Institutional Ethnography, Critical Discourse Analysis, and the Discursive Coordination of Organizational Activity

Abstract

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a social ontology pioneered by Dorothy Smith, the Canadian feminist-sociologist. Conceptualizing discourse as social relations that are organized by the activities of people and are empirically investigable, IE has been increasingly employed by researchers outside of sociology in fields such as education and health. The goal in these cases has often been to explicate the effects of power flowing through textually mediated discourses that work to reconfigure local practices to align with official policy mandates. Yet the discourse analysis performed in much IE to date has not paid close linguistic attention to the way specific actors utilize texts in an active appropriation of what Smith calls the “ruling relations” constituting official discourses. Using data from an IE of student equity practices in Australian higher education, this chapter illustrates how a Fairclough-inspired critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the “orders of discourse” assembled within a relay of university and government texts is able to provide useful analytical purchase on how equity policies are actively appropriated within a university outreach practice. It demonstrates how the accomplishment of student equity outreach involves the hybridizing of equity and excellence discourses in ways that bolster the dominant position of an Australian university. This working together of distinct IE and CDA approaches offers possibilities for more nuanced accounts of individual and collective agency in the process of semiotic and social change.

Citation

Peacock, D. (2017), "Institutional Ethnography, Critical Discourse Analysis, and the Discursive Coordination of Organizational Activity", Reid, J. and Russell, L. (Ed.) Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Vol. 15), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 91-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042-319220170000015007