Institutional Ethnography

Institutional Ethnography

1. there is recognition that institutional ideologies typically acknowledge some kinds of work and not others. Thus, the investigator attends to all of the work that’s done in the setting, and also notes which activities are recognized and accounted institutionally and which are not.

   • What does the investigator need to do?

2. The point is to show how people in one place are aligning their activities with relevances produced elsewhere, in order to illuminate the forces that shape experience at the point of entry

3. Using the map

   • Many institutional ethnographers have adopted a rhetoric of “mapping” to highlight the analytic goal of explication rather than theory building; the analysis is meant to be “usable” in the way that a map can be used to find one’s way.

4. Institutional Ethnography focuses on ...

   • Institutional ethnography’s focus on texts comes from an empirical observation—that technologies of social control are increasingly and pervasively textual and discursive (Smith 1999). Texts such as medical charts, enrollment reports, strategic plans, and so on are mecha nisms for coordinating activity across many different sites.
   • In organizational studies, textual coordination may be quite focused—relatively easy to see—and institutional ethnographies of organizational work often focus on specific texts such as policy documents (Eastwood

5. Case

   • Smith’s initial sketch for institutional ethnographic research (in Smith 1987; elabo rated in Griffith and Smith 2004) demonstrated how one might begin with some embodied experience—in her example it was that of single mothers working to manage their children’s schooling—and define a problematic or “puzzle” that arises from that experience (why should such families be seen as “defective”?). Then,
     • than seeking an explanation in the behavior of single mothers (an analytic project that assumes defectiveness), the sociologist looks toward the conceptual practices that mark single mothers and bring them under the jurisdiction of others—teachers and school administrators
       • The analysis can then bring into view a “regime” of schooling and services that is designed for the “Standard North American Family” (Smith). Such marking and judgments flow from what Smith calls “conceptual practices of power” (1990a). Teachers and other front-line professionals who work with par ents and children are themselves caught up in the “ruling relations”—their treatment of sin gle mothers is not simply a matter of prejudice but related to the organization of their work. Schools,
         • that depend on mothers to perform auxiliary support and even teaching work so that children with their individual needs and capacities can participate and “keep up” in a batch-processing system of instruction

6. What make this case very particular ?

   • Thus, institutional ethnographic analysis not only shows how the problem of inequality arises, but also points to solutions that involve changing the organization of schooling rather than “fixing” single mothers. (Implementing such fundamental changes, of course, remains a matter of politics. The research won’t bring solutions without the political work, but the approach is meant to offer the kind of “map” that could help those working politically to see what they are up against and where they might want to apply pressure).
     • Sobre el tipo de etnografia: Una postura alternativa ante tal impasse teórico-metodológico es el maridaje de enfoques dirigido no solamente hacia la búsqueda de explicaciones causales, sino además hacia la reconstrucción de un sistema educativo conforme con la realidad social que le sustenta. Así, el propósito en este documento radica en la exploración de la etnografía como un método dirigido hacia la identificación de la congruencia entre la propuesta educativa institucional (modelo educativo y demás documentos rectores) y la experiencia estudiantil,

7. Another Case

   • Taking the restruc turing of U.S. welfare institutions as an instance of contemporary economic transformation, she outlines an analysis that would trace institutional ideologies through a series of nested discourses, so that one discovers how the operating procedures of local programs are shaped by enabling legislation with distinctive “master frames. and how those are drawn from and tied into a “meta-discourse” of neoliberalism that supplies over arching ideas to be elaborated specifically for different institutional areas. Drawing on the work of Ellen Messer-Davidow (1993), Smith also points to a possible next step, which would involve empirical study of the intellectual institutions that produce that meta-discourse and the interests that fund and support them.
     • Mother´s Cases
       • Experiences in the Low-Wage Labor Market after Welfare Reform,” follows these discourses of welfare restructuring back into the households of those subject to the new regime, explor ing how low-income mothers participating in the new programs take up and resist both an older mothering discourse and a contemporary discourse of “work enforcement.” Debra Brown, in “Working the System: Re-Thinking the Institutionally Organized Role of Mothers and the Reduction of ‘Risk’ in Child Protection Work,” also investigates the experience of mothers who are caught, along with social workers, in neoliberal transformations of child protection work.
         • Her analysis focuses more specifically on a particular text—the risk assessment instrument—but like Weigt, she is concerned with the ways that mothers are vulnerable to a textually-ordered regime and with their strategies for operating in that situation of vulnerability
           • Although these analyses focus on mothers’ views of work enforcement and the risk assessment process, they bring into view the activities of others so that we see how both cli ents and front-line workers in these programs are caught up in a web of conceptually ordered practices linked to ruling interests
             • But institutional ethnographic analyses such as these provide an extended view of the interests served by this kind of textualization of women’s household work. Whether it’s done by a legal “mother” or by another, or shared between two (or among more) adults, mothering work sustains household life. Social policy relies in various ways on the performance of such work, but typically accounts for it only in a language of “values,” rather than recognizing it as work done in definite material conditions with more or fewer resources. Discourses of child development, school curricula, health care systems, housing practices, and understandings of “risk” are linked to a “mothering discourse”; these all provide “instructions” for mothers and constitute the abstracted versions of mothering that are assumed in the organization of schools, health care systems, community life, and social work in child protection. Those working within these ruling relations—not only mothers, but also teachers, nurses