Institutional Ethnography by Larson, Kelley

What is a problematic?

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 17:51:16 UTC

"A form of abstraction that displaces the presence of individuals as individuals while existing only in what people actually do"

What are ruling relations?

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 18:08:42 UTC

Ruling relations are "social relations extending beyond individuals and beyond the everyday enter into and organize our lives. These are relations integral to our everyday lives and may be very much taken for granted"

Work

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 18:14:08 UTC

"Institutional Ethnography's expanded and generous usage of the term 'work' opens up aspects of what people do that often will otherwise be missed and go unrecognized in the everyday usage of the word. It is useful for what can be learned from respondents in interviews or from observing"

Standpoint

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 18:18:10 UTC

A standpoint is a "stance that has an empirical location, where a group of people are positioned"

IE is an Alternative Sociology

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 18:22:10 UTC

"By taking up a research problematic grounded in people's everyday lives as they know and experience them, institutional ethnography is designing and developing an alternative sociology"

Treating people as subjects, not objects

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 18:31:18 UTC

"The researcher learns from people's own experiences of their doings as they tell it, or from observation, or from a combination of the two. Hence, for institutional ethnographers, those the researcher works with are not the object of study; they are the subjects of study. We have to learn from people about what they do and how they go about it"

Mapping

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 19:00:40 UTC

Mapping to explicate

"Many institutional ethnographers have adopted a rhetoric of "mapping" to highlight the analytic goal of explication rather than theory building; the analysis is meant to be usable in the way that a map can be used to find one's way"

How to avoid common pitfalls

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 19:04:01 UTC

Rankin, J. (2017). Conducting analysis in institutional ethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917734472

What is the role of texts?

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 19:42:52 UTC

The focus of an IE inquiry is the ruling relations. They "are those in which sequences of action are coordinated by replicable texts that can be read or seen or heard in more than one place at more than one time and by more than one person"

Analysis

kelleylarson — 2025-07-27 19:46:12 UTC

Indexing, not coding

"If the data is extensive, it may be useful to index the varied content to help the work of building the ethnography. Indexing is fully responsive to the actual content and does not impose a system of categories"