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Outlines a method of inquiry that uses everyday experience as a lens to examine social relations and social organization. This book is suitable for classes in sociology, ethnography, and women's studies.
In this edited collection, institutional ethnographers draw on their field research experiences to address different aspects of institutional ethnographic practice. As institutional ethnography embraces the actualities of people's experiences and lives, the contributors utilize their research to reveal how institutional relations and regimes are organized. As a whole, the book aims to provide readers with an accurate overview of what it is like to practice institutional ethnography, as well as the main varieties of approaches involved in the research.
Developed in response to the theoretically driven mainstream sociology, institutional ethnography starts from people’s everyday experiences, and works from there to discover how the social is organized. Starting from experience is a central step in challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and relations of power, whilst responding critically to the neoliberal cost-benefit ideology that has come to permeate welfare institutions and the research sector. This book explicates the Nordic response to institutional ethnography, showing how it has been adapted and interpreted within the theoretical and methodological landscape of social scientific research in the region, as well as the institutional particularities of the Nordic welfare state. Addressing the main topics of concern in the Nordic context, together with the way in which research is undertaken, the authors show how institutional ethnography is combined with different theories and methodologies in order to address particular problematics, as well as examining its standing in relation to contemporary research policy and university reforms. With both theoretical and empirical chapters, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, professional studies and anthropology with interests in research methods and the Nordic region.
A form of critical ethnography introduced to the social sciences in the late 1990s, institutional ethnography uncovers how things happen within institutional sites, providing a new and flexible tool for the study of how “work” is co-constituted within sites of writing and writing instruction. The study of work and work processes reveals how institutional discourse, social relations, and norms of professional practice coordinate what people do across time and sites of writing. Adoption of IE offers finely grained understandings of how our participation in the work of writing, writing instruction, and sites of writing gives material face to the institutions that govern the social world. In this book, Michelle LaFrance introduces the theories, rhetorical frames, and methods that ground and animate institutional ethnography. Three case studies illustrate key aspects of the methodology in action, tracing the work of writing assignment design in a linked gateway course, the ways annual reviews coordinate the work of faculty and writing center administrators and staff, and how the key term “information literacy” socially organizes teaching in a first-year English program. Through these explorations of the practice of ethnography within sites of writing and writing instruction, LaFrance shows that IE is a methodology keenly attuned to the material relations and conditions of work in twenty-first-century writing studies contexts, ideal for both practiced and novice ethnographers who seek to understand the actualities of social organization and lived experience in the sites they study. Institutional Ethnography expands the field’s repertoire of research methodologies and offers the grounding necessary for work with the IE framework. It will be invaluable to writing researchers and students and scholars of writing studies across the spectrum—composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and education—as well as those working in fields such as sociology and cultural studies.
This is a book about a distinctive methodological approach inspired by one of Canada's most respected scholars, Dorothy Smith. Institutional ethnography aims to answer questions about how everyday life is organized. What is conventionally understood as "the relationship of micro to macro processes" is, in institutional ethnography, conceptualized and explored in terms of ruling relations.The authors suggest that institutional ethnographers must adopt a particular research stance, one that recognizes that people's own knowledge and ways of knowing are crucial elements of social action and thus of social analysis. Specific attention to text analysis is integral to the approach as is a sensitive to gender relations. Institutional ethnography is remarkably well suited to the human service curriculum and the training of professionals and activists. Its strategy for learning how to understand problems existing in everyday life appeals to many researchers who are looking for guidance on how to take practical action. At the same time, the highly elaborated theoretical foundation of institutional ethnography is difficult to deal with in the brief time most students are in the classroom. The authors successfully tackle the issue of teaching and applying institutional ethnography. Campbell and Gregor have been testing out instructional methods and materials for many years. MAPPING SOCIAL RELATIONS is the product of that effort.
A comprehensive guide to the alternative sociology originating in the work of Dorothy E. Smith, this Handbook not only explores the basic, founding principles of institutional ethnography (IE), but also captures current developments, approaches, and debates. Now widely known as a “sociology for people,” IE offers the tools to uncover the social relations shaping the everyday world in which we live and is utilized by scholars and social activists in sociology and beyond, including such fields as education, nursing, social work, linguistics, health and medical care, environmental studies, and other social-service related fields. Covering the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of IE, recent developments, and current areas of research and application that have yet to appear in the literature, The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography is suitable for both experienced practitioners of institutional ethnography and those who are exploring this approach for the first time.
The institutional ethnographies collected in Under New Public Management explore how new managerial governance practices coordinate the work of people doing front-line work in public sectors such as health, education, social services, and international development, and people management in the private sector. In these fields, organizations have increasingly adopted private-sector management techniques, such as standardized and quantitative measures of performance and an obsession with cost reductions and efficiency. These practices of “new public management” are changing the ways in which front-line workers engage with their clients, students, or patients. Using research drawn from Canada, the United States, Australia, and Denmark, the contributors expose how standardized managerial requirements are created and applied, and how they affect the practicalities of working with people whose lives and experiences are complex and unique.
Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies presents a selection of essays highlighting the ethnographic investigation of how texts coordinate and organize people's activities across space and time.
This book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings, providing an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offering a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.
Translating Institutions outlines a framework for research on translation in institutional settings, using the Finnish translation unit at the European Commission as a case study. Because of their foundational multilingualism, the institutions of the European Union could be described as both translating and translated institutions. The European Commission alone employs nearly two thousand translators, and it is translators who draft the vast majority of outgoing EU messages. Translating Institutions sets out to explore the organizational role and professional identity of this group of cultural mediators, a group that has remained relatively invisible despite its size and central institutional role, and to use the analysis of this data to elaborate broader methodological and theoretical issues. Translating Institutions adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the life and work of the translators at the centre of this study. In practice, this entails employing a number of different methods and interrogating various types of data. The three-level research design used covers the study of the institutional framework, the study of translators working in specific institutional settings, and the study of translated documents and their source texts. This is therefore a study of both texts and people in their institutional habitat. Given the methodological focus of the volume, the different methods and data are outlined in independent chapters: the institutional framework of translation (institutional ethnography), the physical location of the unit (observation), translators' own views of their role (focus group discussions), and a sociologically-oriented text analysis of a sample document (shifts analysis). Translating Institutions constitutes a valuable contribution to the sociology of translation. It opens up new avenues for research and offers a detailed framework for the study of institutional translation.