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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The main purpose of this paper is to document the first author's experience of using institutional ethnography (IE) to “take sides” in healthcare research. The authors illustrate the points with data and key findings from a study of cardiovascular disease prevention.

The authors use Dorothy E Smith's IE approach, and particularly the theoretical tool of “standpoint”.

Starting with the development of the study, the authors trouble the researcher's positionality, highlighting tensions between institutional knowledge of “prevention” and other locations where knowledge about patients' health needs materialises. The authors outline how IE's theoretically and methodologically integrated toolkit became a framework for “taking sides” with patients. They describe how the researcher used IE to take a standpoint and map institutional relations from that standpoint. They argue that IE enabled an innovative analysis but also reflect on the challenges of conducting an IE – the conceptual unpicking and (re)thinking, and demarcating boundaries of investigation within an expansive dataset.

This paper illustrates IE's relevance for organisational ethnographers wishing to find a theoretically robust approach to taking sides, and suggests ways in which the IE approach might contribute to improving services, particularly healthcare. It provides an illustration of how taking a patient standpoint was accomplished in practice, and reflects on the challenges involved.

The purpose of this paper is to problematise the idea of “at-home ethnography” and to expand knowledge about insider/outsider distinctions by using insights from institutional ethnography (IE). It also examines the strengths and challenges of “returning” researchers recognising their unique position in overcoming these binaries.

IE is the method the researcher used to explore community-based water management in rural Chile. The researcher is interested in learning from rural drinking water organisations to understand the way in which their knowledge is organised. The data presented derived from field notes of participant observation and the researcher’s diary.

The notion of “at-home ethnography” fell short when reflecting on the researcher’s positions and experiences in the field. This is especially true when researchers return to their countries to carry out fieldwork. The negotiation of boundaries, codes and feelings requires the researcher to appreciate the complex relationships surrounding ethnographic work, in order to explore how community-based water management is done in the local setting, without forgetting where the setting is embedded.

Unique insights are offered into the advantages and tensions of conducting fieldwork “at home” when the researcher has lived “abroad” for an extended time. A critique and contribution to “at-home ethnography” is offered from an IE perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the workplace experiences of women employees during maternity and post-maternity periods to reveal the institutional order that coordinated the social relations and shaped their experiences through local and extra-local texts.

The institutional ethnography research framework allowed for mapping of workplace experiences of women employees during their maternity and post-maternity periods in their local context, connecting them to the invisible extra-local social relations.

The research study explored the disjuncture between the gender diversity initiatives that aimed at the inclusion of women employees and the workplace experiences of women employees in terms of work disengagement and work role degradation, including career discontinuity.

The gender diversity and inclusion initiatives of an organization need to examine the local and extra-local institutional texts that govern their context and coordinate social relations, such that there is no inconsistency between the intentions, implementation and outcomes.

The state needs to revisit the maternity benefit act to provide additional measures to protect the career continuity of women, who choose maternity at some point in their work lives.

The paper explored the institutional order that influences the career continuity of women employees during maternity and post-maternity periods using institutional ethnography research framework in an information technology services organization in India. No such research study has even been attempted.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute a broader understanding of the complexity in relationships of power and responsibility in employability in higher education contexts and posits a conceptual framework for employability as a process, something to be achieved.

This conceptual paper arises from experience of and research into placement practices and draws upon Joan Tronto’s feminist epistemology (1993, 2012) to argue for a critical understanding of employability.

There is little in the literature that discusses employability as a process involving moral and political work. The conceptual framework offers a process of five phases to provide a foundation for understanding employability that moves beyond a focus on skills and attributes.

The conceptual framework enables all employability professionals, including researchers, to think beyond skills and attributes for employment to explore the implications of the relations that shape the need for employability within and outside their sphere.

Developing a conceptual framework enables employability professionals to evaluate their practices and assess: if practices are inclusive or excluding; the implications of power and responsibility; the tensions arising from the diverse nature of need in employability work.

This paper posits a conceptual framework for understanding the process of employability work as something to be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to flesh out a truncated line of analysis in library and information science (LIS) of language analyses of power in the field.

Literature-based conceptual analysis of the problems engendered by neoliberalism in LIS and the productive approach of language analysis of Austin, Habermas, and Smith that allows us to account for neoliberalism’s effects in language and practices – doing things with words.

LIS has engaged a productive postmodern analysis of power relations that reflects social and economic progress, but Austin, Habermas, and Smith offer a sensible, practical explanation for the operation of neoliberal hegemony on the practices of librarianship.

Postmodern analyses are now being deployed in portions of LIS, but they fail to account for the full implications of the dominant public language (and policy and practices) of neoliberalism for librarianship. This is productive exploration of those implications to correct and round out those analyses.

With the advent of the era of Big Data, the scale of knowledge graph (KG) in various domains is growing rapidly, which holds huge amount of knowledge surely benefiting the question answering (QA) research. However, the KG, which is always constituted of entities and relations, is structurally inconsistent with the natural language query. Thus, the QA system based on KG is still faced with difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to answer the domain-specific questions based on KG, providing conveniences for the information query over domain KG.

The authors propose a method FactQA to answer the factual questions about specific domain. A series of logical rules are designed to transform the factual questions into the triples, in order to solve the structural inconsistency between the user’s question and the domain knowledge. Then, the query expansion strategies and filtering strategies are proposed from two levels (i.e. words and triples in the question). For matching the question with domain knowledge, not only the similarity values between the words in the question and the resources in the domain knowledge but also the tag information of these words is considered. And the tag information is obtained by parsing the question using Stanford CoreNLP. In this paper, the KG in metallic materials domain is used to illustrate the FactQA method.

The designed logical rules have time stability for transforming the factual questions into the triples. Additionally, after filtering the synonym expansion results of the words in the question, the expansion quality of the triple representation of the question is improved. The tag information of the words in the question is considered in the process of data matching, which could help to filter out the wrong matches.

Although the FactQA is proposed for domain-specific QA, it can also be applied to any other domain besides metallic materials domain. For a question that cannot be answered, FactQA would generate a new related question to answer, providing as much as possible the user with the information they probably need. The FactQA could facilitate the user’s information query based on the emerging KG.

Adopting the critical sensemaking (CSM) lens to the micro-level interaction between leader and employees, the article offers a theoretically informed example of leading with soft power and positive emotions that blurs boundaries in democratic organisations.

The research methodology involves videography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions that combines focused ethnography with video analysis. The analysis focuses on face-to-face meeting interactions between a leader and employees in a small service firm.

The findings illustrate how restoring the sense of the democratic organisation is an accumulating and complex phenomenon where explicit and implicit organisational rules and changing identity positions are enacted by constructing affective loyalties, moral and reflex emotions that serve as soft power capacities helping the leader and employees to enact meanings attached to a democratic rather than hierarchical organisation.

The article provides new insight for human resources practitioners and leaders who want to build resilient organisations and pay attention to shared, distributed and relational leadership practices, co-creative work and collective decision-making processes.

The power explored in previous sensemaking studies has been power over, which is most often associated with the negative aspects of power, such as domination and suppression, in the pursuit of specific performance. The applications of videography method linking ethnography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions are still rare in organisation studies.