1. Institutional Ethnography. Alison Griffith and Kjeld Høgsbro Ph.d. Summer School August 2010

2. The idea is to reorganize sociology as a knowledge of society so that inquiry begins where people are and proceeds from there to discoveries that are for them, for us, of the workings of a social that extends beyond any one of us, bringing our local activities into coordination with those of others. The project is to extend people’s ordinary good knowledge of how things are put together in our everyday lives to dimensions of the social that transcend the local and are all the more powerful and significant in it for that reason. We participate in them without knowing what we are doing. Dorothy Smith 2006 p. 3

3. The ethnographic problematic recognizes the real interpenetration of the present and immediate with the unknown elsewhere and elsewhen and the strange forms of power that are at once present and absent in the everyday. A problematic is a territory to be discovered, not a question that is concluded in its answer. Exploration opens up an institutional complex, as it is relevant to the problematic. In opening up an institutional complex it participates in institutional ethnography’s more general discoveries of the workings of institutions and the ruling relations in contemporary western societies” (Dorothy E. Smith 2005: 41)

4. “Institutional ethnography explores the SOCIAL RELATIONS organizing INSTITUTIONS as people participate in them and from their perspectives. People are the expert practitioners of their own lives, and the ethnographer’s work is to learn from them to assemble what is learned from different perspectives and to investigate how their activities are COORDINATED. It aims to go beyond what people know to find out how what they are doing is connected with others’ doings in ways they cannot see. The idea is to MAP the institutional aspects of the RULING RELATIONS so that people can expand their own knowledge of their everyday worlds by being able to see how what they are doing is coordinated with others’ doings elsewhere and elsewhen.” (Dorothy E. Smith 2005)

5. Obviously, institutions cannot be studied and mapped out in their totality, and such is not the objective of institutional ethnography. Rather, the aim of the institutional ethnographer is to explore particular corners or strands within a specific institutional complex, in ways that make visible their points of connection with other sites and courses of action. DeVault and McCoy 2006 p. 17

6. Frontline professionals, such as teachers, nurses, trainers, social workers, community agency personnel, and other bureaucrats, often become informants in an institutional ethnography. Individuals in such positions are especially important because they make the linkages between clients and ruling discourses, ’working up’ the messiness of an everyday circumstance so that it fits the categories and protocols of a professional regime. DeVault and McCoy 2006 p. 27

7. In interviews, it is common – and understandable – that people in an institutional setting describe their work using the language of the institution. This is especially the case with people who have been taught a professional discourse as part of their training or people whose work requires them to provide regular accounts of institutional processes. DeVault and McCoy 2006 p. 37

8. It is important to focus on: 1.What people are talking about 2.How they talk about these matters. How does it come to be available to them to know and tell their experience in that way. In contemporary society, many institutional discourses are not esoteric or exclusive to trained insiders; they are moved into wider circulation through the mass media and popularizing literatures. Liza McCoy 2006 p. 118

9. The extent to which people participate in the discourses varies. Those who can appropriate the institutional discourse can often move with greater ease through its processes; they know what to expect, they can imagine how things work, and they have the language to advocate for themselves and their families. Liza McCoy 2006 p. 119

10. The wise researcher will avoid making incautious assumptions about what people think or know based on how they talk about their experience in an interview. Most people have linguistic repertoires that allow them to vary the language, the register, the emphasis, even the narrative frames of the accounts they provide in order to fit their verbal contributions to the emerging conversation or to achieve particular ends. Liza McCoy 2006 p. 120-21

11. “Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” "The aim of the sociology we call institutional ethnography is to reorganize the social relations of knowledge of the social such that people can take that knowledge up as an extension of our ordinary knowledge of the local actualities of our lives. " Dorothy Smith 2005 (p.26)