Institutional ethnography: a sociology of discovery—in conversation with Dorothy Smith

Innovative methods in health information behaviour research

“…informing patients, information exchange and work practices of multi-disciplinary teams (Caspar et al, 2016;Ion, 2019;Quinlan, 2009;Reid et al, 2018). The paper also confirms the value of the key work of Dorothy Smith (2005) (also stressed in Kearney et al, 2018), and the importance of moving beyond interests in individuals only. Institutional ethnography has been used in various healthcare contexts, including nursing and mental health (Knyahnytska, 2014;Rankin, 2003;Walby, 2007), but with very limited uptake in Information Science; Ocepek (2018) and Pilerot (2016) note it in their work on, respectively, everyday life information behaviour and evidence-based practice and social welfare service, and Dalmer notes a few other works, in addition to her own, that use the method.…”

Why institutional ethnography? Why now? Institutional ethnography in health professions education

“…With that said, taking up institutional ethnography in HPE is likely to have its challenges as students and researchers conform to institutional requirements. Smith mentioned in conversation with us how she saw a strong potential for institutional ethnography in this domain but stated that ‘one of the things that I am concerned about is that I suspect that things like funding and the requirements of doing Theses, tends to detach the kind of connections with activism that were part of institutional ethnography’s origins, so it becomes something that is sort of ethnographic within a discipline but not related to the possibilities of making change’ [ 25 ].…”

“…As George Smith summarizes ‘Objective knowledge is no longer ‘the truth’ [ 24 ] and he discusses how whilst the ontological shift came about from Dorothy Smith’s reading of Marx, this epistemological shift is due to the influence of her experiences through the feminist movement; hence its common description as a ‘Marxist feminist’ approach to sociology and social scientific inquiry. Taken together, institutional ethnography’s ontological and epistemological shifts positions institutional ethnography as a non-positivist approach in that it rejects the assumption that there is a knowable (real) reality and it rejects ‘causal logic’ [ 25 ] that often results in decontextualized simplistic analyses devoid of the authorial presence of the researcher.…”

Institutional Ethnography and the Materiality of Affect: Affective Circuits as Indicators of Other Possibilities

“…IE, developed by Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990, 2005, 2006), sought to unsettle the traditional ground of much sociological research through its refusal to begin with theory. IE investigates ‘the work that actually happens, and how it is organized to happen as it does’ (Kearney et al. 2018, 305) primarily through a focus on the materiality of institutionally produced texts and the ways in which they govern or organize people’s doings.…”

“…. .at least think about the possibilities of change, even though making it is not necessarily a straightforward matter’ (Kearney et al. 2018, 298).…”