Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People

by Dorothy E. Smith

Prominent sociologist Dorothy Smith outlines a method of inquiry that uses everyday experience as a lens to examine social relations and social institutions. Concerned with articulating an inclusive sociology that goes beyond looking at a particular group of people from the detached viewpoint of the researcher, this is a method of inquiry for people, incorporating the expert's research and language into everyday experience to examine social relations and institutions. The book begins by examining the foundations of institutional ethnography in women's movements, differentiating it from other related sociologies; the second part offers an ontology of the social; and the third illustrates this ontology through an array of institutional ethnography examples. This will be a foundational text for classes in sociology, ethnography, and women's studies.

Genres: Sociology, Academic, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Feminism

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

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

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong book that offers profound insights into "work knowledges" and the ontology of objects

Deep thinking has punctuated this book. It is intriguing to see a critique of Butler here. This critique is nested in the concept - and application - of experience. This perhaps is the great dissonance that remains between the second and third wave of feminism: the role of experience in the manifestation of politics.

Yet in this book, Smith does enter textual systems to discover social systems. There is also an evocative - if secondary - history of the university that emerges from this monograph. The institutional ethnography is house in the university, and the fingerprints of this strange instutition have left their mark on this argument.

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Discusses Ethnographic work involving both actually lived experiences and their (dis) connection to regulating texts and bureaucracies. The use of “text” is rather loose, it could also be “media” and there seems to be no particular metaphysical implications of using “text” instead (unlike a lot of “the social as text” ideas, see Ricoeur and the critiques by Hirschhauer, Bourdieu and Hörning).
The text is clearly structured, every chapter ends with a summarizing conclusion and the whole last chapter is a summarizing conclusion for the whole book.

[Natasha Rayman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I personally prefer Smith & Griffith (2022) but this is a great way to familiarize yourself with IE work and how to begin IE research using sociological language.

The 2022 version simply makes the language of IE easier and more accessible for researchers who are not from a sociological background (hence why I enjoyed that more).

But Dorothy was an incredible scholar and all her contributions to creating IE is highly recognizable in this book.

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here.