Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a process and method of inquiry or research into human activities and organization as they are put together by the mutiple individuals engaged in them. In Institutional Ethnography they are the primary experts and the researchers learn from them. IE is the social science Canadian Dorothy Smith aimed to make from the start of her 1970s’ pioneering work to create a sociology that works with and for people. Grown from her experienced ‘disjuncture’ being a woman in academia, and her activities with grassroots women’s groups, the project of building a different social science foundation and practice from people’s everyday experiences has deep roots in an awareness and understanding of our embodied existence and experiences as human beings – in a particular time and place, connected to all living things and the world we live and continuously create together – our consciousnesses, our activities, forms of organizing and living our relationships with others.

Basics and foundations of Institutional Ethnography Practice and Guiding Concepts

• Institutional Ethnography (IE) is ethnography. Ethnography means that we only inquire, learn, and come to know by being with and observing or talking with people. We explore large scale institutional organization and relations, but only as people actively produce them in time and space. We recognize that people bring the world and their local contexts for actions into being continuously. Where we look in doing IE is at how they are engaged in doing this – in mundane activities like talking, reading, writing, which are largely taken for granted but have productive outcomes. Only individuals can show and tell us how they are doing this.
• Language is a key organizer of social relations. We investigate what’s happening in active language. We don’t cut ‘discourse’ off from what people are doing in their embodied activities. We also recognize that texts are ‘in the action’ in some way, coordinating people’s consciousness, their active discourse and how it is linked to what others are doing in other settings and time. How this all goes on and what we can possibly claim that texts ‘do’ can only be learned from people.
• IE topics and its enterprise are not bounded by theory; how you go about it is with methods that suit the activities you want to explore and learn about. The goal is to make visible how particular institutional organization, thinking, language, terms concepts – its operation – go on as what people do. We begin where people are, “in their bodily being” including their consciousnesses, their material conditions and their concerns that arise there. The ethnographer learns from people, explores and discovers with them.
• Mapping is a practice that extends ethnography and shows the way into replicable, institutional organization and action.  We track actual sequences of work and make visible an institutional course of action and texts that are integral to it. Texts are not extracted out of located in courses of action. Tracking textual work including talk, and the notion of ‘work-text-work sequences of action’ takes us into a complex of institutional action. Forms, files, memos, carry ‘ruling’ and managerial language into courses of action in multiple settings. Many innovative methods of inquiry have been developed for exploring and for writing accounts.See DeVault and McCoy on interviewing, in Institutional Ethnography as Practice, 2006, McCoy’s Activating the Photographic Text, 1995, and Smith and Turner Eds., a collection on Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies, 2014 in Recommended Reading
• The enduring areas of inquiry for an institutional ethnographer are ‘real sensuous human activities’ (Marx and Engels) including people’s consciousnesses and discourse practices. We are actively engaged in organizing socially the local relations we participate in and extended relations our lives are hooked into. Local discourse practice include ways of knowing and speaking that hook into what seem to be larger forces that have power on their own over us.
• The direction is always from the immediately observable ‘local’ into the order of relations called institutional, keeping the original experiences of people where inquiry began in mind, to discover how it’s organized and shaped in a complex of relations external to them.
• What we do in IE is start in what we or others know, are experts in. We and they will not know the concrete details or have ways and words to describe it all, how it’s put together. We explore together in ongoing conversation.
• Readily taking a stance of not knowing is key while doing institutional ethnography. (See the mapping video on this website in which Barbara, an agency employee, starts out not knowing how it suddenly happened that the personal rights of a person she was working with professionally were taken away. From here, she explores the local and state-level organization of Adult Conservatorship and its intersection with other professional and legal processes.)
• We begin where we are in our bodies to explore what we don’t know and want to learn more about. We are interested, curious. We must figure out who we need to learn from, how to go about asking and finding out from them how they do things. We develop a working knowledge of a complex of institutional processes that comes from learning the work knowledges of people in multiple sites who put that large-scale organization together in ordinary ways. We might start out thinking there are particular enemies or changes needed. But we will discover from people their limitations and the embedded concerns they share, the active policies and local practices that don’t work for people, the institutional changes they themselves would like to see made, and how they can be brought about.

About Dorothy Smith and working with her

Pioneer Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith developed Institutional Ethnography as a fundamentally distinct social science from the start through the 1960s and 70s, then as ‘a sociology for women.’ Its beginnings are in the actualities of the conditions of women’s lives at that time; women and their material conditions were largely invisible in the public sphere and – importantly, did not have language with which to speak of their experiences and concerns, to make change. They were invisible in the making of discourses like sociology that claimed to account for ‘the social’ world. It was a profound paradigm shift that Dorothy was undertaking to make visible ‘the truth’ built from the lives and experiences of those left out.

The goal was a social science that starts and goes on with and for people, in a practical way in their circumstances. Dorothy and institutional ethnographers like myself who were part of the community of students and researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) where she came from Berkley, California to teach in the 1980s, acknowledge this overriding principle of beginning and learning from people, not theory; learning the ‘actualities’ of people’s lives, the material conditions in which their concerns emerge and the project of opening up to view seemingly impenetrable powerful large scale organization.  

Dorothy Smith’s and James Heap’s expanded conventional ethnography practice

Dorothy and James taught what was then the Social Organization of Knowledge. Dorothy’s classes were mind-altering and thrilling. She’d come in and say, “here’s what I’m thinking about now,” roll up her sleeves, “let’s get to work.” We’d work through readings in feminist methods, social philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of language, ethnomethodology, work of the brilliant Michael Lynch, discourse analysts, anthropology of science, Marx and Engels, George Herbert Mead and Russian language theorists. We’d discuss in and outside of class, how to think, investigate and talk about ‘the social’ and keep people active in creating it. And we had to practice out in the world. ‘botonizing’: trying out ethnographic practice.

In James Heap’s classes, we delved into conversation analysis, ethnographic studies of teachers and kids and their ‘micro’ level classroom interactions, constantly asking what claims can we really make to know and talk about what people are actually doing. James’s observational studies of children working collaboratively at the computer were powerful demonstrations of ‘micro’ level investigations of talk-screen interaction.

Dorothy’s thinking is always developing; IE goes far beyond ‘a feminist sociology’ that remains within and as a critique of conventional sociology. It deftly steps out of conventional and critical or qualitative sociologies. That move and commitment is radical. She delved deep and intensively into the philosophies underpinning contemporary thinking and inquiry into the actualities of human existence and the various constructions of human experience as individuated and unified. And found them useless for the enterprise. Her theoretical findings underpin and weave through all her writing,  but see especially  Telling the Truth after Post Modernism, Texts and the Ontology of Organizations and Institutions, Talk to Sociologists . See also Marjorie DeVault’s chapter on the history of Institutional Ethnography in the 2021 Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography.

Essential Reading and viewing

1. Dorothy’s 2018 Introduction talk to the Dalla Lama School of Public Health, here and below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOO9fLT9r-Q
2. Marjory DeVault’s marvellous chapter in Palgrave’s 2021 Handbook of IE.  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_2
   Lately Dorothy has been saying IE is more a natural science like primatology or ethology, calling it ‘institutional primatology.’

Dorothy Smith’s writing is evidence of the expanding and deepening inquiries of a remarkable thinker of this century. Watch for, at age 95, her forthcoming book called Simply Institutional Ethnography, University of Toronto Press, 2021.

In her lifework, Dorothy established and nurtured a truly engaged social science and its discourse, building its methods of inquiry and extending learning in conversation among explorers. From that early building of conversations among learners in place and time, now the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the International Sociology Association have Institutional Ethnography Divisions have members all over the world. Their forums and newsletters provide rich active conversations.

• Society for the Study of Social Problems – Institutional Ethnography Division
• International Sociological Association – Institutional Ethnography Working Group