Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People

by Dorothy E. Smith, Allison I. Griffith

Institutional ethnography (IE) originated as a feminist alternative to sociologies defining people as the objects of study. Instead, IE explores the social relations that dominate the life of the particular subject in focus. Simply Institutional Ethnography is written by two pioneers in the field and grounded in decades of ground-breaking work. Dorothy Smith and Alison Griffith lay out the basics of how institutional ethnography proceeds as a sociology. The book introduces the concepts – Discourse, Work, Text – that institutional ethnographers have found to be key ideas used to organize what they learn from the study of people’s experience. Simply Institutional Ethnography builds an ethnography that makes this material visible as coordinated sequences of social relations that reach beyond the particularities of local experience. In explicating the foundations of IE and its principal concepts, Simply Institutional Ethnography reflects on the ways in which the field may move forward.

154 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2022

About the author

Dorothy Edith Smith CM (born July 6, 1926) is a Canadian sociologist with research interests in a variety of disciplines, including women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies, as well as in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. Smith founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.

Reviews

[Melvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant introduction to institutional ethnography. Smith and Griffith's conversational prose is really easy to follow and they describe the foundation and concepts of institutional ethnography very well. highly recommend this book for anyone new to this kind of social research and wanting a primer before diving deeper into other works

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for a course, made me rethink a lot of stuff and is way more digestible than the 2005 version