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Article
Publication date: 15 November 2019

Nicole K. Dalmer

Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that brings attention to people’s everyday work while simultaneously highlighting broader sites of administration and governance…

Abstract

Purpose

Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that brings attention to people’s everyday work while simultaneously highlighting broader sites of administration and governance that may be organising that work. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the integration of institutional ethnography in health information practice research represents an important shift in the way that Library and Information Science professionals and researchers study and understand these practices.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper first explores the key tenets and conceptual underpinnings of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, illuminating the importance of moving between translocal and the local contexts and identifying ruling relations. Drawing from a library and information science study that combined interviews and textual analyses to examine the social organisation of family caregivers’ health-related information work, the paper then explores the affordances of starting in the local particularities and then moving outwards to the translocal.

Findings

The paper concludes with an overall assessment of what institutional ethnography can contribute to investigations of health information practices. By pushing from the local to the translocal, institutional ethnography enables a questioning of existing library and information science conceptualisations of context and of reappraising the everyday-life information seeking work/non-work dichotomy. Ultimately, in considering both the local and the translocal, institutional ethnography casts a wider net on understanding individuals’ health information practices.

Originality/value

With only two retrieved studies that combine institutional ethnography with the study of health information practices, this paper offers health information practice researchers a new method of inquiry in which to reframe the application of methods used.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 71 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 November 2017

David Peacock

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a social ontology pioneered by Dorothy Smith, the Canadian feminist-sociologist. Conceptualizing discourse as social relations that are organized…

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.

Details

Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-653-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 November 2017

James Reid

In this chapter, I highlight the need to turn the institutional ethnography (IE) lens of enquiry onto IE itself, and consequently, the importance for institutional ethnographers…

Abstract

In this chapter, I highlight the need to turn the institutional ethnography (IE) lens of enquiry onto IE itself, and consequently, the importance for institutional ethnographers to attend to their standpoint in taking up and activating their understanding of IE. Many, including Wise and Stanley (1990) and Walby (2007), celebrate Smith’s sociology but raise important ontological and epistemological questions about IE’s own recursive power. While IE has developed from a critique of wider sociological inquiry, it is troubled by the institutional ethnographer’s own standpont when using IE uncritically, without reflexivity of their standpoint in relation with IE and knowledge generation. IE stands in relation between the researcher and the everyday of the research participants in a local research context that is particular and plural, situated and dynamic. The chapter highlights a particular critique by Dorothy Smith of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a “blobontology,” yet considers the theoretical similarities between Smith and Bourdieu. I argue that institutional ethnographers and IE itself are not be immune from the kinds of unravelling that Smith undertakes of other approaches to sociological inquiry. Researcher standpoint, reflexivity, and their relation to knowledge generation are therefore critical aspects of approach without which there is potential to “other” and develop morally questionable representations of people that diminishes the actuality of their subjective experience.

Details

Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-653-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 November 2017

James Reid

This chapter explores researcher reflexivity developed during an institutional ethnography (IE; Smith, 2005) of a primary school. It illustrates the use of a narrative method…

Abstract

This chapter explores researcher reflexivity developed during an institutional ethnography (IE; Smith, 2005) of a primary school. It illustrates the use of a narrative method, “The Listening Guide” (Mauthner & Doucet, 2008), in particular my production of an “I” poem after being interviewed by research participants. This promotes an ethical approach to researcher reflexivity, enabling an explicit analysis of the researcher’s subjectivities in the use of ethnographic methods and a deeper understanding of privilege and power on the part of the researcher. The approach works to negate any researcher authority over the textual representations of the research participants and objectification of them. Consideration is given to the tensions between the sociological basis of IE and how this is troubled by particular approaches to narrative production. The point of reflection in institutional ethnography is not to learn about the researcher per se, but to learn about the researcher’s location in the “relations of ruling” (Smith, 2005), that is, the researcher’s standpoint. There are particular tensions for institutional ethnographers in seeking to avoid objectification of participants through both “institutional capture” and “privileged irresponsibility,” specifically; the imposition of researcher subjectivities in listening for, asking about, and producing texts. A significant concern, for example, in this research context is the researcher’s place and privilege in the education hierarchy. I argue that it is precisely because of the troubling nature of the Listening Guide and “I” poems that they can be utilized by institutional ethnographers in revealing and analyzing the co-ordination of social relations.

Details

Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-653-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 24 September 2010

Maria DiTullio and Douglas MacDonald

A primary impetus of the modern hospice movement was the disparity, during the later 20th century, between the care provided to persons with illnesses considered “curable” and the…

Abstract

A primary impetus of the modern hospice movement was the disparity, during the later 20th century, between the care provided to persons with illnesses considered “curable” and the treatment – or lack of it – accorded the incurably or terminally ill. In its transformation from a reform-oriented, interdisciplinary response to the needs of the dying to an integrated component of the American healthcare system, hospice care's original mission, target population, and modality of service delivery were all significantly altered in ways that generated new disparities in access to “death with dignity.” This chapter attempts to trace the political, economic, and institutional dimensions of this transformation as reflected in the experiences of one Northeastern hospice during a 6-month period in 2001. Using an analytic approach known as institutional ethnography (IE), the authors focus on the work of the Hospice's Interdisciplinary Group (IDG) to uncover the linkages between local problems in the delivery of hospice care and extra-local sites of power and constraint at the mezzo- and macrolevels of the American healthcare system. The significance of these linkages for patients, frontline workers, and other stakeholders are interpreted from several perspectives. Implications for change are discussed.

Details

The Impact of Demographics on Health and Health Care: Race, Ethnicity and Other Social Factors
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-715-8

Article
Publication date: 11 June 2018

Cindy Malachowski, Katherine Boydell and Bonnie Kirsh

The purpose of this paper is to make visible the ways in which peoples’ experiences of mental ill health are coordinated and produced in the workplace setting.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to make visible the ways in which peoples’ experiences of mental ill health are coordinated and produced in the workplace setting.

Design/methodology/approach

This institutional ethnography draws from data collected from 16 informants in one Canadian industrial manufacturing plant to explicate how texts organize activities and align worker consciousness and actions with company expectations of a “bona fide” illness.

Findings

The findings demonstrate how a “bona fide” illness is textually mediated by biomedical and physical work restrictions, thus creating a significant disjuncture between an experiential and ruling perspective of mental ill health.

Research limitations/implications

The work of employees living with self-reported depression becomes organized locally and translocally around the discourse of “mental illness is an illness like any other.” This presents a profound disjuncture between the embodied experience of being too unwell to mentally perform work duties, and the textually coordinated practices of what it means to access sick time for a “bona fide illness” within a biomedical-based attendance management protocol.

Originality/value

The current study adds to the literature by shedding light on the disjuncture created between the embodied experience of mental health issues and the ruling perspective of what constitutes a bona fide illness, adding a unique focus on how people’s use of attendance management-related supports in the workplace.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 38 no. 5-6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Primary Teachers, Inspection and the Silencing of the Ethic of Care
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-892-1

Book part
Publication date: 5 April 2012

Mike Reed

This chapter reviews three analytical perspectives – ‘structural’, ‘network’ and ‘cultural’ – on the study of power and their implications for theorizing elites. It builds on this…

Abstract

This chapter reviews three analytical perspectives – ‘structural’, ‘network’ and ‘cultural’ – on the study of power and their implications for theorizing elites. It builds on this initial theoretical review by developing a critical realist approach to the study of organizational elites out of the structurally based perspective identified in the first section of the chapter. The explanatory potential of this critical realist approach is then illustrated through two case studies of ruling elites embedded in contrasting historical, political and social contexts. The final section of the chapter provides a discussion of the wider implications of these case study analyses for understanding and explaining the ‘new feudalism’ which is emerging in advanced political economies and societies.

Details

Rethinking Power in Organizations, Institutions, and Markets
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78052-665-2

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 August 2015

Kyung-Jin Hwang and Kan Wang

The purpose of this paper is to explore China’s labour dispute arbitration system reform through analysing the degree to which it has attained its stated objectives – notably…

2007

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore China’s labour dispute arbitration system reform through analysing the degree to which it has attained its stated objectives – notably, independence, justice, efficiency and professionalism – from the perspectives of the arbitrators, previously ignored in research on China.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper used a mixed research method using questionnaires and interviews. Questionnaires were sent to all full-time labour dispute arbitrators in Beijing, China with a useable response rate of 71 per cent. Additionally, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 key stakeholders involved in the arbitration process.

Findings

Instead of establishing an impartial platform, the arbitration system endeavours to promote the state’s capacity to rule over labour relations. Its recent reform excluded arbitrational independence owing to concerns about reducing the Chinese Communist Party’s arbitrary power. Arbitrational justice was perceived to improve through case resolution efficiency, which made arbitrators minimise arbitration time, partly because of high caseloads but largely because of their key performance indicators. Quality of arbitration was compromised. The arbitrators understood the spaces and boundaries of the reform, and focused on increasing professionalism to enable them to more fluidly manoeuvre between the different political economic interests, above safeguarding labour rights.

Research limitations/implications

The questionnaire size was too small for regression analysis. Future research should expand the sample sizes and conduct cross-regional studies.

Practical implications

In 2008, China undertook an arbitrational system reform – probing its practical influence contributes to the authors understanding about the changing institutional environment of Chinese labour relations.

Originality/value

As a pilot study on labour dispute arbitrators, this research presents the dynamics of the Chinese labour dispute resolution mechanism.

Details

Employee Relations, vol. 37 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0142-5455

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 November 2017

Michael K. Corman and Gary R. S. Barron

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociology that focuses on the everyday world as problematic. As a theory/method of discovery, it focuses on how the work people do is organized…

Abstract

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociology that focuses on the everyday world as problematic. As a theory/method of discovery, it focuses on how the work people do is organized and coordinated by text-mediated and text-regulated social organization. Actor-network Theory (ANT) is a theory/method that is concerned with how realities get enacted. ANT focuses on a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors (e.g., computers, documents, and laboratory equipment) and how the relations between them are constituted and how they are made to hang together to create certain realities. In this chapter, we discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT. We begin with an overview of IE and ANT and focus on their ontological and epistemological “shifts.” We then discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT, particularly from an IE stance. In doing so, we put these approaches into dialog and allude to some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of combining these approaches.

Details

Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-653-2

Keywords

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