Institutional ethnography

Abstract

The term “institutional ethnography” has been used since 1987 to refer to an approach to social inquiry pioneered by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (Campbell & DeVault 2011; Smith 1987). By the 1980s, Smith had become known internationally for studies in the social organization of knowledge with roots in the women's movement, Marx, phenomenology, and ethnomethodology. The central concerns of this approach included beginning with the standpoint of women, treating social actors as active knowers of their worlds, and examining the social relations of knowledge – especially the gender‐based divide between everyday worlds of local experience and the ruling forms of institutional organization in capitalist societies. Institutional ethnography both continues this project and refocuses it, placing emphasis on (1) ethnography as an approach to studying social organization and (2) a conception of institutional processes in which text‐based forms of coordination play a key role. Since the 1980s, a significant body of work in institutional ethnography has been built up, numerous institutional ethnography‐based dissertations have been undertaken, several international conferences on institutional ethnography have been held, journal special issues on institutional ethnography have been published, and institutional ethnography sections of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the International Sociology Association have been established.