Institutional Ethnography as Practice

Dorothy E. Smith is professor emerita in Sociology & Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and adjunct professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria.

This is an extraordinary text that should be read by all scholars, students and activists who are interested in exploring how the social world is put together. Taken together, the chapters provide a comprehensive methodological road map for designing research that starts in people's actual experiences to reveal how ruling relations organize everyday life. Smith has gathered together the best practitioners of institutional ethnography to help bring her feminist methodology to life. This insightful and accessible collection offers inspiration and practical advice to all who yearn for a sociology that can make a difference in people's lives.

• Chapter 1 IntroductionChapter 2 Part I: institutional ethnographic data: interview observation and textChapter 3 Institutional ethnography: using interviews to investigate Ruling Relations Marjorie L. DeVault and Liza McCoyChapter 4 "Where did you get the fur coat Fern?" Participant observation in institutional ethnographyChapter 5 Incorporating texts into ethnographic practiceChapter 6 Part II: AnalysisChapter 7 Data: what it is and what to do with it:institutional ethnography and experience as dataChapter 8 Keeping the institution in view: working with interview accounts of everyday experienceChapter 9 Mapping institutions as work and textChapter 10 Constructing single-parent families for schooling:discovering an institutional discourseChapter 11 Part III InquiryChapter 12 A research proposalChapter 13 Making the institution ethnographically accessible: UN document production and the transformation of experienceChapter 14 U.S. judicial interventions in the lives of battered women: an Indigenous community’s assessment