KURUMSAL ETNOGRAFYA: TEMEL YÖNLERİ VE TEORİK TEMELLER

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how institutional ethnography provides a way forward for social scientists to explore how social organization of work shape people’s daily lives and transform their experiences into institutional knowledge. Institutional ethnography is a qualitative method of inquiry taking individual’s experience and standpoint as a starting point and try to explore the textually mediated forms of coordination and control in institutional settings. According to this theory, institutional texts are tools that transform subjects' experiences into knowledge necessary for institutional functioning. Institutional ethnography claims that the transformation of knowledge leads the a bifurcation between the reality of the owner of the actual experience and the institutional reality. As a result, the individual whose experience is processed and transformed for the needs priorities of the system is alienated from his/her own experience and becomes disadvantaged against the institutional system. Within this regard, institutional ethnography has a critical and activist perspective with its search for power relations and social inequalities within institutional organizations. In this paper, the theoretical and philosophical foundations of institutional ethnography, and its main concepts and principles as a research methodology are revealed by the systematic review of the relevant literature. In addition, the differences and common aspects of institutional ethnography from other sociological theories such as the feminist standpoint approach, Marxist theory, ethnomethodology and phenomenology have been tried to be revealed.