Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography: IE Scholars Speak to Its Promise 3031334019, 9783031334016

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Where Do We Go from Here?
References
Part I: Critical Commentary on Experience and Standpoint
Chapter 2: “Just Trying to Do My Job.” Accounting for the Institutional Ethnographer’s Sensibility in Everyday Life
The Essay and Encounters with Detecting Practices
Putting an Institutional Ethnographer’s Sensibility to Work at the Airport
Thinking About the Security Guard and Griffith and Smith’s (2005) Small Hero
Local Ways and Practices in the Matter of Consciousness-Raising
Detection Is Overwhelming but Not Inevitable
Bringing More People into Consideration as Subjects of Ruling
Just Trying
References
Chapter 3: Human Service Professionals and IE: Interrogating Some Quandaries over “Standpoint”
Professionals and IE Inquiry in the Human Service Organization
How Nurses Think About Their Practice: Evidence of a Dual Consciousness?
The Contemporary Social Organization of Professional Nursing
Registered Nurse Schroeder, Her IE Research, and Her “Standpoint”
IE’s Standpoint, Ruling, and the Production of Trustworthy Knowledge
Knowledge, Power, and Standpoint in IE
Interrogating a “Ruling Regime”
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Institutional Ethnography as an Approach for Social Justice Allies
The Problematic
Institutional Ethnography and the Black Equity and Excellence Initiative
Bringing the Problematic Experience into Focus
Mapping the Ordinary Daily Practices Behind the Problematic Experience
Taking Action as an Ally to Bring About Concrete Change
Conclusion
References
Part II: Critical Commentary on Institutions
Chapter 5: Reflections on Social Relations and the Single Institution Tendency in Institutional Ethnography
Recognizing the Single Institution Tendency
Critiquing the Single Institution Tendency
Accounting for the Single Institution Tendency
Some Promising Exemplars
Some Ways Forward
Professional Writing Studies and Recontextualization
Medico-Legal Borderland
The Relational Turn
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Institutional Ethnography and Feminist Pedagogical Praxis
Nancy’s Reflections
Dorothy Smith as Feminist Pedagogue and Mentor
Resources for Teaching IE: A Pedagogical Textual History
Conceptualization and Key IE Concepts
IE Praxis: Three Case Studies
Learning by Doing: “Responding to Racist Harms”: Ashley’s Reflections
Doing IE as a Reflection on Standpoint Experiences
IE Analysis as Experiential Learning
Doing IE as Pedagogical Praxis
Conclusion
References
Part III: Critical Commentary on Ruling Relations and History
Chapter 7: Revisiting the Ruling Relations
Introduction
Foundations: A Brief Review of the Ruling Relations
You Are Here, 2016
Writing the Ruling Relations
You Are Here, 2022.
Discussion: Implications for Institutional Ethnographers
Conclusion
Appendix: Key Sources by Dorothy Smith
References
Chapter 8: Contextualizing Institutional Ethnography
Sociology as Practice/Work: A Standpoint from Norway
Sociology as Discourse: A Standpoint from Norway
The Emergence of Norwegian Sociology
The Welfare State
Hybrid Models
Positioning IE in the Norwegian Context: Future Challenges and Prospects
References
Chapter 9: Institutional Ethnography as Alternative to Studying Historical Change: A Conceptual Framework and Analytical Strategies
Studying Social Change
An Alternative
Our Methods for Investigating Historical Changes in Housing
Collecting Oral Housing Histories
Collecting Archival Data
Guide for Doing Archival Research in IE
Conclusion
References
Part IV: Critical Commentary on Settler Ruling Relations
Chapter 10: Going in Circles: The Hidden Work of Hospital Staff Trying to Meet the Healthcare Needs of First Nations People Through “Patient-Centered Care”
The Research Problematic
Using IE to Explore the Work of Staff
What Staff Trying to Improve Care for First Nations People Spent Their Time and Effort Doing
Band-Aid Work
Convincing Work
What Happened When Staff Shared Their Knowledge About This Work with Others to Make Change? How Was This Knowledge Received?
Resisting work
What Was Shaping These Interactions? Who Benefited from This?
The Virtual Reality of Patient-Centered Care
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Institutional Ethnography and Decolonization in Planning: Exploring Potential and Limits
The Origins of This Chapter: Planning’s Complicity with Colonial Dispossession
Unpacking the Colonial Cultures of Planning Through IE
Mapping Fear, Economic Interests, and Western Legal Supremacy: What IE Allowed Me to See
What Can IE Do to Support Decolonization?
Decolonization in Planning
Decolonization Discussions in IE
Decolonization as Indigenous Resurgence and Land Restitution
The (Im)Possibilities of IE in Support of Decolonization
Concluding Thoughts: From Mapping State Planning to Strengthening Indigenous Planning
References
Part V: Commentary on Social Relations Beyond Texts
Chapter 12: Writing the Social Web: Toward an Institutional Ethnography for the Internet
Virtual, Digital, Online Ethnography
What Is a Digital Platform?
IE and Digital Ethnography
Considerations in Digital Fieldwork
Conclusion
Suggested Questions for Digital IE Research
References
Index

Citation preview

Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography IE Scholars Speak to Its Promise Edited by Paul C. Luken · Suzanne Vaughan

Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography

Paul C. Luken  •  Suzanne Vaughan Editors

Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography IE Scholars Speak to Its Promise

Editors Paul C. Luken University of West Georgia Villa Rica, GA, USA

Suzanne Vaughan Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-33401-6    ISBN 978-3-031-33402-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Dorothy, for giving us a sociology for women, an institutional ethnography, a sociology for people, and the sociology we needed. To Tim, for introducing us to Dorothy’s writing and then to Dorothy herself, and for always practicing a sociology for oppressed people. For those who continue to take up the work.

Acknowledgments

At the time of this writing we do not know what will appear on the cover of this volume, so we ask you to imagine this picture. It is simply two yellow calla lilies. In floriography, a yellow calla lily represents gratitude, a sentiment that has come to underlie our work in institutional ethnography. We wish to express our gratitude to those who were involved in this book project from the beginning through their participation in the “Concluding Thoughts” panel during the 2021 Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) annual meeting: Marie Campbell, Nancy Naples, James Reid, Emily Springer, and Frank Wang. We are very grateful for their presentations regarding the current state of institutional ethnography and its future directions. Following the success of that panel, we were inspired to invite a few scholars who made presentations during the 2021 and 2022 SSSP meetings to be contributors to this volume. We have learned immeasurably from the contributors, and we thank them for their thoughtful and attentive examination of critical issues in institutional ethnography as new generations of scholars take up IE on different topics in different disciplines and countries. We are indebted to you all for ideas, assessments, but, most assuredly, for “doing the work” to bring our volume together. This volume was made possible by the invisible work of reviewers and consultants who provided the background, participated by reading, commenting on, talking about, and editing chapters. We extend a special thanks to them for their generous donation of time and critical eye on topics with which we were not familiar. Thank you to our reviewers, vii

viii 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

consultants, and supporters: Brian Richardson, Linda and Andres DeAguero, Adriana Suarez-Delucchi, Helen Helwig, Janet Rankin, Neema Noori, and Miguel Ramos. We thank Elizabeth Graber, senior editor, Sociology and Anthropology, Palgrave Macmillan, for swiftly ushering our proposal through the review process, and Vinoth Kuppan, project coordinator, Springer Nature, who has tirelessly answered our questions as we prepared this volume. Everyone mentioned above and all those institutional ethnographers who encouraged and helped to bring us to this place where we are editing a second volume on IE, the flowers are for you.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Where Do We Go from Here?  1 Suzanne Vaughan and Paul C. Luken Part I Critical Commentary on Experience and Standpoint   9 2 “Just  Trying to Do My Job.” Accounting for the Institutional Ethnographer’s Sensibility in Everyday Life 11 Brenda Solomon 3 Human  Service Professionals and IE: Interrogating Some Quandaries over “Standpoint” 27 Marie L. Campbell 4 Institutional  Ethnography as an Approach for Social Justice Allies 53 Frank Ridzi Part II Critical Commentary on Institutions  67 5 Reflections  on Social Relations and the Single Institution Tendency in Institutional Ethnography 69 Colin Hastings and Eric Mykhalovskiy ix

x 

Contents

6 Institutional  Ethnography and Feminist Pedagogical Praxis  91 Nancy A. Naples and Ashley N. Robinson Part III Critical Commentary on Ruling Relations and History 117 7 Revisiting  the Ruling Relations119 Marjorie L. DeVault 8 Contextualizing Institutional Ethnography137 Ann Christin E. Nilsen, Rebecca W. B. Lund, and May-Linda Magnussen 9 Institutional  Ethnography as Alternative to Studying Historical Change: A Conceptual Framework and Analytical Strategies153 Suzanne Vaughan Part IV Critical Commentary on Settler Ruling Relations 175 10 Going  in Circles: The Hidden Work of Hospital Staff Trying to Meet the Healthcare Needs of First Nations People Through “Patient-Centered Care”177 Sophie Hickey 11 Institutional  Ethnography and Decolonization in Planning: Exploring Potential and Limits199 Magdalena Ugarte Part V Commentary on Social Relations Beyond Texts 229 12 Writing  the Social Web: Toward an Institutional Ethnography for the Internet231 Tanya Osborne Index247

Notes on Contributors

Marie  L.  Campbell  is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Human and Social Development, University of Victoria, Canada. With a background of 15 years of nursing experience, she gained a BA and MA from UBC, and in 1984, a PhD in sociology of education from the University of Toronto, supervised by Dorothy E. Smith. She held teaching positions in social work at Carleton U., Ottawa, and in a Multidisciplinary Graduate Program for nurses, social workers, and child and youth care professionals at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on the organization of work that has largely been reserved for women (in healthcare, nursing, and health disabilities services, and in also in international development where gender bias is also extensive.) Peer-reviewed publications include one co-­edited and two co-authored books, eight single-authored and six co-authored book chapters, all of which feature institutional ethnography. Marjorie  L.  DeVault  is the author of Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work (1991) and Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research (1999), and editor of People at Work: Life, Power, and Social Inclusion in the New Economy, (2008). She was Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University until 2015, and now lives in Brewster, Massachusetts. She has spent much of her career, and a good bit of her retirement, deepening her understanding of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography approach and sharing her enthusiasm for it with students and colleagues. She feels a deep gratitude for conversation and fellowship with Dorothy and many old and new friends in the IE network.

xi

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Colin Hastings  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. His program of research is located at the intersection of the sociology of health, sociolegal studies, and media studies. His forthcoming book, Newswork and Policing Beyond the Police: The Social Organization Of Digital Knowledge About HIV Criminalization, is an institutional ethnographic study of how news media messages about HIV criminal non-­disclosure cases are produced and circulate online. Hastings’s research also examines the implications that public health surveillance practices have on processes of criminalization and understandings of consent. Sophie Hickey  is a White settler woman living on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Jinibara peoples in South-East Queensland, Australia. She is a postdoctoral researcher, with a background in applied sociology and health services research. She works with health services and First Nations community organizations to redesign healthcare services to meet the needs of First Nations families better. In 2020, Hickey co-founded the Australasian Institutional Ethnography Network and remains engaged in the international IE community of practice. Paul  C.  Luken  is Associate Professor Emeritus in Sociology, at the University of West Georgia. He is a founder of the Institutional Ethnography Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Thematic Group (now Working Group) on Institutional Ethnography of the International Sociological Association. With Suzanne Vaughan, he published studies of housing in Social Inquiry, Social Problems, Social Forces, Sociological Quarterly, Sociology and Social Welfare, and Housing and Society, and together they edited The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography. They are completing a manuscript on changes in the social institution of housing in the US.  He resides in Villa Rica, Georgia, USA, where he has begun investigating the social relations shaping the work of voting. Rebecca  W.  B.  Lund  holds a PhD in Organization Studies, a title of Docent in Social Sciences, and is a postdoctoral scholar at the Centre for Gender Studies, the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research interests include feminist epistemology, social theory, capitalism, sociology of knowledge, affect and emotions, with a particular focus on higher educational contexts and academic work. Lund has published extensively in international and Scandinavian journals and conducted several research projects using and developing institutional ethnography. She is co-editor

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

of the book Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region. She has served as vice-president of the Working Group for Institutional Ethnography in International Sociological Association and has been coordinator for the Nordic Network of Institutional Ethnography since 2020. She also supervises PhD students using institutional ethnography. May-Linda  Magnussen holds a PhD in sociology and is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder, Norway. Her research includes family and work life in a gender and migration perspective, meetings between welfare state professionals and migrants, and gender and diversity in academia. She is author of a chapter in Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region, and is co-editor of a special institutional ethnography (IE) issue in the Norwegian Journal of Sociology. An anthology about IE in practice in Norwegian, co-edited with Ann Christin Nilsen, will be published in 2023. Magnussen was co-coordinator of the Nordic network of institutional ethnography from 2017 to 2020. She supervises several masters and PhD students using IE, is coleader of a research group about IE at the University of Agder, and is organizing the IE sessions at the European Sociological Association conferences, together with Morena Tartari and Órla Murray. Eric Mykhalovskiy  is a Professor of Sociology at York University. He has been working with institutional ethnographic approaches to sociological inquiry since the early 1990s. Eric’s research contributes to social justice traditions that engage critically with public health issues, with recent work focused on the public health implications of HIV criminalization. In 2020, he co-edited Health Matters: Evidence, Critical Social Science, and Health Care in Canada. Mykhalovskiy is the editor of the University of Toronto Press book series Institutional Ethnography: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge. Nancy  A.  Naples is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her publications include Feminism and Method; Grassroots Warrior; Women’s Activism and Globalization; and Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field. She received numerous awards for mentoring and scholarship including the Feminist Mentor Award and the Feminist Lecturer Award from Sociologists for Women in Society; Sociology Graduate Mentor of the Year Award, UConn; the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association; Scholar Activist Award, from the Division of Sociology and Social Welfare, Society for the Study of

xiv 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Social Problems; Mortar Board Award for Contributions to Women, Iowa State University; and Honored Faculty Award, Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Union, University of California, Irvine. She has been teaching graduate qualitative methodologies courses for over thirty years and was as an advisor or associate advisor to over 100 graduate students. Ann Christin E. Nilsen  holds a PhD in sociology and is Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, the University of Agder, Norway. Her research interests include childhood and families, early intervention, professional work, indigenization of social work, and the sociology of knowledge. Nilsen has published extensively in both Norwegian and English. She is co-editor of the book Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region, and co-editor of a special issue about institutional ethnography in the Norwegian Journal of Sociology. An introductory book about institutional ethnography and an edited volume about institutional ethnography in practice, both in Norwegian and co-authored by Nilsen, will be published in 2023. Nilsen was coordinator of the Nordic network of institutional ethnography from 2017 to 2020, together with May-Linda Magnussen. She is supervisor of several master’s and PhD students using institutional ethnography. Tanya  Osborne  is a PhD student at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Their PhD research focuses on gendered epistemic inequalities in online computer programming community questions and answers forums. They are also involved in disability advocacy, and they are currently leading a small research project exploring career expectations of disabled PhD students. Frank Ridzi  PhD, MPA, is vice-president for Community Investment at the Central New York Community Foundation and Associate Professor of Sociology at Le Moyne College. Ridzi has helped to launch and lead community initiatives in areas such as increasing community literacy, reducing lead poisoning, and addressing poverty and economic inclusion. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Sciences, the Journal of Organizational Change Management, and Review of Policy Research. He has researched and written using IE for decades. Ashley  N.  Robinson  is a recent graduate of the UConn’s Leadership and Education Policy PhD program at the University of Connecticut. She spent nearly a decade working as a student affairs practitioner in university housing and residential life prior to pursuing her doctoral degree. Her

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xv

research has appeared in Critical Studies in Education, the Journal for College Student Development, About Campus, and at multiple scholarly and practice-based conferences in the fields of higher education and student affairs. She is committed to being a scholar-practitioner and activist within her field and incorporates her research into her teaching and advising of emerging student affairs practitioners within their master’s studies. Brenda Solomon  is Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Vermont who, some years back, during doctoral studies and thanks to the mentoring of Marj L.  DeVault, became a student of Institutional Ethnography. Solomon has written about institutional and discursive practices governing welfare and work, school violence, and front-line workers in security and loss involved in detection. Solomon takes Dorothy E. Smith’s teachings of IE as a guide for navigating everyday life where a multitude of people interact, various goings on may come together as problematics, and people can work in concert with one another to bring about an IE-informed consciousness to meet how things are put together, in time, as they unfold. Magdalena Ugarte  is an Assistant Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she teaches social planning, planning theory, and public policy. Her work critically examines the relationship between planning, settler colonialism, and other forms of institutionalized dispossession, as well as how communities historically excluded from planning for themselves. Suzanne Vaughan  is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, USA. As one of several US experts employing this mode of inquiry in their research, she and her co-­author have published a number of articles on homeownership, childrearing, retirement housing, independence in old age, company housing, and methodological articles about institutional ethnography. She and Paul Luken are currently writing a book based on the oral housing histories of women living in Phoenix, which explicates the ways in which the ordinary work of people in the housing industry transformed housing in the US over the twentieth century. She co-edited and contributed a chapter on the social organization of copyright work to the Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (2021). Vaughan is part of an international IE mentorship team including Janet Rankin and Adriana Suarez-­Delucchi, offering monthly seminars on institutional ethnography sponsored by the WG06 group of the International Sociological Association.

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 9.1

My cycle of doing IE Preliminary little hero diagram of housing, Olive Jackson, Wyoming, 1905–1923 and 1923–1930 Fig. 9.2 Preliminary little hero diagram of housing, Sun City, Arizona, Ursula Roberts, 1978–1992 Fig. 10.1 Ideological circle of the hidden work required for meeting needs of First Nations people through “patient-centered care”

107 159 160 181

xvii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Where Do We Go from Here? Suzanne Vaughan and Paul C. Luken

“It’s out there,” we recall Dorothy Smith saying during one of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) conferences that she attended. The “it” was institutional ethnography (IE), and she was acknowledging that institutional ethnography had developed somewhat of a life of its own, that it would persist, and that it was no longer hers alone. Not that it ever was hers alone. In her writings, she often made it clear that the project that became known as institutional ethnography was collaborative, that it developed while working with graduate students at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, and that it continued to advance as these individuals and others pursued various research endeavors, both academic and activist. Yet, anyone making a quick perusal through her final book with

S. Vaughan (*) Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. C. Luken University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_1

1

2 

S. VAUGHAN AND P. C. LUKEN

Alison Griffith, Simply Institutional Ethnography, will notice that the early influencers of IE were, by and large, North American. That has changed. Institutional ethnography is out there, indeed! And many of those who take it up are separated from Dorothy by generations, by oceans, and by languages. The circumstances in which they live are vastly different from hers, as they are from our own. While this edited book on critical commentary on institutional ethnography (IE) began at a different time and place, through the collective effort of contributors, it has become a tribute to Dorothy E. Smith and an expression of our encounters with her ideas and writing about a different kind of sociology. The conversations about the social organization of knowledge that she and her early students embarked upon in their journey to develop a new sociology set in motion a model of collaborative dialogue among institutional ethnographers about its theory, practice, methods to include the statement, “You are here” and the question, “Where do we go from here?” We believe that the series of chapters collected in this volume builds upon that heritage. Following Smith’s tradition of beginning in one’s own experience, each of our authors has written a first-person narrative of their current thinking, research and teaching of IE by showing us their internal dialogue as they investigate, observe, read, talk with, and teach others about institutional ethnography. Many write about their first encounter with Smith, either as a teacher or as a reader of her books and articles. Their stories tell us about the wide impact she has on the kind of research, questions, and interests that continue to concern them. Many have returned to Smith’s earliest books (The Everyday World as Problematic; The Conceptual Practices of Power; Texts, Facts, and Femininity; and Writing the Social) to glean new insights, while others rely more heavily on some of her earliest articles translated and published internationally. Each of their journeys is unique, but we learn about the problems they confront along with how their thinking about IE and its ontology has helped them resolve these obstacles. One of the most exciting features of institutional ethnography is its focus on discovery of “how things happen as they do.” As a mode of social inquiry founded over 45 years ago, it continues to unfold for practitioners new avenues of investigation. As studies have emerged across diverse (inter)disciplinary fields, borders, historical time, and interests and topics, recently those well-grounded in institutional ethnography have returned to the basic ontological assumptions of IE outlined succinctly by Liza McCoy in “Materialist Matters: A Case for Revisiting the Social Ontology of Institutional Ethnography” in The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional

1  INTRODUCTION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 

3

Ethnography (2021). McCoy cites a sentence from Smith (2005, p. 59), adding time and place in brackets: “Individuals are there [in time and place]; they are in their bodies; they are active, and what they’re doing is coordinated with the doings of others. That is the four-part package that is foundational to the institutional ethnographic project” (p.  36). This volume contains some of these recent commentaries that point to the many expansive and under-explored elements of Smith’s simple conceptualization of how we know the social through empirical inquiry. Returning to these foundational roots, the 11 contributors in this volume continue the dialogue about core IE ideas of standpoint, experience, institutions, social relations, and ruling relations related to this four-part package and their potential to inspire new practices of inquiry. Some of these scholars have studied directly with Smith, others know her through conferences and guest lectures, while others know her through her writing only. Although the themes of each chapter differ in terms of each author’s journey with IE and their research interests, the chapters often touch upon a similarity—that the core concepts of IE are interrelated in the same way that Smith’s little hero diagram suggests. Thus, these chapters explore themes that are both enduring, but also newly emerging as the conditions of peoples’ work change: how institutional ethnographers can take an expanded view of social institutions, how they might explore the dynamics of ruling relations over time, what results from understanding experience as dialogue (including internal or in-skull dialogue), the significance of “standpoint,” and the opportunities for institutional ethnographers to move beyond texts as they discover and describe social relations. We have divided this volume into five sections on what we call critical commentary on experience and standpoint, institutions, ruling relations, settler ruling relations, and social relations beyond text. The chapters do overlap these divisions, however. Many chapters address ruling relations as they relate to standpoint, the problematic or experience. In other chapters, other common themes emerge across chapters such as the (re)production of white institutions, the notion of an IE sensibility, and the importance of scholar/activism. Part I “Critical Commentary on Experience and Standpoint” includes chapters which explore how standpoint—whether that of a personal account, client, or ally—organizes what unfolds for the institutional ethnographer possible paths of discovery of ruling in the everyday world as people go about their work with other people. Brenda Solomon examines her own experience and what she calls “IE sensibility” to elaborate her

4 

S. VAUGHAN AND P. C. LUKEN

in-­skull work as a sister and mother connecting her with those people doing surveillance work. Marie Campbell, an early student of Smith’s at the University of British Columbia, begins in her experience of being told by fellow graduate students that she is “thinking like a nurse” to explore what it means for novice IE researchers/human service professionals. Her concerns focus on the struggles of maintaining a standpoint as they take up institutional ethnography as a research project. She suggests that “expert knowledge” in human service professions often interferes with taking the standpoint of clients they serve and explicating the ruling relations of which they are part. Frank Ridzi, whose work focuses on social justice and activism within his community, points to the problematic and mapping the standpoint of those experiencing it as important tools in reorganizing the way that philanthropic organizations go about funding grants to marginalized groups. His work is revolutionary in many ways since the result was to “dethrone the white institution of philanthropy.” The two chapters in Part II “Critical Commentary on Institutions” initially examine how institutional processes often constrain the work of research and teaching institutional ethnography in universities and the consequences of this organization for them and other institutional ethnographers. Yet, they also offer alternative ways in which attending to how peoples’ activities are coordinated across multiple “institutions” can add complexity to IE analysis of how ruling relations are produced, reproduced, and changed. Colin Hastings and Eric Mykhalovskiy, longtime collaborators, address the tendency toward single-institution investigations and reasons for the single-institutional focus and argue for ways of building more expansive ways for institutional ethnographers to explore how seemingly diverse institutions might be interconnected via ruling relations in peoples’ everyday lives. Their chapter outlines several research projects by IE scholars that focus on the interconnections between institutional complexes and their search for connection between other approaches that help them explore their more recent topics of research. Nancy Naples and Ashley Robinson, feminist scholars and activists, discuss attempts to take up what they call “IE praxis” in research across organizational contexts to make change for women and families. Given the obstacles of teaching IE in two or three class periods, they argue that the ever-expanding institutional ethnographic available texts and Smith’s own mentoring of students across the globe have helped to overcome these constraints. Part III “Critical Commentary on Ruling Relations and History” contains three chapters. The section opens with a chapter, “Revisiting Ruling

1  INTRODUCTION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 

5

Relations,” by Marj DeVault, a longtime observer and participant in the business of building institutional ethnography. Her chapter introduces many of the themes that other authors take up in greater depth in this section: the materiality, regional specificities, historicity, and the reach of the ruling relations. She begins in her own experience grappling with outcomes of U.S. elections, police killing of African Americans, gut-­wrenching backlash, the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the pandemic and trying to figure out “what’s actually happening.” Through the lens of Evelyn Glenn’s historical work on settler colonialism, she begins to unravel some of the historic specific relations upon which the United States was and continues to be socially organized. Elaborating DeVault’s point that ruling is both historically and regionally/nationally specific, major Nordic scholars Ann Christin E.  Nilsen, Rebecca W.  B. Lund, and May-Linda Magnussen, in “Contextualizing Institutional Ethnography” discuss the history of Nordic sociology in order to understand the challenges and opportunities that institutional ethnography presents. They begin from their own experience of hearing the discourse of IE during international meetings and unfold how their understanding of IE as an alternative was different from others given the trajectory of sociology as a discipline developed in support of a socially just welfare state in Norway. They argue that explicating the ruling relations must be contextualized both in terms of discourse and its praxis. Given this context, IE offers a social ontology that attends to people, rather than concepts and provides insights into institutional orders producing inequality, rather than simply important work on behalf of the welfare state. In her chapter “Institutional Ethnography as Alternative to Studying Historical Change: A Conceptual Framework and Analytical Strategies,” Suzanne Vaughan outlines her and Paul Luken’s analytical reasoning and strategies for examining historical change in twentieth-century U.S. housing. Although few institutional ethnographers have exploited archival documents, she argues that the ontology of the social embedded in this mode of inquiry solves many of the issues confronted by sociologist in their research on social change. Her chapter ends with suggestions of how to locate and connect people’s doings during a particular time period with the work others were doing elsewhere through historical documents. In Part IV “Commentary on Settler Ruling Relations,” we highlight a renewed interest in race/ethnic/indigenous relations that was first investigated by several of Smith’s students and collaborators at the University of British Columbia and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education:

6 

S. VAUGHAN AND P. C. LUKEN

Roxana Ng (1995), Himani Bannerji (1995), Adele Mueller (1995), and Yoko Ueda (1995). Sophie Hickey’s and Magdalena Ugarte’s chapters provide more in-depth analyses of the social organization of settler colonialism discussed in DeVault’s chapter, but in Australia, Chile, and Canada in spite of organizational attempts to be responsive to indigenous people and their interests. Hickey’s personal narrative in “Going in Circles: The Hidden Work of Hospital Staff Trying to Meet the Healthcare Needs of First Nations Peoples Through ‘Patient-Centered Care’” begins in her experience as a team member working to implement a federal mandate for organizational change in health care for First Nation’s people in Australia. As indigenous members began to resign from the team, she began to unfold how staff work was subsumed under an ideology of “patient-­ centered care” and came to overwhelm the task of making First Nation people’s needs present. Institutional change was inhibited by creating what she calls a virtual reality of justifying a practice for “all people” at the expense of First Nation people that the mandate proscribed. On the other hand, Ugarte, a geographer and scholar of planning, in “Institutional Ethnography and Decolonization in Planning: Exploring Potential and Limits” examines her own research both in Chile among planners attempting to incorporate the duty to consult indigenous people in planning processes and her poverty reduction work in Labrador with indigenous and Inuit communities. Through this reflection, she argues that IE can make visible colonial ruling relations and assumptions in planning practice. However, through an extensive review of her own and others’ IE research on indigenous dispossession, she notes that IE scholarship by itself does not in itself enable land restitution and the restoration of Indigenous life. It does provide a historical entry point into contemporary practices for activism as long as research is conducted by indigenous people and their priorities. Part V “Social Relations Beyond Texts” contains one chapter that grapples with investigating social media and social relations producing and distributing digital forms. Tanya Osborne, a graduate student in Sweden, in “Writing the Social Web: Towards an Institutional Ethnography for the Internet” combines insights from digital ethnography to elaborate on how one might go about an institutional ethnographic study of the internet. Her chapter introduces her readers to how digital technologies are produced and monetized through social media and ways in which institutional ethnographers can get at the work of people invisible to those using

1  INTRODUCTION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 

7

Facebook, Wordle, and other types of digital platforms. Her approach is informative and poses a number of questions in relation to IE. Dorothy Smith’s work along with others doing institutional ethnography have inspired these authors. We hope that this edited volume continues to stimulate your understanding and your work.

References Bannerji, H. (1995). Beyond the ruling category to what actually happens: Notes on James Mill’s Historiography in The History of British India. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 49–64). University of Toronto Press. McCoy, L. (2021). Materialist matters: A case for revisiting the social ontology of institutional ethnography. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  35–46). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_3 Mueller, A. (1995). Beginning in the standpoint of women: An investigation of the gap between Cholas and “Women of Peru”. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 96–107). University of Toronto Press. Ng, R. (1995). Multiculturalism as ideology: A textual analysis. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 35–48). University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. AltaMira Press. Ueda, Y. (1995). Corporate wives: Gendered education of their children. In M.  Campbell & A.  Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 122–134). University of Toronto Press.

PART I

Critical Commentary on Experience and Standpoint

CHAPTER 2

“Just Trying to Do My Job.” Accounting for the Institutional Ethnographer’s Sensibility in Everyday Life Brenda Solomon

Living a life with an institutional ethnographer’s sensibility has guided my career and life’s work and has allowed me a way to situate myself and make observations in my own life so that I may better navigate the everyday. The ongoing practice of institutional ethnography (IE) has not just sustained me in my work, it has afforded me an impromptu way of mapping social relations as I go—a sociology for the institutional ethnographer in-­ time or an institutional ethnographer’s GPS-like mapping system of the social. This ongoing practice of institutional ethnography is a way of looking and putting together my social world that has become, at once, my everyday practice and sense of things. It is how I consciously look at things, and also how I experience things even as I am not fully aware of my engagement with things in this way.

B. Solomon (*) University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_2

11

12 

B. SOLOMON

It all seems a given of sorts, that I would have a substantial relationship with institutional ethnography, and while it strikes me that this relationship is in some way experienced by other institutional ethnographers as well, is not fully discussed and accounted for. Certainly, it seems to me, it should be looked into further. I use institutional ethnography (Smith, 1987, 1999, 2001) to make observations and analysis, as one does when you think and use IE as a mode of inquiry. However, my thinking about institutional ethnography, as Dorothy Smith (2005) instructed, as a sociology for people, has allowed, if not encouraged, me to consider how I use IE in everyday life, and further, how IE is practiced by other institutional ethnographers in their lives and could be practiced more broadly as a sociology for people. Related to this, I consider Smith’s recent chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (Luken & Vaughan, 2021) where Dorothy weaves together an interest in how “words are practiced both among us and just in our heads that organize our subjectivities in specific ways” (Smith, 2021, p. 67). Smith goes on to say: We want to be able to make observations of words as people practice them; we want to be able to see how they are working; we want observations both of what people say, write or read, but also of words as they go on inaudibly and invisibly inside the bony walls of the skull. (pp. 68–69)

With this in mind, I have thought a lot about how I go about using institutional ethnography everyday or with what I call an institutional ethnographer’s sensibility and how so much of what would be considered IE work goes on inside the bony walls of my skull and does not stop at the walls of the university or the contours of a project but, as Dorothy noted, is at play just as well in and between everyday encounters and casual conversation. By employing an institutional ethnographer’s sensibility in my everyday life, it is not simply that I have extended IE from research into teaching and practice, maintaining the academy as the context for exploring and explicating. Rather, my use of IE everyday suggests something more to the point of IE, that is, institutional ethnography’s use, as much as possible, to directly inform the everyday. Considering this, in addition to mapping everyday contexts in the academy, institutional ethnography may be carried out in some way in everyday circumstances and local settings to analyze and respond to everyday life as it unfolds. In this way, along with using IE in formal inquiries to raise consciousness about how

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

13

extra-local texts coordinate local activities and social relations, there is a possibility of advancing a practice of institutional ethnography by people from their various standpoints to engage in an analysis of “how things are put together” for themselves. To take a step toward this possibility, it follows that we would turn to people trained in institutional ethnography observation and analysis who likely have a consciousness about using IE in their own lives. Using IE in their everyday lives, institutional ethnographers would be able to provide substantive examples of how IE can be and is carried out in-time day-in-­ and-out. It is in keeping with mapping a sociology for people in the academy that institutional ethnographers may map their own encounters with “textually mediated institutional contexts” and “objectifying practices” to sort out “the doings” of their own lives on their own behalf. Considering the practices of institutional ethnographers as they use IE in their everyday lives may point a way for others to form an everyday consciousness for themselves. To create a bit of a context for further consideration, in this chapter I will focus on my own use of an institutional ethnographer’s sensibility in institutional spaces, reviewing aspects of an essay I wrote related to my sister’s illness and impending death (see Solomon, 2014). In this essay, invariably, I wrote about the ways extra-local detection practices were carried out across institutional contexts at an airport, a hospital, and a secure research campus to mediate and at times overwhelm my intention to connect during a time of desperation. I came to make sense of the practices I referred to in that essay by saying they secured without providing security and understood without understanding. I also pointed to the considerable effort and risk one took in those spaces to act outside of the terms of their job and with what would otherwise be a simple expression of concern or a commonplace regard for another. As I write about that time again here, I will reflect on the ways my institutional ethnography sensibility operated in-time as events unfolded particularly between one security guard and me at the airport close to my place of employment and what was then my home. From this experience of accounting for my institutional ethnography sensibility and entering everyday problematics as an institutional ethnographer, I will show how my actions (1) were subject to institutional capture, (2) came about in relation to, and with others, unfolding together within coordinated social relations, and (3) were modified by my internal dialogue and analysis of what was going on or by employing an institutional ethnographer’s

14 

B. SOLOMON

sensibility. From there, I will consider the difficulties workers face in calling into question the documentary realities of their work lives and the possible actions they may take to favor their own local interests and personal sense of what is right and one should do.

The Essay and Encounters with Detecting Practices Some time ago, a good friend and colleague was putting together an edited book of narratives by social work academics. He asked me to contribute by writing about the experience of my sister’s death. In order to focus my attention on writing this chapter, I took my partner and child to the airport to visit my partner’s family. And I begin the essay there, at the point of saying good-bye to my family as they boarded a plane. As I indicated in that earlier essay, saying good-bye to my sister was still very fresh in my experience, and the difficulty of that experience got in the middle of other good-byes that should not have been so filled with worry and trouble as they most certainly were. This was one of those occasions. But more so, after saying good-bye and still at the airport, I noted that my partner, Jen, had left our daughter Clare’s sippy cup in the car. Now if this were any other airport, there would be nothing I could do about it; Jen would have left the cup and that was that. But it wasn’t any other airport, it was our little airport. I could easily pull up to the front of the building and be steps away from a terminal where passengers find their gates. And drawn to the possibility I could get the cup to Jen and Clare, I pulled the car to the curb close to the gate and got out. However, as soon as I was out of the car, I was met with a security guard who stopped me on the sidewalk and interrupted my sense of where I was and what I was doing. In my mind, I was in the city where I had lived for some time, twelve minutes from our home, and just steps away from my partner and child. It made sense that I would try to get the cup they left behind to them. It was a commonsense event with a commonplace purpose. But upon opening the door to the car at curbside, I entered a powerful and pervasive re-­ ordering of place and purpose that eclipsed and obscured the common place aspects of the activity I had embarked upon moments ago. What drew me to the airport was my concern as a parent, but what I encountered at the airport called for the sensibility of an institutional ethnographer, or at least that is how I look at it now. At the airport, Homeland Security ordered observations and actions. It arranged the observations and actions of people coming and going to the airport and it particularly

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

15

arranged the security guards’ observations and activities. Within homeland security protocols, sippy cups should be met with the same level of scrutiny as any other object, simply, as a potential object of harm. Further, as someone entering the airport, I should be informed and expect that it would be encountered in those terms. Considering how important and pervasive homeland security protocols are at airports, other terms of consideration could only be trivialized or serve as a distraction. Thus, when I stumbled upon and into these acute social relations, thinking about them from my institutional ethnographer’s sense of things helped orient me and dissuaded me from trying to navigate a way into the airport with the cup. Especially when the guard said, “Just trying to do my job,” I knew there was little to be said or done to change the course of action at curbside in the airport. That said, my IE-informed internal dialogue that led to this conclusion kept me engaged in the analytical features of the problem and from getting lost in my frustration with the security guard. Knowing that my way of making sense of the situation was trouble for homeland security, and the sippy cup had no chance of getting into the airport, my institutional ethnography sense of things pointed a direction: I pulled the sippy cup close to me and got back in the car. But this experience gave me the pretext for my essay. I realized that the story I had to tell was not directly about my sister’s death but rather about my encounter with practices of detection that permeate everyday life and, again, secure without providing security and help without ever helping. It was about the airport security guard I just mentioned and the medical and mental health staff at the hospital where my sister sought a miracle. But it was also about opportunities for pushing through detection trying to connect (the title of the essay I wrote in 2014) and the possibilities that yet exist to act from one’s own sense or a locally generated common-sense of just what is called for. To that point, the story I told in the essay also included another security guard, one who was stationed across the street from the hospital where I visited my sister, at a secure research campus. This security guard defied rule and regulation by the simple act of letting me take a walk. Outside the confines of the textually mediated regulations of his job, he permitted me to enter a quiet space, get my thoughts together, and take hold of myself and the grave conditions of my circumstance. In the essay, I pointed out how I observed, in time, these various spaces and modes of detection. I also noted the opportunities to disobey institutional imperatives as they were taking place and were unfolding.

16 

B. SOLOMON

As I said, I made sense of these different experiences at different places by accounting for them within one overarching institutional practice. I found the operations with which I came in contact were all premised on a kind of detection work and that the pervasive employment of extra-local protocols arranged actors’ indexing activities for the purpose of detection. Further, I saw how this detection work not only organized detecting itself, but largely negated any other way of organizing oneself as a legitimate worker. The need for vigilant security detecting at the airport and the quick and efficient identification and sorting of patient problems at the hospital did not allow for other potential local interests or understandings or any individual sense-making that might lead to a response that was something other than detection. From my observations, it seemed that institutional processing had shown itself to be so pervasive and complete that protocols were less often challenged by frontline workers or breeched for the sake of commonplace human accommodations that fell outside of detection. Rather, it had become futile to expect exceptions to the rules of work at work. And further, considering security at the airport, as families work extra hours and multiple jobs to stay afloat, to follow protocols, rather than figure things out for oneself, is an easier path to get things done. Finally, people in need at the airport seemed to understand quite well the terms of detection and knew better than to ask most anything from those whose jobs were set to review their inquiries as potential trouble (in the case of the airport, as either terrorism or trouble to the mandate of detecting terrorism). Unless you were really in need, you kept your head down and demonstrated compliance with what was outlined on walls in the airport and periodically broadcasted in terminals.

Putting an Institutional Ethnographer’s Sensibility to Work at the Airport Taking account of the sum and substance of Smith’s work, Marj DeVault (2021) noted how “Smith began to explore disjunctures in consciousness, which offered fleeting clues to transitions from one mode of knowing to another” (p. 14). Attention to these shifts between one mode of knowing to another became the hallmark of IE. Institutional ethnographers begin social inquiries considering these shifts, examining one mode of knowing, such as the everyday experience of what is going on at work, in relation to another mode of knowing, the texts that order that work. Likewise,

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

17

gathering a sense of one mode of knowing to another is where institutional ethnographers engage problematics in their everyday lives. For example, I used an IE-informed approach to navigate my encounters with the frontline workers I met and discussed in my essay, I considered the lines of fault (Smith, 1987, 1990, 1999) the workers I met straddled and whether to appeal to their embodied experience over the documentary realities of their jobs which kept them from attending to me as I needed. In this way, my observations about the security guard and the hospital mental health care worker I encountered later were in keeping with how I would begin any IE project, to start in the everyday and make it problematic (DeVault, 1999; Smith, 1987). However, rather than as an aspect of data collection and analysis, I carried out my interest in-time, as it was unfolding to inform how I could respond. I stood there with the security guard across from me and the sippy cup in my hand between us on the walkway outside the Burlington Vermont airport terminal in the wee hours of a cold and blustery morning and thought about the forms of knowledge that arranged that moment. What institutional imperatives were at play? What held this security guard to those mandates? Was there anything I could say or do that could alter the way my car at curbside and the sippy cup were taken up by security to allow the cup to get to my child? By using institutional ethnography to think about what was taking place, I was able to engage the problematic in a more complex way, considering the security guard and his actions within the ruling relations arranging his work. From there, I began to see the security guard less within the terms typically set by such encounters with law enforcement, as either my ally or my adversary, and more so as someone, like myself, caught up in the problem of security at the airport. Even as we negotiated extra-­ local institutional arrangements that separated us, the notorious winter weather conditions of our home state that were in full swing that morning and the security guard and I could hold up against as we made our opposing claims helped to remind me of our place-based ties. Though detection work does not suggest that the security guard and I should partake in friendly chatter, beyond managing harsh weather, Vermonters pride themselves on their civic engagement and community spirit. The security guard and I likely gardened with our neighbors, had a favorite maple syrup, and believed there was no better sunset than that over Lake Champlain. When I looked at it like this, it was hard to understand why the security guard didn’t simply let me pass through. Yet, whatever else we could be engaged in together, we were in an institutionally arranged process and event

18 

B. SOLOMON

regulated by practices likely devised very far from the maple syrup loving context of our immediate encounter. With that, I understood that the neighborly context of place likely made it even more important that he was strict about attending to his work mandates over his personal inclinations. Regardless, with all this in mind, I felt less inclined to pick a fight with him and actually was concerned about putting him in a position to defy regulation and jeopardize his job. Still, the situation remained; we were working at cross purposes within different conceptual frames. In some sense, we were both just trying to do our jobs. He needed to be a good security guard who kept me from parking curbside and bringing an object to a gate, and I needed to be a good parent who got a sippy cup to my daughter. With that, I thought about the kinds of legitimate claims each of us could make at the airport. Obviously, the security guard had institutional authority brought about by Homeland Security, but, at the same time, I knew how exceptions are made place-to-place for a parent attending to the needs of a small child. My initial stance was to exploit this knowledge and take the posture that getting a sippy cup to a child was to carry out a widely accepted American interest and that it was absurd to think it could present harm to anyone at the airport. But, as it turned out, I did not press it. I saw that this line that was drawn between the security guard and me was a very thick line. It was a sturdy and durable line, the kind that security guards find hard to overlook or get around. They may consider that they have some discretion about how to react to somethings at the airport that fall outside of the protocols of homeland security, but, even then, a move to assist would likely distract from their trained focus and displace the centrality and urgency of their detecting mandate. Certainly, allowing me to leave a car curbside to run into the terminal with an unchecked object that I was trying to get on a plane checked too many boxes on a probable list of things to lookout for that guided the guard’s actions. Realizing I was not likely to get my way and, more so, was asking more of the guard than he could consider without overlooking major features of his job, I did not engage him further. There was no rendering of my objective that could open up lines of consideration, let alone have it supported and carried out. That I could see this situation at curbside in these institutional terms— particularly, with consideration for how the security guard and I were positioned with in an overarching project of homeland security which organized our courses of action differently—made me aware of the futility of further action on my part and kept me from getting into more trouble

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

19

than I was already in. But if the problem between the security guard and me turned into a bigger one, institutional ethnography gave me a view of the situation that should have made any potential exchange I had with the security guard set in less adversarial terms. First, it was helpful that I had considered how the security guard may not have been conscious of the line between embodied experience and documentary reality that he straddled, and rather, that he may have very much believed in his work. And second, it was helpful that I considered that he, as a Vermonter in a Burlington context, may have needed to be vigilant about keeping to the protocols of homeland security over his local inclinations to act in a neighborly way with people coming and going at the airport. In any case, it was useful that I could see him, beyond his power over me (to keep me out of the airport), and, more so, as a frontline worker with just enough power to do the job prescribed by the protocols arranging his actions.

Thinking About the Security Guard and Griffith and Smith’s (2005) Small Hero Beyond the sippy cup, looking back at the encounter and my internal dialogue during that encounter, I wonder now about the opportunity of that moment to possibly form an alliance with the guard. Could I have done anything to shift the terms of engagement so that he could have seen me as something other than trouble? Could I have used the opportunity to see him as a “small hero” in the way Allison Griffith and Dorothy Smith (2005) explained their single parent caught in school and family practice? This security guard benefited from homeland security employment and willingly executing the duties of his work, but still, was caught up in deference to homeland security and detection and likewise “implicated thereby in a complex of relations beyond [his] view” (Smith, 2006, p.  3). Explaining further, Smith (2006) goes on to say, “We, researchers, take up our inquiry from that site” (p. 3) “…so that from where our small hero stands, she can see how things are coming about for her as they do” (p. 4). How could I use what I was putting together in my mind in those moments between the guard and me, not just for my potential gain, but to acknowledge how he was implicated in a complex of relations beyond his view? In an immediate sense, homeland security may have paid his bills but day-in and day-out stood-in for what the security guard believed and what he could say and do. It dismissed his potential to make sense and take

20 

B. SOLOMON

action that met what he thought was called for to secure the airport and address the needs of people coming and going from it. Under the circumstances, it was near impossible for me to appeal to him. The insistence upon our standpoints as security guard and troublemaker at the airport precluded a potential for an alliance formed from our positions as residents of the same community or as a frontline worker and institutional ethnographer on a cold November morning, just talking. I felt a sense of failure and bewilderment that I could not more effectively use the lines I saw drawn on the GPS-like map making of this encounter to invite some kind of view of things between us that stepped to the side of those lines, if only for a moment. No doubt, in homeland security, a misstep could have devastating consequences; vigilance is insisted upon and bears down on the situation. The fear of letting something go and something going very wrong because of it must put a strain on those at the frontline of this work. That fear must keep someone acting to meet protocol over any other interest they may have to be kind or generous or a good Vermonter or to think about the arrangements of their work in terms that would make it a problem for them to stay at work and on the job. In what mattered most at the airport, the guard was trying to protect the homeland, and I was trying to cause trouble, and in those moments in the early hours in the wind and cold, that was that.

Local Ways and Practices in the Matter of Consciousness-Raising In IE projects of any kind, we examine different parts of the elephant (as I recall Tim Diamond (Personal communication. n.d., 1992) aptly noting when describing IE projects at an SSSP meeting many years back). Since then, we’ve come to forefront the ways we examine those different parts differently, and, of course, this has a lot to do with how we are situated within or alongside our standpoint as IE researchers. I think here about Jim Reid’s remarks made as a panelist at the Society for the Study of Social Problems (2021), whereby he noted, “My consciousness is different from your consciousness.” In a related writing, Reid (2017) called for an “explicit analysis of the researcher’s subjectivities in the use of ethnographic methods and a deeper understanding of privilege and power on the part of the researcher” (p. 29).

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

21

Similarly, Gerald de Montigny (1995) notably discussed the difficulties of assuming a professional standpoint as a working-class person, underscoring the supposition of one’s middle-class subjectivity related to becoming a professional. More recently, de Montigny (2021) called for a reflexive turn in IE projects that “leads to self-consciously locating our work, our practice, so that we can question, resist, and develop alternatives to an adoption of the ideological forms of textually mediated institutional knowledge” (pp. 521–522). I would like to think that my consideration of an institutional ethnographer’s sensibility follows this path. Taking account of my IE sensibility was a way to look more closely at how I was located within relations of ruling and acted from various stances. It was a way of forming a consciousness about my location. At any given point, I focused on what I was experiencing and what was called for in the immediacy of the goings-on at the airport (the local) and considered the relations of ruling and textually mediated institutional practices organizing what was happening as it unfolded there (extra-local). The aspect of experience I focused on was particular to what seemed most salient to me as things unfolded. For instance, I focused on the reverence for place the security guard and I likely shared related to our actual location, living in and around Burlington, Vermont. Being alert to the practices of detection organized by homeland security were, as Smith (1987) noted while discussing consciousness and extra local modes of ruling, “objectified and impersonal” (p. 3). I was taken with how a Burlington-based way of connecting provided a ready alternative to the contours of detection. While this contrast did not necessarily generate an awareness of relations of ruling and address textually mediated institutional practices organizing detection work at the airport (and therefore was not consciousness-raising in the sense of an IE-generated view of things), it provided a shift away from one mode of knowing to another and an alternative way to experience the documentary realities of homeland security that might lead to, at least, a more complex consciousness about work at the airport.

Detection Is Overwhelming but Not Inevitable I found the practices at the frontline that I discussed here to be intricately knotted with detection in various ways, and that these practices seemed especially troubling in that they caused trouble as they were set to mitigate trouble. Though pervasive in application and effect, detection was not inevitable. When I was at the airport and encountered the security guard,

22 

B. SOLOMON

I had already had the experience with the hospital and the research campus security guard—while the hospital disappointed me and the security guard saved me—I didn’t think about how their work was tied together. It was at the airport that it came together for me as detection work in this pervasive way. And it is an IE way of making sense that these snippets of experience line up and make sense and provide a problematic. The research campus security guard (whom I did not discuss at length here) risked his job rather than to consider me, as he should have, a risk to the research campus. It seems he recognized my despair and responded to it as any person would and no professional had. I imagine that my position as a professor at another university gave him some terms by which he could make the exception. But, given the strict rules that arranged his work, his decision to let me take a walk (that otherwise would be considered commonplace) was extraordinary. This action was the kind of action that changes lives—and the world. I remain interested in these exceptions that someone like this security guard made. I think that examples of contrasting connecting practices, such as this, can be acknowledged, mapped out, as one would ruling relations to serve as a guide. For now, I just wish to acknowledge, that as many years ago as it was, the actions of that security guard stay with me and give me hope.

Bringing More People into Consideration as Subjects of Ruling Over the years I have been often interested in the institutional ethnographer’s involvement with their work. I think particularly of Marj DeVault’s tender rendering of Ivy, an informant in Marj’s classic, Feeding the Family (1991). Ivy and Marj’s analysis of Ivy’s social location and experience of feeding her family are enduring features of Marj’s work. After many years, I am still interested in Marj’s story about Ivy’s story. I remain interested in how Marj experienced Ivy as she did. This seems like such an important aspect of our work: how we engage IE and the people we meet as we do it. This interest of mine, expressed in these pages, is one way to explore this further. In my encounters described in my earlier essay, whether the frontline worker helped me or not, I experienced the problematic as something between the worker and me in an up-close and personal way. I experienced very directly the contexts and complications in which we were situated.

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

23

This seemed important to my consideration of what was happening. I was not interested in my experience alone, or any of the people I encountered alone. I focused on how we were situated within the problematic together. I came to see the people I encountered in the terms I had hoped they would see me, as people-in-common entangled in separating practices of detection. This suggests something to me about how to think about people and ruling going forward. Complex accounts of problematics can bring more people into consideration as subjects of ruling and possibly expand opportunities for large-scale resistance to institutional capture in favor of local sensibilities and interests.

Just Trying Thinking back to Smith’s early examples for us from her own life, it is hard not to imagine how alone Dorothy must have felt; sociology departments and elementary schools had no place for the kind of account of sociology and mothering Dorothy had in mind. There was no discursive space, no institutional opening, there was not even the pretense of a gap that she could fill with something other than what was completely and fully there. That Dorothy pressed beyond what could count as mother and thinker and knowledge and did so at once changed the terms of engagement and created a viable space for so many of us to make claims and feel worth. I think about a practice of institutional ethnography beyond the accepted forms of academic research and sociological inquiry whereby Dorothy and Allison’s “one small hero…in a complex of relations beyond her view” (Smith, 2006, p. 3) can more readily be brought into the work of seeing for herself how things come about as they do for her. I think about a practice that occurs in the actualities of everyday life to change what is possible there in the moment, moment-to-moment. Certainly, it is a way of “doing the work,” (p.  7) as Paul Luken noted in his opening remarks in The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography that he coedited with Suzanne Vaughan (2021). Invariably, it is part of what Dorothy referred to as “the work.” And it may do well to associate my work more broadly with the work I study and phrases used at work every day, like “just trying to do my job.” If “naming is organizing,” as Dorothy instructs (Smith, 2021, p.  68), then I can associate with how I keep at “the work” and am just trying to make some worthy contribution to it. In contrast, I take “just trying” on the part of the security guard as an opening, that he is not as strongly associated with security and detection as his

24 

B. SOLOMON

assertions to me at the airport would most certainly suggested at the time. Hmm, seems I should get back to the airport for a little conversation about maple syrup.

References de Montigny, G. (2021). Institutional ethnography for social work. In P. C. Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  505–525). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­ 030-­54222-­1_26 de Montigny, G. A. J. (1995). Social working: An ethnography of front-line practice. University of Toronto Press. DeVault, M. (1991). Feeding the family. University of Chicago Press. DeVault, M. (1999). Liberating method. Temple University Press. DeVault, M. (2021). Elements of an expansive institutional ethnography: A conceptual history of its North American origins. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  11–34). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_2 Luken, P. C. (2021). Institutional ethnography: Sociology for today. In P. C. Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  1–8). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­ 54222-­1_1 Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (Eds.). (2021). The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­ 54222-­1 Reid, J. (2017). Reflexivity and praxis: The redress of “I” poems in revealing standpoint. In J. Reid & L. Russell (Eds.), Perspectives on and from institutional ethnography (pp. 29–47). Emerald Publishing Limited. Reid, J. (2021). Concluding thoughts. Institutional Ethnography Thematic Session. Panelist. Suzanne Vaughan and Paul C. Luken, Organizers. Annual Meeting. Society for the Study of Social Problems. Chicago, Illinois and online. Smith, D.  E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic. Northeastern University Press. Smith, D. E. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston: Northeastern U Press; Toronto: U of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (1999). Writing the social. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D.  E. (2001). Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7, 159–198. Smith, D.  E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for the people. Altamira Press. Smith, D. E. (2006). Introduction. Rowman & Littlefield.

2  “JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB.” ACCOUNTING FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL… 

25

Smith, D.  E. (2021). Exploring institutional words as people’s practices. In P.  C. Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  65–78). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_5 Solomon, B. (2014). What matters most in living and dying: Pressing through detection trying to connect. In S. Witkin (Ed.), Narrating social work through autoethnography (pp. 177–196). Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Human Service Professionals and IE: Interrogating Some Quandaries over “Standpoint” Marie L. Campbell

Underlying my inquiry are key ideas about doing institutional ethnography (IE) expressed in two quotes, one from Dorothy Smith, IE’s theorist and instigator of its methodology, and another from George Smith, a student-­ collaborator who contributed much to her early work. The accretion of IE methodology has been through students’ research and a literature that develops its possibilities. Dorothy Smith’s (1987) own words offer the beginning idea: “The problematic of the everyday world … is a simple idea … (pointing) to the fact that the everyday world as the matrix of our experience is organized by relations tying it into larger processes in the world as well as by locally organized practices” (p.  10). George Smith (1990) adds that “(IE) can be used by all individuals who stand outside political-administrative regimes intent on managing society. … As a matter of method, it begins from the standpoint of those outside ruling regimes, (…) its analysis (… being) directed at empirically determining how such

M. L. Campbell (*) University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_3

27

28 

M. L. CAMPBELL

regimes work—that is, how they are socially organized” (p.  631)”. Keeping in mind these ideas, I explore quandaries that human service professionals confront from where they are located as knowers carrying out their IE research. Taking a standpoint in research is a practice intimately connected with Dorothy Smith’s (1987, 2005) institutional ethnography (IE) and its unfolding/explicating of the ruling relations that organize people’s lives. How the concept “standpoint,” along with “ruling relations,” is fundamental to the practice of IE is problematized in this chapter. My inquiry’s general focus is on human service professionals who adopt IE as a research practice, bringing their research attention to instances of human service work and to its organization. I am specifically interested in the nurse, social worker, or other professional whose involvement in the human service setting is now as an institutional ethnographer—but who has previously been prepared to provide professional care to people in such settings. What quandaries arise for institutional ethnographers whose dual preparation brings them as engaged (professional)  actors into the ruling regimes that as G.W. Smith (1990) notes are “intent on managing society”? My inquiry problematizes that institutional context of research on human service work. Another foundational understanding in IE is that human service activities take place as organized relations among institutional participants. Besides the providers and recipients of services engaged in local sites of giving and receiving care, IE recognizes as crucial the relevant work done “off-scene” to plan, make decisions, and account for all aspects of human service work. While professional knowledge has a privileged place in service provision, IE’s analytic attention goes to the contemporary and ever-­changing organization of the institution that is part of the social relations of the work. Who decides what knowledge is relevant and what work is necessary? Where and how is that power over the provision of human services exercised? It is in this potentially conflictual terrain that human service professionals exercise their contribution of expertise, judgment, and skills. I was a human service professional, a registered nurse, the only nurse in my year’s cohort of Dorothy Smith’s graduate students in the late 1970s when we were learning about the social organization of knowledge, later called institutional ethnography. I could see the usefulness of IE to the study of the professional workplaces that, as a nurse, I was familiar with; and I made the competent practice of IE a long-term preoccupation of my career. It was in graduate student discussions that I first heard the phrase “thinking like a nurse” used critically by my PhD student peers to communicate that I was somehow breaching their idea of good IE conduct.

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

29

Returning to that expression now, I make use of “thinking like a nurse”— both the dictum and the actualities lying behind it—to help me reconsider the tensions that professionally trained human service practitioners (like me) encounter on our way to becoming competent institutional ethnographers in these settings. I will explore how difficulties may arise systematically for human service professionals who become institutional ethnographers. Currently, not just me but some of my experienced IE colleagues are puzzled when their students, trained in the human service professions (and now taking up IE research in these professional settings), treat the professional practices they encounter as fundamentally sound; they seem to assume that because these practices are expounded by professional experts, institutional ethnographers like themselves cannot or should not question them. For these IE researchers, it seems that professionally authorized knowledge trumps other sources of knowing. Observations of this kind strike me as requiring further investigation. To conduct such an inquiry, I use two exhibits, working accounts of their research made by two institutional ethnographers who are also prepared as human service professionals. The first exhibit is an essay by social worker Gerald de Montigny (1995) reflecting on his own professional practice; the second exhibit, I compiled from a seminar1 discussion of her research-in-progress made by a nursing post-graduate student to whom I have given the pseudonym, Linda Schroeder (Ms. S). Each researcher uses IE, and in each exhibit I query difficulties arising that seem inherent to the professional practitioner’s use of the research approach. The overall goal of my inquiry into these accounts of human service professionals’ conduct of IE is to generate some insights that might be of possible help to similarly situated institutional ethnographers. Gerald de Montigny became interested in questions that arose in his employment as a professional social worker,2 questions that featured in his (1989) doctoral research. De Montigny’s (1995) essay recounts a (routine) home investigation and evaluation of parenting he conducted where the protection of a possibly neglected child became his institutional responsibility. His findings were entered textually into a Child Protection agency’s formal decision-making processes. His essay explicates his and his colleagues’ expertise in “working up” the circumstances of children’s lives into a form of words (and documents) that are institutionally actionable; he finds otherwise caring social workers, himself included, creating in texts the necessary “facts” whereby a child can be legally apprehended; he recognizes the troubling contradiction for social workers whose recording of

30 

M. L. CAMPBELL

their professional knowledge of a client becomes the means for protecting children by removing them, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently, from their homes and families (when these are officially assessed as deficient). For my present inquiry, de Montigny’s essay supplies a late twentieth-­century glimpse into the professionalism quandary that human service professionals may confront as they take up IE inquiries into their own work. Writing as an IE-informed critic, de Montigny exposes what he calls the ideological stance of a social worker trained to “help” but also professionally educated in how properly “to see and how to think about the world” (1995, p. 219). De Montigny finds social workers making use of the power that they exercise over the subjects of institutional services— to also distance themselves from their painful involvement in the child protection work. The issue of his and his colleagues’ standpoint is left unclear, in my view undermining his argument about social worker’s power. Missing from de Montigny’s account is IE’s explication of the social organization of ruling; lacking analysis are the ruling relations that keep social workers in thrall to the institution whose power they enact. The nursing graduate student, Linda Schroeder, tells participants in an online university seminar that her (thesis) research focuses on Karen, an indigenous single mother of a toddler whose physical and mental development is of sufficient concern to public health professionals that the mother and child have been enrolled in a program of oversight offered by the government health department. Housed at some distance from where Karen lives in the countryside, getting to program appointments is a persistent problem for Karen. Ms. S reports on what happened during her attendance with Karen at one of these meetings with program staff; I made notes that became a base for my inquiry’s vignette. A decision made by Ms. S suggests to me that she is “thinking and acting like a nurse,” not as an institutional ethnographer who understands social organization. Ms. S’s conception of her relation to Karen, as she enacts it, positions her with the professionals who staff the program, not as a researcher interested in understanding Karen’s experiences. With this introduction of the IE/professional actors, I turn to review the social ontology of IE that underpins any institutional ethnography; IE presupposes that social life is put together by people acting in socially organized circumstances, not, that is, circumstances of their own making. This presumption will be relevant for human service professionals and their research as for other institutional ethnographers. In IE analysis of human service settings, the analyst learns to recognize and analyze the

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

31

materiality of the social relations that professionals invoke and play out in their socially organized human service work. Does “thinking like a professional practitioner” or having been prepared first as a human service professional and then as an institutional ethnographer affect what knowledge a practitioner treats as trustworthy and authoritative about their research? How, in practice, do they position themselves as institutional ethnographers to understand the troubling life situations of the people they encounter in the institutional context of their work?

Professionals and IE Inquiry in the Human Service Organization The responsibilities of professional practitioners to their clients (and to their employers) have long included the professional adequacy of their disciplinary knowledge, competencies, and ethical behavior, all handled as matters of regulated professionalism. Institutional ethnography recognizes as changes in ruling practices that professionalism’s long-standing influence in the human services is currently being reformulated through technologically supported administrative action (for more on this, see DeVault, 2008). Transitions across time and in organizations—noted and debated by sociologists, organization analysts, and others (e.g., Lowe & Wilson, 2017; Noordegraaf, 2011)—are indeed changing the nature of professional responsibility in the human services. Arguments are being made about the proper and most effective manner for professionals to function in these settings. One influential view is expressed by European public management expert Mirko Noordegraaf (2007) who, with Abma, (2003) argues the necessity of improving the management of public services through improving their organizational governance. Professionals employed in such institutions find their responsibilities being redefined within the purview of modernized practices of governance. For instance, the availability of new text-based and digitized communication and decision technologies supports a more business-like and calculative approach to human service administration, an approach that demands special knowledge, management training, and a matching ideological perspective. New executives of human service organizations will need competencies and attributes that not many candidates for (high-level) positions will have gained  if their training and experience has been as human service professionals.

32 

M. L. CAMPBELL

While historically, professional power has been an instrumental feature of the human services, professional dominance was until recently largely taken for granted.3 Now, as power is being exercised in newer forms of policy management and institutional administration, IE inquiry brings a capacity to decipher through its scientific analysis of the social organization of the (professional) work what is actually changing in human service settings. Additionally, IE’s focus on taking the standpoint of the subjects of research is intended to keep them (in this case, the recipients of human services) at the center of debates about service administration and provision. Early twenty-first-century institutional ethnographies of human service organizations (Campbell, 2001, 2008; Rankin, 2001; Rankin & Campbell, 2006, among many others) examine this exercise of power that, in IE terms, is understood as ruling. Practicing IE, researchers learn how ruling is being integrated right into the newly technologized institutional organization of professional work. One critical analytic capacity of IE is utilization of IE’s conceptual and methodological tools to discover how ruling organizes the work of professionals (and others) to adopt new ruling knowledge and practices, without much resistance, into their human service work. At the same time, being “ideologically” framed as professional, new administrative methods variously reorganize and redirect professionals’ efforts, in the course of which the conventional influence of professionals is displaced. A critique based on IE analysis can help clarify what purposes the newly text-based (administrative) arrangements are aimed at and in doing so, how institutional efforts are shifted toward these desired achievements. IE’s concepts of “standpoint” and “ruling relations” become relevant to the analytically and materially grounded critique of what happens as ruling ideas and practices become predominant in human service organizations. Some changes appear in professional work, while other social organizational effects, less easily observable, impact recipients of care; what can be seen depends on where one “stands.” Institutional ethnographers collect ethnographic data that focuses analytically on the knowledge and strategies that human service organizations rely on in building institutionally authorized and resourced human service work. In my inquiry into the de Montigny and Schroeder research exhibits I aim to sort out what I call “quandaries” within the practices of human service professionalism. My inquiry uses IE’s scientific analysis to reconsider the trustworthiness of the knowledge being relied on. How service provision is socially organized, including what knowledge prevails in the course of its organization,

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

33

affects all its participants and, thus, they all have some kind of stake in it—those with high-level policy and administrative responsibilities, those who have more direct contact with the people who are its clients, and those located in-between elsewhere who play some, often invisible, part in establishing what a human service entails. This range of actors and ruling relations that an IE analysis examines helps clarify what is being organized to happen, accountably. An IE investigation often begins with some troubled experiences of a potential research subject leading the researcher to gather relevant ethnographic details and then to look at how the identified experience has been organized to be so. My inquiry begins with the stance of the two researchers, their focus, decisions, data, and any findings they may be making. I want to uncover their interest in the ruling connections to unknowns in a professional work setting such as “who reaps the benefits (of any newly directed action)?” and “who absorbs the costs of institutionally structured work”? Discovering these and other mandated purposes will begin to cast light on institutional requirements that professionals are unlikely to understand except as requirements they are to follow in the course of their work. In both research accounts under consideration here the burning issues of ruling and ruling relations remain buried, while the work itself is made less and less accessible to an individual professional’s judgment, thus, becoming less conventionally “professional.” As DeVault (2021) reminds us, in IE, power is equated with “ruling” and to understand the exercise of power in an institutional setting, an IE inquiry uncovers the materiality of the social organization of ruling. Let’s look at what De Montigny’s (1995) account of conducting a home assessment for child protection purposes shows about the relevant knowledge and the ruling practices within this particular instance of social work professionalism. His account suggests that his own prescribed actions were personally and professionally unsettling to him, although competently done. Also troubling to him was his recognition that his professional “help” was observably unhelpful to the subjects themselves, and possibly even oppressive. Yet for social work professionals, the knowledge they treat (in this rendering) as professionally authorizing of their activities offers them certainty about any such ambivalence. De Montigny’s analysis of his work seems to be a case of his “thinking like a socially and institutionally organized human service professional.” An apparent blurring of the professional-institutional relations seems integral to the textual approach of administering child protection services that de Montigny

34 

M. L. CAMPBELL

describes. According to de Montigny’s account, social workers’ “knowing” from their training in the practical competencies of their discipline acknowledges the authority of the institution that employs them; it seems apparent that their confidence in institutional authority is as secure as it would be if it were professional authority. Overlooking the IE concept of ruling, de Montigny treats as “professional” his colleagues’ and his own socially organized work but falls back on calling their professionalism “ideological.” Perhaps it is ideological. However, for such institutional ethnographers who become aware of serious contradictions in their work, that characterization is not helpful. He accepts that his colleagues, disquieted by the effects of exercising their institutional power, go on to use what he now calls their professional power to distance themselves from their unfortunate clients. Instead of explaining their discomfort this way, de Montigny might have continued to employ IE’s methodology to inquire into the institutional authorization of the work undertaken in response to the child protection directives. An IE analysis conducted in this situation would track the organized relations of ruling instead of accepting them as “professional” and properly read as authoritative.4 My suggestion does not solve the problem of a professional being an employee of a ruling institution, but it could have made a more accurate account of what was actually happening.5 For the IE practitioner the material evidence of the social organization of the authorized activities is available to be explicated, beginning in the actualities of the work (as de Montigny’s account begins to do). But IE practice goes further in explicating the ruling power that is being enacted in the institution and through its technologies. An IE analysis can reveal the standpoint of any participant in the situation being researched, including that of the researcher. The standpoint of any institutional actor corresponds to their position in the ruling relations, the materiality of which is available to be discovered. As my inquiry proceeds, it will address the puzzle of where some professionally prepared participants actually “stand” in the organized settings of human services. Marjorie DeVault (2021) draws attention to IE’s analytic connections between “authorized knowledge” and the exercise of an institution’s ruling power. She links IE, knowledge, and the exercise of power by noting, “Before institutional ethnography had a name, the social organization of knowledge rubric captured Smith’s explorations of the ideological practices of authorized knowledge including [its] implications in ruling, the term [Smith] generally used in order to populate and enliven abstractions like power” (2021, p. 13. Italics in the original). This perceived relation between

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

35

knowledge and power makes a particular demand of IE practitioners to locate themselves “politically” regarding their research topics and the people who are implicated in them. The “political” significance of Smith’s theoretical writing makes apparent why the social relations of ruling are crucial in IE’s social ontology and thus to its methodology. A research setting’s social organization is always to be discovered. One’s “standpoint,” in this way of thinking, is organized around the politics of the setting. In contemporary human service organizations, as illuminated here in the research exhibit I read analytically, the power of the institution comes into play as professionals’ work. Professionals are confronted by institutionally formulated (and now reformulated) activities designed to achieve today’s administrative purposes. An institution’s ruling directives to professional staff may be taken for granted, absorbed, and enacted as powerful controls on professionals’ activities in contemporary settings. Note, however, that the effects of institutional power go both ways: to the degree that de Montigny’s social workers are institutionally empowered to do the work of ruling they lose their power to act on the basis of their own judgment. This begins to open up what is puzzling about professionalism in the contemporary organization of human services. Professional employees, engaged in the institution’s textual transformation of their knowledgeable and embodied work, are engaged in ruling; it would be a mistake to overlook that de Montigny’s social workers are always instruments of the institution and are being “negated” as individual and professional actors. De Montigny recognized this negation as it applied to himself, but it seems generally true of his colleagues as professionals. Powerless to act except in doing the institution’s bidding, it might be said that the institution (re) shapes the consciousness of a professional engaged in its organized ruling activities. In this case, social workers’ embodied work brings them negative consequences as it also does for the recipients of these human services, even as it renders the expected institutional benefits.6 Here it becomes apparent that the social workers’ positioning in this institution’s work means that the standpoint they represent is that of the institution. Critical as de Montigny’s essay is, he does not explicate the institution’s ruling features and their power over professional practitioners. This suggests to me that it is their work of ruling that creates tensions for these social workers. IE’s mapping of the social organization of their work relations may be the only way to uncover the standpoint of the “professional” knower and to illuminate how (mis)comprehension of one’s standpoint  can easily (mis)direct an inquiry. Turning now to my second research exhibit, a

36 

M. L. CAMPBELL

registered nurse makes use of IE in research she conducts in healthcare, offering a slightly different angle on the puzzles relating to professionals and ruling practices.

How Nurses Think About Their Practice: Evidence of a Dual Consciousness? The widespread administrative changes in professional organizations occurring in hospitals and other healthcare facilities,7 if explained at all to the professional staff who are affected, are likely represented as an improvement and indisputably beneficial; or perhaps the changes in question are to be considered as the answer to some self-evident institutional problem such as its “inefficiency.” Ms. Schroeder was confronted by a mundane but troubling issue of the routine scheduling of a service recipient’s treatment, questioned by nobody. This may be an instance where, for the professionals in the setting, administrative routines “just happen” (see below, Jackson, 1995). Nurses now conduct their work, recording and reporting it in digital communication systems, through which knowledge the institution routinely (and perhaps automatically) organizes the provision of healthcare services. In this manner, nurses are engaged in constituting the service provided. As Campbell and Rankin (in progress) are discovering, when the management of professional nursing effort in a Canadian hospital becomes a matter of official administrative sanction, the nursing activities so organized no longer can be said to express nurses’ professional knowledge and judgment. “Thinking like a nurse,” in such instances, will express what nurses are indeed doing. In such administratively “updated” workplaces, nurses’ efforts (and the professional knowledge that the work incorporates and, it is assumed, a professional nurse will contribute) are being programmed toward new institutionally authorized goals; for instance, Campbell and Rankin8 find nurses’ use of their time being reorganized to be spent on activities directed toward the administratively programmed, more expeditious, movement of patients into and out of hospital beds. Nurses apparently do not recognize any discrepancy in this institutional call on their time. Similarly, as I introduce presently, the Schroeder exhibit draws my attention to what a nurse “sees” and what remains unseen, accepted as how things are in a professional-institutional setting. Does a professional’s dual consciousness play some part in what IE recognizes as a muddled issue of standpoint?

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

37

Originally all employed nursing professionals were the product of a carefully designed undergraduate education where they learned their profession’s required knowledge and skills for practicing nursing. Their basic nursing curriculum also would have conveyed precepts aimed at molding a student’s professional identity and a conventional professional stance toward their work. Their education and the legal regulation of their profession frames the institutional commitments all of which provides, for employed professional nurses, the knowledge scaffolding for the (shifting)9 demands of healthcare work. If, later in their careers, nurses become IE-prepared researchers, their new research focus makes their workplace and its organization a researchable topic. This kind of academic move necessitates yet another and different kind of shift in nurses’ thinking. In particular, studying and practicing IE offers its own conceptual framework and the tools with which to shine new light on the contradictions that nurses and other professionals increasingly face in administratively reconstituted institutional workplaces. It provides an alternative way of “seeing” and of thinking—what some IE practitioners call IE’s worldview.10 As modern administration advances new forms of governance that transform healthcare institutions, human service professionals in these workplaces are expected to “keep up” with new ideas and new technologies. Professional nurses become institutionally accountable both to their employers and to their clients/patients through formal and informal institutional practices that are increasingly established outside the profession and without much critical or meaningful oversight by the implicated professionals. Nancy Jackson’s (1995) research analyzed how this happened in one professional human service sector—Canada’s post-secondary education. I sketch it here owing to the insight it brings to my present inquiry into professionalism and organized power. Jackson found professional college educators bewildered by the reorganization of the college curricula that they taught in the Ontario public community college system. Jackson’s IE analysis adds some conceptual coherence to the widespread but mainly taken for granted experiences of diverse professional workers for whom “these things just happen,” as was Jackson’s ironic observation of the college administrative transformations. The social organization of new institution-­client relations (see, for instance, Griffith & Smith, 2014; and earlier, Mykhalovskiy, 2001; Rankin & Campbell, 2006) demonstrates how professionals become institutional actors engaged in building “the administrative state” that DeVault (2008, 2021) discusses.

38 

M. L. CAMPBELL

Nurses, too, encounter in the workplace aspects of the institutional reorganization of the professional work that they now perform. As they become institutional actors, nurses and other institutionally employed professionals take up new obligations that are still represented as professional responsibilities, that is, not to be differentiated from their traditional professional and inter-professional commitments. Introduced in this manner, nurses accept such new demands and expectations as falling within the parameters of their professional work. Institutional ethnography’s general claim is to make more explicitly understandable what otherwise seems to “just happen.” IE inquiries find nurses entering unquestioningly into healthcare’s contemporary ruling relations as its active proponents. Smith has argued that in work processes organized in this ideological way, an actor’s consciousness11 is changed, a matter that reappears next when I discuss my second exhibit, that of Ms. Schroeder, a professional nurse, and her (IE) standpoint. Nurses, becoming institutional actors, are expected to alter or give up traditional nursing activities to prioritize those that are administratively, technologically, and managerially directed. Professional nurses learn to adhere to organizational/administrative arrangements and technologies that organize their efforts for administrative interpretation, that is, to “speak” or be read accountably as the (desired) institutional accomplishments. Constituted as the updated alternative for healthcare participants to think about their newly structured contributions, a nurse’s conventional professional education becomes not just outmoded and not just overlapping ambiguously with newly organized administrative plans. Workplace changes will take on new meaning when considered with the insight that IE analysis offers. Yet the changing social organization of professional human service work sustains the professional assumption that nurses will respond positively to the workplace’s new administratively generated expectations. Without IE’s (adequately theorized) insights nurses’ professionalism seems to be a catch-all frame for any institutional “improvement” whether or not it improves nursing and patient care. Without IE analysis, and as the settings of nursing’s professional work are transformed authoritatively, nurse employees may see no alternative to accepting as theirs the institution’s new expectations. As Campbell and Rankin (in progress) are discovering, and as similarly noted earlier regarding de Montigny’s account of social work professionalism, when professionals’ effort is directed toward administrative goals, are no longer fully in charge of their so-called professional actions. Their professionalism is

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

39

authoritatively captured.12 All this makes nurses more reliable participants in institutionally reorganized undertakings of “the administrative state” and its ruling relations. Differently organized perspectives on these plans may become uncomfortably disjunctive for nurses. Alternatively, these new expectations may be absorbed into their work without much apparent notice taken. For the nurse involved, this may signal the structuring of a dual consciousness, accomplished through the social organization of the new work they undertake.

The Contemporary Social Organization of Professional Nursing My IE inquiry into the exhibit of Registered Nurse Schroeder’s research efforts is set in the midst of transformations of Canadian healthcare that are difficult for nurses to discern.13 Expressed in the language of IE, the commitments of individual professional nurses are being socially organized in ways that are largely unremarkable to nurses themselves. Their status as “registered” nurses will likely be considered to be unchanging; that is, to practice nursing, they carry individual membership in a provincially regulated professional nursing association. Their registration binds them legally to provincially approved rules and regulations which change, but more or less imperceptibly over time. In Canada, control over the otherwise self-governing professions operates on this legally regulated terrain. “Thinking [and acting] like a professional nurse” in Canada—or in any liberal democracy—will bear a definite relationship, therefore, to its (national) forms of professional regulation. Thereafter, under Canada’s regime of legitimacy, the activities of professional nursing are constituted in institutionally organized work relations that—whatever else is claimed for the work, as being described here—are now being organized for the achievement of definite institutional purposes.14

Registered Nurse Schroeder, Her IE Research, and Her “Standpoint” Ms. Schroeder, a professionally educated and credentialed nurse, was a graduate student, enacting the role of a novice IE researcher when we met in an online university seminar about the IE research she is conducting for a Master’s of Nursing thesis. We seminar participants learn from Ms. S that

40 

M. L. CAMPBELL

her research focuses on an indigenous single mother of a toddler with possible physical and mental development problems. As a vignette around which to inquire into Ms. S’s own professional knowing and acting, I chose the issue of Karen missing appointments at a healthcare program of professional oversight of Karen’s mothering and the child’s development. Ms. S reported on her attendance, with Karen during one of those meetings with program staff. My vignette shows her making a decision that impinges on her research; in her account I recognize her “thinking and acting like a nurse,” not as an institutional ethnographer. IE researchers typically identify a potential research situation through getting to know it from the standpoint of the subject of the research. Ms. S is not yet fully aware of the circumstances of Karen’s life, nor the healthcare program she is involved in, its setting, and so on. But (I hear that) Ms S approaches the interaction between herself and Karen conventionally and stereotypically as a professional nurse. Ms. S tells the seminar participants that she was worried about the child’s healthy development and that she agreed with the program staff’s concern about Karen missing appointments; Ms S had reinforced to Karen that she should keep her scheduled program appointments faithfully. It seems that her conception of her relation with Karen, as she tells of enacting it, positions herself as a nurse, making a conventional nursing response. In this healthcare setting this kind of response misses a possible IE focus of inquiry into the circumstances of Karen’s life. Paying attention to her difficulties might have opened up for Ms S’s analysis what was actually happening that organized Karen’s experiences. As to the standpoint that Ms. S takes in regard to Karen’s experiences, she suggests to seminar participants that she appreciates “both sides” of the mother’s failure to regularly keep program appointments. Ms. S speaks empathetically about Karen whom she recognizes as someone wanting to take good care of her child. Yet something reduces Ms. S’s appreciation of the relevance of the practical difficulties that disrupt Karen’s keeping to the schedule of program appointments; (what Ms. S knows is that Karen is a single mother living in the country with no vehicle and no easily accessible public transportation; and that her family supports are unreliable). Ms S’s response to the issue of missed appointments shows her participating competently in the institution’s ruling relations. It seems that this nursing competence overrules her attention (as researcher) to Karen’s currently stressful life experiences. It puts Ms. S “on the side of” the institution, not positioned to treat analytically the institution’s routines that for

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

41

Karen are trouble. The program’s scheduling routines are not “a topic” for discussion and come under no scrutiny at all. From the seminar discussion, it was my impression that Ms. S’s commitments as a nurse were undermining her capacity as an institutional ethnographer to take Karen’s standpoint. Undermined, as well, was the analytic stance that taking Karen’s standpoint could have prompted. IE insists that the researcher maintain a steadfast interest in the social organization of the subject’s experiences that in this instance were made visible in Karen’s failures to meet the institutional rules and requirements. (Karen had found the clinic staff’s disapproval so off-putting that this may have been an additional deterrent to her efforts to get to the program appointments.) This attention to everyday oppression in a woman’s life is part of the IE thinking that its practitioners bring to local settings and to their  explication  of  ruling relations. Extending that interest would have been an alternative or at least an appropriate extension of Ms S’s “empathetic” response. However, a professional stance of empathy for a research subject’s “personal” troubles is not the IE-appropriate response that it might be when made by a professional nurse. This fragment of Ms S’s research story suggests how easily the standpoint of an institutional ethnographer who is also a professional practitioner can be tilted, unknowingly, toward professional coherence with institutional ruling practices and away from an IE-based interest in a research subject’s everyday experiences. Apparent, at least in my interpretation of what happened, is how an ordinary incidence of routine institutional practice overrides an institutional ethnographer’s attention to a research subject’s experiences and needs. Adhering to IE methodology could have led to questioning the routine exercise of an institution’s power. An expectation of IE research is that its ethnographic findings will uncover and open interrogation of the social organization of the more or less invisible ruling practices that disrupt a research subject’s life. IE’s Standpoint, Ruling, and the Production of Trustworthy Knowledge The institutional ethnographer who knows abstractly or “in theory” how a setting can be organized to accomplish an institution’s ruling purposes will try to locate materially how this exercise of power works in the setting; an institutional ethnographer needs also to be aware of how easily an institution’s exercise of its power can be overlooked. Here, for instance, the

42 

M. L. CAMPBELL

social organization of program schedules and of the staff’s insistence on Karen “keeping appointments” will be accepted by professionals as therapeutically necessary, thus, not to be questioned. This seems to be a cardinal case of “thinking like a professional nurse.” But less easily identifiable is the ruling relation attributable by IE to the twenty-first-century advent of the so-called administrative state in healthcare. Accepted implicitly, owing to their institutional sponsorship are similar sets of ruling practices that constitute the institutional standpoint, taken for granted by those who themselves conduct, identify with, and/or are professionally familiar with ruling practice. Using IE’s conceptual framework disrupts that implicit position on ruling. Dorothy Smith’s feminist writings on socially organized (and gendered) dominance operating routinely and widely make visible how institutional power is exercised without being recognized as ruling. Yet for healthcare professionals, ruling in itself is not a topic of their professional discourse (not even as nurses are recruited to join administrative projects that extend an institution’s control over nurses’ work). Routinely unnoticed or worse, treated authoritatively as the institutional knowledge-based, and the professionally privileged exercise of institutional power, it is no surprise that adverse effects of ruling are routinely overlooked by caregiving professionals in a therapeutic setting. Hence, standpoint becomes a vital issue for a professionally trained institutional ethnographer to comprehend. In this regard, let’s take another look at professional empathy. In an IE research setting, as I have already noted, the researcher is expected to take the standpoint of the research subject in the inquiry to be conducted. A professional nurse may appropriately “have empathy with” a client who becomes the subject of her IE research, but as a response in Ms S’s IE research setting, empathy misses the mark. As an institutional ethnographer, Ms S is expected to draw on the theoretical/analytic foundations of her IE analysis to guide her thinking and acting. IE’s conceptual/analytic framing of IE research is different from conventionally professional approaches to thinking and acting. The respective frameworks are not necessarily equivalent, at least, not in the sense of being interchangeable. The vignette of Ms. S and Karen shows the institutional plan for keeping the child healthy that requires Karen to prioritize regular attendance at program appointments. By siding with the program staff on this matter, however, Ms S misses the possibility of discovering how Karen’s failed efforts to follow the rules of regular attendance at appointments might be intensifying whatever troubles Karen is experiencing in the world. How might

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

43

“taking the standpoint” of this indigenous mother have improved the research? The IE notion of standpoint originates in Smith’s feminist analysis of the organization of women’s (routine) oppressions. Smith’s (1987) writings of her feminist consciousness of women’s experiences of living in a man’s world show their relevance in the alternative research approach she was developing. A propos the research that Ms S was conducting, Karen’s disconcerting experience within a public program of healthcare could be read as an instance of a woman’s subordination to (routine) ruling in healthcare. Smith had argued that women’s knowledge is routinely suppressed and women’s lives routinely subordinated to men’s power and the (ruling) institutions that men have formed. An institutional ethnographer is expected to recognize that institutionally organized action is ruling action and thus has the potential for socially and institutionally organized oppressiveness (and not just of women, of course15); uncovering the circumstances of such experience offers an entry point for IE inquiry into the otherwise mysterious workings of the social organization of ruling. The implication of Smith’s feminist scholarship remains broadly relevant across time and institutional settings and for differently gendered subjects, too. Here, in the present inquiry, Karen is subjected to ongoing institutional dominance—for her own good, as is assumed in the professional stance. In Ms S’s empathetic response to Karen’s plight, she accepts as given the institutionally organized relation in which she plays her professional part competently. Differing perspectives underpin the professional and the IE approaches—supporting my proposition that a “dual consciousness” is part of the problem to be sorted out.

Knowledge, Power, and Standpoint in IE Ms S relies on her professional knowledge to emphasize Karen’s (i.e., a mother’s) responsibility to adhere carefully to the institutional process for regularizing child development. Working within the context of a professional human service organization and its rules, she is not keeping IE’s promise of being a feminist-based alternative to mainstream approaches for conducting social research. My contemplation of the vignette reveals that Karen’s experience is not kept at the center of Ms. S’s research attention. If, as Smith insists of IE, Ms S had centered her research on Karen’s experience, she might have discovered what it means to Karen that her life is being organized outside of her own control; and how situations arise

44 

M. L. CAMPBELL

limiting her ability to respond as institutionally expected to the routines set by healthcare professionals, and for which she, Karen, gets blamed. Karen is subordinated by the professional dictates of the institution with its authorization by science-based (medical) knowledge and its routine administrative protocols constituted to support the healthcare institution and its purposes. In the face of this medical/administrative authority, the IE notion of standpoint would re-focus attention on Ms S’s knowledgeable participation in the institution’s ruling practices. Ms S, as professional nurse, in adding her support for the institution’s routines fails to notice how the treatment plan asks more of Karen than she can manage. Had Ms S noticed that Karen experienced this situation as oppressive and brought this routine scheduling decision to the staff’s attention as a problem, another option could have been looked for. My hypothetical playing out of the vignette illustrates the relevance of the concept of standpoint in an IE inquiry into how ruling actually works in everyday life. Revealed in this manner, any thoughtful person could “see” (as Smith promises of IE research) that aspects of this research subject’s life were dictated through a professional practice of public healthcare. However, Ms S, as institutional ethnographer, does not connect analytically the daily difficulties Karen experiences and the institutional decision-making. In supporting the program’s requirement for Karen to attend program appointments as expected, Ms. S acts in alignment with the institutional standpoint. From the Ms S-Karen vignette, it becomes apparent that what one sees or doesn’t see in a research setting reflects the standpoint of participants: power in everyday interactions expresses the power relations (the politics) built into professional-client interactions. This is “visible,” however, only when the observer’s worldview holds this concept of ruling. Arising from Smith’s writings, the concept of ruling leads the analyst to an IE explication of the materiality of the ruling relations and to discovery of their effects as experienced in people’s lives. This practical analytic move carries pedagogical weight: the researcher’s uncovering of the social organization of ruling shows what actually happens to people as opposed to truth claims that depend on findings that line up with, in this case, medical or administrative authority. Had Ms S problematized the setting’s relations of ruling (as the hypothetical case begins to do) she might have discovered how something as apparently insignificant as an appointment schedule can create serious trouble in people’s lives. My inquiry into the two exhibits of professionals conducting IE research in their own professional work milieu has emphasized the importance of

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

45

the concepts of the social relations of ruling and of standpoint in IE research. De Montigny’s account of “being a professional” does not pursue an interrogation of the ruling relations. Missed in his account is the full significance of the child protection institution as organizer of the relevant and troubled social relations of the setting. Thus, he mistakes the institutional power he and his colleagues wield with “being a professional.” Doing the work that is required of him, he becomes the institutions’ eyes, ears, hands, mind, and—in his acute description—its sense of smell, too. It may trouble him to accomplish the institution’s purposes as it does his colleagues who do the same work and whose actions are likewise not theirs to determine. From his description of his work, it is difficult to credit his actions as adding up to “being a professional” but that is what he claims. Because he fails to interrogate the institution’s ruling relations, he cannot acknowledge how he and other social workers are ruled—deviating, in my view, from “thinking and acting like professionals.” Unlike DeMontigny, Schroeder was not an employee in the institutional setting (and not directly subject to the institutional power) but was involved as an IE researcher observing the interaction of Karen with the institution’s program staff. Hers is the reaction of a trained professional but novice institutional ethnographer seen here losing touch with her IE methodology and its feminist roots. Neither of these researcher/professionals, it seems, was sufficiently orientated to the social organization of institutional ruling to recognize how their own standpoints were organized, concerted within the social relations of their research settings.

Interrogating a “Ruling Regime” In reviewing these two quite dissimilar research accounts I found that in neither case did they recognize (or in de Montigny’s case, recognize fully) the implications of human service professionals becoming, themselves, institutional actors in the socially organized relations of ruling. Contemplating one’s standpoint requires the researcher to attend to her or his own relation to what is happening and what will be problematized. Researchers bring very different kinds of problematizations to IE for explication. George Smith’s (1990) research writing offers methodological insights that help clarify how a standpoint is “located” vis-à -vis a research problematic. His notion of a ruling regime extends Dorothy Smith’s (1987, pp. 170–171) original discussion of the “design” for inquiry into the social relations of the experiencing subject’s everyday world: the IE researcher

46 

M. L. CAMPBELL

ethnographically  enters, observes, and then  problematizes an everyday experience for subsequent inquiry. George Smith was not a trained and credentialed professional; he was an activist working in the AIDS epidemic in Ontario during the 1980s. His responsibility as an activist was to a constituency of people in the Ontario gay community of which he was a member; as such, he took the standpoint of its members to problematize the government’s lack of provision of new AIDS treatments that might save their lives. His (1990) IE research report problematized the government’s “politicaladministrative regime” (p. 632) that he would interrogate to discover how the regime worked—to manage the AIDS crisis. George’s research into the Ontario health department’s official obligations, decisions, and actions as a ruling regime was to find out what accounted for AIDS treatment not being made available. His informants included, among others, members of the regime or of the media who reported on the regime’s public responsibilities. Either as bureaucratic insiders who did the work of “managing the crisis” or in the case of reporters whose job it was to ask questions and file stories, these informants could supply him with information he needed about the regime’s actual work. But, as in any IE, he had to learn to identify and resist institutional ideologies that were intrinsic to the accounts they gave. For instance, he discovered that the regime’s idea of “AIDS as a fatal disease” (p.  634) was directing and rationalizing the regime’s decisions to use its resources mainly on palliative care, not on new treatments. Not a scientific basis for action!

Conclusion George Smith’s activist investigations of the ruling regime for managing AIDS in the gay community is a very different IE topic than de Montigny’s querying of a professional’s account made for institutional decision-­ making about child neglect. Yet, the IE  research approach to any topic stays the same: an experiential standpoint in the everyday world directs the institutional ethnographer’s attention to the problematic for inquiry. Dorothy Smith (1987, pp. 170–171) makes this point in different words: “the point d’appui” for IE inquiry begins in a particular standpoint. Methodologically, IE requires its practitioners to learn from the prospective subjects of their research about their experiences in order to know how to “take their standpoint” in subsequent inquiry. Through the problematizing of an actual experience, IE practitioners analyze and make understandable the world in which people live and work. IE offers the

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

47

possibility to recognize the ordinarily taken-for-grantedness of the world that, as Dorothy Smith argues, is being constituted ideologically for its ruling. An IE inquiry is framed so as to not objectify the people who become its intended research subjects, but instead recognize and become interested in (researching) the organization of subjects’ experience. IE is an alternative to research approaches that establish “objectivity” through meeting the established/scientific method’s standard of research trustworthiness for producing “the truth.” Instead, the IE subject’s standpoint becomes integral to the framing of the inquiry wherein the researcher’s task is to discover and make materially visible the social relations inherent in and constituting the actuality being experienced by real people. For human service professionals who practice as IE researchers, as for any IE practitioner—the social relations of the setting are explicated to answer the question(s) “Is this explicative account correct? Is the subject’s experience really organized in this manner?” The answer points to the “physically” available evidence of social organization (such as George Smith’s informants helped him learn) from their being insiders themselves or from their own work of getting “inside” information. The skeptical reader of the IE account has the option to say “no, this is not accurate,” and, of course, to supply a materially persuasive correction. IE practitioners who take the standpoint of their research subjects will be able to discover how power is exercised in the research setting. To be queried in the case of human service organizations is how professional human service work is organized to be turned into institutional ruling activities. The research must do what is claimed—clarify what actually happens. We must not overlook that institutional employees, including professionals, are among the resources that an institution utilizes to achieve its ruling purposes. The IE research product must, therefore, offer details of the means and methods whereby professionals are hooked into the ruling activities as its enactors. This happens, when professionals are organized to take up professional and institutional ideologies in and as their work. My inquiry suggests how things can go wrong in the experiences of a person who becomes the subject of institutional efficiency practices and other ruling undertakings. To sort out how someone’s experience is being ruled, those intimately involved are kept at the center of the IE inquiry. George Smith did not veer off into speculative accounts and critiques. In hospitals, abstract critique of institutional efficiency efforts is not the aim of an institutional ethnography. Instead, IE offers the capacity to discover the definite institutional relations that produce “what happens” to actual people.

48 

M. L. CAMPBELL

The standpoint of those whose troubled experience is problematized can be maintained and tracked as the social relations organized to deliver—for example—newly structured care to the subject in question. The increasing pervasiveness of ruling ideas (ideologies) and technologies that  are believed to “save time” may now be seen in the social relations that are reorganizing the setting and its caregiving work. If the IE account shows things being organized to revise professional-client interaction, then “Did the IE account get it right?” remains the crucial question to be asked of this unfolding of the relations of ruling. Is something being altered in the determination of “who benefits”? While ordinarily “explained” optimistically in terms of new ideas and technologies that will reduce wasted time and other institutional costs, an IE analysis can turn up something previously unknown and not yet appreciated. People’s (troubled) experiences can be made known as by-products of these newly conceived and institutionally preferred ruling outcomes.

Notes 1. I encountered this graduate student online when I was a guest in an informal on-line discussion of questions that students raised about their IE research. Thereafter, the student’s research proceeded and with advice from her supervisor the thesis was written and successfully defended; it mentions the issues that I discuss here but the interpretation I make of them is mine alone and only for my use as an ‘exhibit’ in this paper. For these reasons and to protect the researcher’s anonymity, I do not cite the thesis. 2. In a Canadian provincial government’s Child Protection agency. 3. Except, of course, in nurses’ long-standing resentment of physician’s power over healthcare. 4. Some institutional ethnographers might call this “institutional capture.” Instead, I am directing analytic attention to the social organization of institutional power and the discovery of its materiality—as instructions, rules, structured reporting, and so on, as in de Montigny’s account of the centrality of texts to his child protection work. This institutional social organization of the work would seem to strip it of its professional facade. 5. Canadians might remember that accepting without question that apprehending children was the answer to child protection allowed authorities to carry out, for decades, child protection policies that decimated the families of the indigenous population. This is not to blame social workers, but rather, in cases like this, to encourage accurate analyses

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

49

of the work relations that are being organized. As it turns out, when official attention was drawn to these oppressive conditions in indigenous families through ‘truth and reconciliation’, other solutions were proposed. 6. De Montigny has continued to explore this problem in other research (See de Montigny 2021). 7. The section draws on the research about nurses and their work organization by Marie Campbell and Janet Rankin, separately and together, over many years; besides those already referenced, publications include Campbell M. (2014, 2000, 1995), Campbell M. & Rankin, J. (2017); Rankin, J. (2009), Rankin & Campbell (2009), Rankin J., & Tate, B., (2014). 8. Nurse informants in this ethnographic setting are finding their work being reformulated to support new efficiency-orientated hospital activities such as attending administratively-relevant meetings to provide what they know about their patients that might advance a patient’s discharge. This kind of data-driven work uses nurses’ time, thought, and effort, displacing the time nurses have available for direct patient care. 9. During the mid-twentieth century, the nursing profession in Canada and the USA was embroiled in a shift of its own around the new intellectual grounding of nursing (see, for instance, accounts of competing theories in nursing science (McGee, 1984). This suggests to me that the basis of knowing that professional nurses bring to problems they encounter in their domain of practice was expanding in the twentieth century, but still unstable and contested. Within the new curricula of nursing as a science, the influence of the social world on nursing education and practice (also see Campbell, 1995) was only beginning to gain a foothold. 10. Dorothy Smith did not use or recommend use of the word “worldview” but I find it useful here as a foil against the taken for granted notion of a world (or an organization) in which power differences apparently do not exist or at least do not matter. 11. Dorothy Smith (1987, p.  66), writing of the structuring of a woman’s consciousness says that women are “generally means to the enterprises of others, or means to the enterprise built into an organizational process” and this requires a consciousness organized by subordination of her attentiveness to herself (and her knowledge, etc.,) and a focus on others’ wants and needs, and so on. 12. Dorothy Smith (1987, pp. 214–219) undertook a careful reconsideration and compilation of what she called the institutional capture of feminist activism and feminist scholarship in the academy. She saw that although feminist scholars and activists did influence the academy and what was taught, yet over time, the established ruling powers had reclaimed much of the intellectual and institutional space that feminists had won or made serious inroads into. It seems that she was writing a cautionary tale, one that

50 

M. L. CAMPBELL

might be applicable within what I have come to see as the contemporary ruling transformation of human service professionalism. It is not easy for feminists to challenge a ruling establishment, nor more to the point of this paper’s inquiry, for women (or professionals) to withstand the onslaught of a ruling challenge. Professionalism is itself being subordinated to a more dominant kind of ruling practice, increasingly and more explicitly tied, according to Smith (1999), into the economy and capitalism. Is this socially organized connection pertinent to grasping what is happening— for example, new ruling powers taking institutional/administrative charge in professional fields and institutions? 13. The Canadian constitution establishes that healthcare be operated under the jurisdiction of Canada’s provincial governments. Until the mid-­ twentieth century the medical profession had controlled hospital-based healthcare (and had a good deal to say about nursing education and practice). Now medical associations negotiate doctors’ working relationships with representatives of the provinces’ healthcare institutions. Nursing leadership in hospitals has largely been reorganized (from a professional function into a corporate role) within a hospital’s administrative hierarchy. 14. I’m most familiar with the province of Alberta’s strategies to update and improve the organization and delivery of hospital care and through  its institutional efforts over more than a decade to reorganize nurses’ contributions. 15. By 2005, Smith’s IE’s analytic processes would be recognized and extended, appropriately, to problematizing the ruling practices used against any person or group who is being subordinated—not just women in that position.

References Campbell, M.  L. (1995). Teaching accountability: What counts as nursing education? In M.  L. Campbell & A.  Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 221–233). University of Toronto Press. Campbell, M. L. (2000). Knowledge, gendered subjectivity and re-structuring of health care: The case of the disappearing nurse. In S.  Neysmith (Ed.), Restructuring caring labour: Discourse, state practice and everyday life (pp. 187–208). Oxford University Press. Campbell, M.  L. (2001). Textual accounts, ruling action: The intersection of knowledge and power in the routine conduct of community nursing work. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7, 231–250.

3  HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS AND IE: INTERROGATING SOME… 

51

Campbell, M. L. (2008). (Dis)continuity of care: Explicating the ruling relations of home support. In M. DeVault (Ed.), People at work: Life, power, and social inclusion in the new economy (pp. 266–288). New York University Press. Campbell, M.L. (2014). Institutional ethnography (IE), texts and the materiality of the social. Proceedings of 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 6–9. Campbell, M. L., & Rankin, J. (2017). Nurses and electronic health records in a Canadian hospital: Examining the social organisation and programmed use of digitised nursing knowledge. Sociology of Health and Illness, 39, 339–443. De Montigny, G. (1989). Accomplishing professional reality: An ethnography of social workers’ practice. Unpublished PhD thesis. OISE, University of Toronto. De Montigny, G. (1995). The power of being professional. In M. L. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 209–220). University of Toronto Press. De Montigny, G. (2021). Institutional ethnography for social work. In P. Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  505–525). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­ 030-­54222-­1_26 DeVault, M. (Ed.). (2008). People at work: Life, power, and social inclusion in the new economy. New York University Press. DeVault, M. (2021). Elements of an expansive institutional ethnography: A conceptual history of its North American origins. In P. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  11–34). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_2 Griffith, A., & Smith, D.  E. (Eds.). (2014). Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of front-line work. University of Toronto Press. Jackson, N. (1995). “These things just happen”: Text, talk and curriculum reform. In M. L. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp.  164–180). University of Toronto Press. Lowe, T., & Wilson, R. (2017). Playing the game of outcomes-based performance management. Is gamesmanship inevitable? Evidence from theory and practice. Social Policy and Administration, 51(7), 981–100. McGee, M. (Ed.). (1984). Theoretical pluralism in nursing science. University of Ottawa Press. Mykhalovskiy, E. (2001). Troubled hearts, care pathways and hospital restructuring: Exploring health services as active knowledge. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7(2), 269–296. Noordegraaf, M. (2007). From “pure” to “hybrid” professionalism. Present-day professionalism in ambiguous public domains. Administration & Society, 39, 761–785.

52 

M. L. CAMPBELL

Noordegraaf, M. (2011). Remaking professionals? How associations and professional education connect professionalism and organizations. Current Sociology, 59, 465–488. Noordegraaf, M., & Abma, T. (2003). Management by measurement? Public management practices amidst ambiguity. Public Administration, 81, 853–871. Rankin, J. (2001). Texts in action: How nurses are doing the fiscal work of healthcare reform. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7, 251–267. Rankin, J. (2009). The Nurse Project: an analysis for nurses to take back our work. Nursing Inquiry, 16, 275–286. Rankin, J., & Campbell, M.  L. (2006). Managing to nurse: Inside Canada’s healthcare reform. University of Toronto Press. Rankin, J., & Campbell, M. L. (2009). Institutional ethnography (IE), Nursing work and hospital reform: IE’s cautionary analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10(2). https://doi. org/10.17169/fqs-­10.2.1258 Rankin, J., & Tate, B. (2014). Digital era governance: Connecting nursing education and the industrial complex of health care. In A. Griffith & D. E. Smith (Eds.), Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of front-line work (pp. 122–147). University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D.  E. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory and investigations. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. AltaMira Press. Smith, G.  W. (1990). Political activist as ethnographer. Social Problems, 37(4), 629–648.

CHAPTER 4

Institutional Ethnography as an Approach for Social Justice Allies Frank Ridzi

As a professional in the philanthropic sector, I have had ample opportunity to reflect on the ways that sociology helps to guide my practice in strategizing how best to disseminate charitable funds for community benefit. As a college professor of sociology, I have also worked over the years to hone how I speak about the important work of philanthropy within the context of sociology. I draw on the work of Frederick Howard Wines (1898) who has asserted that philanthropy is the application of sociology, much like engineering is the application of mathematics and medicine is the application of biology. However, when I talk to my students about this connection between the theoretical, knowledge-gathering world and the world of action, I have often found that textbooks do not do the potential of our field of sociology justice. In standard sociology textbooks, we learn that qualitative research is a tool for gathering ideas about what is going on in people’s lives and in the

F. Ridzi (*) Le Moyne College and Central New York Community Foundation, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_4

53

54 

F. RIDZI

world at large. We then learn that quantitative research is ideal for establishing just how widespread those experiences are. We hear about these approaches as inductive and deductive approaches to knowing. While knowing is certainly important when it comes to recognizing things that are problematic in our world and it certainly is critical when it comes to public advocacy, these methodologies are both quite lacking when it comes to taking action to actually transform our world away from what is problematic and toward the type of world we would hope for our own children and future generations to inherit. This is where institutional ethnography (IE) is inspiring. What sets IE apart for me is that it lays out an approach that is eminently helpful for people who are seeking to go beyond recognizing how social relations and organizational processes shape our daily lives and seek to change those patterns of organization. IE provides an intensive indexical map (Smith, 1987) that allows us to trace exactly where current processes go wrong and can benefit from a bit of restructuring so that they lead us in very different directions and toward preferred outcomes. In the following pages, I will focus on how the institutional ethnographic approach can do this for practitioners who leave the halls and hills of academia to step into the world of community change and applied practitioner action. Similarly, as in my own case, I show how this can be useful for people who attempt to straddle both worlds of academia and professional practice.

The Problematic One of the most innovative and telling aspects of institutional ethnography for me is the use of the term “problematic.” This is simply identifying something that is troublesome in a person’s own lived experiences and using that as a starting point for discovering how things are put together organizationally from the ground up. Inquiry typically involves interviews, observations and other research skills in order to sketch out the dynamics, organizational sites and daily processes that collude to bring about that problematic experience. The result is that this problematic serves as a “you are here” symbol for the beginning of this exploration and everything else that is collected in terms of following the research path becomes meaningful to people at that starting point. It is a sociological way of mapping that is useful for those frustrated with the way things are and seeking to understand how they get that way. It is critical to have such a tool since, as Smith

4  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS AN APPROACH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE… 

55

(1987) and others have told us, how things get the way they are is shrouded often in multiple actions by multiple actors and processes that go on behind the scenes and are typically invisible to the person experiencing this problematic situation (DeVault et al., 2012; Janz et al., 2014; Ridzi, 2008, 2009, 2021). Beginning with the problematic is critical to applied sociology for at least two reasons. First, it is informed by a large body of thinking known as standpoint theory which asserts that we really cannot always experience things the same way as others because of the way our own personal identities (things such as race, gender, age, ability and sexuality) influence how others treat us and how the world unfolds in front of us (Gurung, 2021). I think for a second of my good friend who recently told me she had no idea what it meant and what it felt like to interact with law-enforcement until a young man she was dating was pulled over for “driving while Black.” She is white and he is Black and through the shared experience she began to see, not what it is like to be a Black person, but at least she was able to grasp that growing up Black and learning to drive being Black is quite a different scenario in so many ways from what she experienced. Institutional ethnography honors the importance of our intersectional identities but does not waste time arguing over which standpoint is better. Rather, by simply accepting and embracing a problematic as it presents itself, it incorporates all of the benefits that standpoint can afford (i.e., the ability to see nuances and understand them in a broader context, that other people without those standpoint advantages simply overlook and cannot see). Experience is a dialogic process and IE directs the researcher to explore socially organized and shared ways of knowing, as these arise in and shape our doings. This, as I will explain, is a critical aspect of IE that has helped guide my work since it brings accountability to positive social change; I will know when things are better when I return to the person experiencing that troublesome situation and they describe to me the positive ways in which things have changed. A second and very closely related critical aspect to the problematic component of IE is that it opens the door to concrete and meaningful allyship. I share below details about a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. In the world of racial sensitivity training, we often hear that the most efficacious role for people who are not experiencing a certain type of ism, such as racism or sexism or ableism, is that of an ally or someone who avoids the pitfalls of being neutral and unengaged (or acting “color blind” [Carr, 1997]) and embraces the role of helping to bring about change by

56 

F. RIDZI

following the lead of those who can actually see the problem from where they stand in their own lived experiences (Reynolds & Kendi, 2020). This point cannot be overstated in its importance. For a practitioner, to restrict active and positive change making only to those people who are personally experiencing a problem would limit the value of the field of sociology immensely. What the IE approach does is empower people to be allies and thus magnifies their utility toward bringing about a multitude of positive changes. As I will share below, in my role as a philanthropy professional, I also identify as a White male. If the work of addressing the legacy of racial inequity in the United States could only be done by Black or Latino or Asian practitioners, then my social positioning as an established professional in the field, and furthermore one with gatekeeping authorities that typically comes with manager level positions, would be rendered inert and not useful to the applied sociological project of striving toward racial equity. However, because the IE approach does not require the researcher or user of that approach actually to be the person experiencing the problematic, IE instead positions others and me as potential allies to those experiencing the problematic situation and furthermore leverages the IE practitioners’ own positions within the institutions at question. By recruiting allies, IE becomes an even more powerful approach. It incorporates the things that we see from our privileged positions for the betterment of the larger project of ameliorating the problematic situation. In my case, I had insight into how the machinery of philanthropy works on a day-to-day basis and how decisions are actually made. Having this type of insight is the first step toward transforming the institutional workings, dynamics, rules, processes and underlying thinking that makes a situation so problematic in the first place. In this way the IE approach is a big tent strategy that welcomes anyone and everyone who is willing to observe and acknowledge a troublesome situation as presented to them from the standpoint of those experiencing the problem and then take a serious look at the day-to-day parts of society and interaction that make it problematic. As I will explore in my reflection below, this combination of allyship and mapping make IE such a potent tool. In other words, IE incorporates both: (1) It enables a clear personal role as an ally to those who present us with problematics (oftentimes ones that we cannot even see before because our own lived experiences were so different), and (2) it maps out the dynamics that make things problematic. As a practitioner, the way IE encourages allyship and mapping have been critical to guiding my work. As I have written about elsewhere, this

4  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS AN APPROACH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE… 

57

approach was essential in helping to bring about community reform in the area of early childhood lead poisoning (Ridzi, 2021). Next I share how these two critical components were also indispensable in my own thinking and actions that helped to support the work of others in bringing about the Black Equity and Excellence Fund at the Central New York Community Foundation in Syracuse, New York. This is an ongoing program that provides grants to nonprofits and others that are seeking to build up the resources and wealth in the Black community to both celebrate the excellence that currently exists and strive toward greater equity. To date, this fund has disseminated nearly $1 million to actively engaged community organizations seeking to support Central New York’s Black community.

Institutional Ethnography and the Black Equity and Excellence Initiative Bringing the Problematic Experience into Focus As a White male, everything seemed fine to me. When I began this journey, I was quite happy with the philanthropic sector and all of the “good” that we as professionals have the privilege and honor of doing in our home communities. We facilitate the collection of charitable resources from donations, wills, and trusts and then invest them in diversified portfolios, such as the stock market, to grow them and then redistribute the earnings of these assets back into our community for its long-term and perpetual benefit. This meant my days were filled with things like making grants to support soup kitchens, afterschool programs, job training, environmental conservation and care for stray animals. We are basically in the business of inviting people to be charitable by contributing to a community trust fund that would last in perpetuity and provide benefit not just to the community of today but also to future community members for generations into the future. To this day, the mission and this form of work bring me a sense of fulfillment and gratitude that I can be part of such a magnificent endeavor. Nevertheless, that does not mean that it is perfect or that the field of community philanthropy does not need to grow. In the present case, I was oblivious to the ways in which race, racial dynamics, historical inequalities and inequities are reproduced in the field of United States philanthropy today. The story I share below is not about addressing something that is problematic about my community, but rather it is about

58 

F. RIDZI

addressing something that is problematic across the nation, including in my community. We all have blind spots and one of the benefits of open communication and dialogue is that others can point this out for us and we can do the same for them. In this case my blind spots related to what it is like to be a Black member of the community and how it feels to look at the field of philanthropy and what it does and what it does not do. For me it was Black colleagues and friends and their candid conversation that helped me see that the philanthropy sector was inherently a white institution, even though and despite the fact that communities such as my own had made significant strides toward increasing the racial diversity of our boards of directors and staff. What does it mean that philanthropy is a white institution? That is perhaps a question that is too large for the present discussion, but I can provide some basic contours. Racial wealth disparity is very well documented in the United States and there are many reasons for this economic inequality including 400 years of slavery and persistent oppression in the forms of exclusionary employment rules, restrictive housing covenants (that prevented African Americans from purchasing homes in white communities), racially determined/redlining/home loans, segregation, exclusion from government benefits and theories of racial superiority and racial inferiority, not to mention blatant racism, bigotry, attacks and murders such as lynchings that have an effect not only on the body but also the mind and spirit (McGhee, 2022). In short, there is a huge social history behind Black families in aggregate today having much lower levels of wealth than white families. Documenting this has been a strength of the sociological field that it seems the rest of the world has recently noticed. This racial wealth disparity means that much of the wealth in this country that is either passed onto future generations or disseminated to philanthropy through such mechanisms as private foundations, family foundations and in this case community foundations, is given generously by white folks. Now there is nothing wrong with white people being charitable. In fact, that is fantastic. However, there are problematic aspects of this because when people donate, they are able to designate their own preferences and direct future monies in perpetuity to the things that they benefited from in their lives. To the extent that these things are different for Black and white families, the racial inequities that the aforementioned horrible legacy of racism has wrought on families during their life can actually be replicated in the afterlife. There’s a concept

4  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS AN APPROACH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE… 

59

in the field of philanthropy called the “dead hand of the donor” or “dead hand control of charitable assets” (Atkinson, 2007, p.  1) in which the restraints, restrictions, and preferences left by donors as guides to how their philanthropic funds should be dispersed in the years after their demise can actually constrain the actions of the living for generations to come as they avoid things those donors did not like and steer those funds toward the deceased donors’ preferences. Before I began this journey of engaging with the problematic, I was enthralled by the majesty of charitable foundations such as community foundations to provide a form of benevolent immortality to people who wished to give to their communities from now into eternity. What I did not perceive was the disjuncture between this mechanism and the problematic aspects that needed some tweaking. Fortunately, my philanthropic work was housed in a community foundation, which, by design and structure, was nimble in order to be responsive to changing community needs as society continues to evolve beyond what the donors of past generations could have ever foreseen (Sacks, 2000). Hence, I was uniquely situated to be able to encounter what was racially problematic about the field and actually do something about it. For me, the problematic appeared in candid conversations with Black friends and peers in the field about just how white the sector was and how we were not responsive to the needs of Black members of our community because funds left behind by white donors did not resonate with the needs and passions of the Black community, but also because Black members of the community simply did not see philanthropy as an ally. Talking with colleagues who had conversed with community members, it became clear to me that for advocates of the Black community philanthropy seemed inaccessible and beyond reach. “That’s not for us, that is a white institution,” was a general sentiment. There was a sense that we could not even conceive of or perceive what they saw as community problems since they did not affect us personally. Hence, we were not considered partners in trying to address those problems. Furthermore, there was a sense that the philanthropic sector has a tendency to have our thinking captured by traditional ways of seeing art and community building (which reconnects to those activities that were beneficial to the donors) and overlook new Black-centered artistic approaches and opportunities to invest in the Black community. This problematic was well articulated by a vocal advocate in our field in his weekly blog posting:

60 

F. RIDZI

In our field, foundations have significantly more power than nonprofits. White-led organizations have more power than those led by BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] communities… However, a form of privilege we do not talk much about is Solutions Privilege, a phenomenon that includes people of privilege expecting solutions to be brought to them but being unable to even perceive solutions that challenge their privilege. (Le, 2020)

Mapping the Ordinary Daily Practices Behind the Problematic Experience While identifying this racial problematic of philanthropy was critical toward understanding the experiences of others, it was not enough. Unfortunately, research all too often stops with awareness. I believe that this is one area where institutional ethnography starts to shine. Mapping the institutional relations that bring about problematic situations is a well-­ established focus and change-enabling feature of the IE approach. Learning about the experiences of my friends and colleagues led me to ask follow-up questions such as, “But what might it look like if we change things for the better? And what exactly is keeping us from doing it?” The result was sketching out a map, much like a subway map in a new city or a mall that points with an indicator that “you are here” (Smith, 1987) and then helps you figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be. The key difference with this mapping experience, however, is that we are not simply following routes that already exist, but we are working to transform the routes that exist so they go where we want to go instead of where they currently go. As I have described elsewhere (Ridzi, 2021) professionals working in the philanthropic sector can use this approach to do outward-focused work such as the work that I did to help foster community change to reduce childhood lead poisoning. In that approach I used an institutional ethnographic map to track what needed to change externally. However, in this case, we are talking more about change from within the philanthropic sector and so the mapping was much closer to home. It was a mapping of our institutional processes that we use in order to bring about optimal grantmaking for the betterment of our community. This map looked like many other IE mappings including how potential grantees hear about our work, how they interact with staff and websites in order to learn more about the ways we can support their efforts, and then

4  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS AN APPROACH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE… 

61

the different levels of meetings with staff in order to propose ideas for funding and conduct due diligence follow up in order to make sure that the foundation understands the project and that it resonates with the mission set forth by the foundation’s staff and board. Beyond this, the map leads into the less visible aspects of philanthropy. The things that people cannot see from outside of the institution includes such things as who sits around the table when internal discussions take place that move some projects forward toward funding and that keep others held up or make them eventually unsuccessful grant applications. In our case, this involves a web of staff and volunteer board members at a variety of levels and different committees. Looking at these maps, it was clear that the structure was created to be efficient and effective in disseminating philanthropic resources to our community. However, it was also clear that we needed to see changes and restructuring if we truly were to become responsive to the new perspectives that the problematic experiences of my friends and colleagues were bringing to light.

Taking Action as an Ally to Bring About Concrete Change It has been said that obscuring who makes decisions is a source of power. The work described in the above section helps to ameliorate that by revealing where decisions are made and by whom. However, simply revealing how that prerogative to make funding decisions is wielded and by whom does not in itself change a modern institution or the daily experiences it produces. It might be tempting to assume that all decision-making resides at the top of a bureaucracy, but that is not how modern institutions work. Power is distributed and there are key decisions at meaningful decision points that must happen in certain orders and which are cumulative. For instance, when it comes to grantmaking key decisions are made regarding where to advertise grant deadlines, which groups to reach out to for applications, what types of projects to fund, and what types of activities and organizations to exclude from funding. Beyond that, foundation staff members exercise discretion and use specific decision rules that inform how they think about and process an organization’s needs and requests. These subtle acts can make all the difference.

62 

F. RIDZI

After thinking long and hard and reflecting on not only the experiences of my friends and colleagues who are Black but also on literature about the need for safe spaces that were Black only (Blackwell, 2018), we decided that our Black Equity and Excellence Initiative and Fund needed to be run by an entirely Black staff and be overseen by an entirely Black advisory council. This was perhaps the most radical of our efforts to transform institutional practice toward a more equitable structure that would make great strides in improving the lived experiences of Black members of our community seeking philanthropic support. A theme for us internally became “giving up power.” While it is one thing to point to a mapping of processes and say that it should change, it is quite another thing to do so. In our case, it involved people who were accustomed to having oversight, including me, willingly and thoughtfully transferring activities in a permanent and institutional way. It included discomfort and unease, all for appropriate and well-meaning reasons. As a manager, it was my responsibility to assure quality and adherence to shared standards across the many areas where the foundation offered programming. I had to rethink my activities as a manager, a leader and a mentor or coach to those who reported to me and those who reported to people who reported to me. Similarly, our board of directors had to wrestle with change in their practices. They had to intentionally and thoughtfully abdicate part of their oversight activities by giving up their right and responsibility to have the last word on what grants would be funded. Effectively, by hiring staff who identified as Black to run the program and by removing me and the board of directors (a group that was only approximately 20% Black) from the decision-making process and replacing us with an all-Black staff and advisory council recruited from the community, we were able to create radical institutional change. The result, as we have shared elsewhere, was a process that, from start to end, included only Black staff and community members with the single exception that the chief executive officer (CEO, a white man) also signed off before the grants were sent out (Elliott & Ridzi, Forthcoming). These evolutions brought to fruition a series of meaningful institutional changes that included the following among other things: • Outreach and recruitment in partnership with Black community members, • More creative grant application opportunities, including allowing submissions in audio, video, PowerPoint and written narratives,

4  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS AN APPROACH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE… 

63

• A  much more streamlined application process designed for easy access, with fewer requests for attachments. (This shifts work to staff and away from applicants.), • A redefinition of the public good such that for-profit entities and projects that aren’t necessarily organized as charitable organizations that nevertheless build up the Black community are considered for support if they have a nonprofit fiscal sponsor and are making an investment in Black-led community change and improvement. This truly was an institutional change that has survived despite the high turnover of staff through such things as getting promotions and taking new positions elsewhere. Now run by a completely new group of staff and a continually rotating advisory committee, the Black Equity and Excellence Initiative and Fund are an example of internal change guided by the sensibilities of institutional ethnography.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have reflected on how the Institutional Ethnographic approach has served as a guide to me as both a researcher at an academic institution and as a practitioner in the field of community philanthropy. IE has served as a guide to connect the knowledge producing work of academic sociology with the applied work of philanthropy. Most importantly, where traditional sociology approaches exhaust their utility at the stage of raising awareness about inequities or social problems, I have reflected on how the IE approach offers a roadmap for positive change in the organizations, social structures, rules, policies, and practices that make up today’s institutions. Of note in this reflection are a few key advantages to IE that offers future scholars, activists, and practitioners areas of opportunity and growth. First, IE offers an approach that is open to all. One does not need to be aggrieved or to be actively oppressed by social structures in order to utilize IE. Rather, it encourages and indeed demands the ability to listen to the lived experiences of people who encounter a situation as problematic (these people may indeed be oppressed). Furthermore, by design, IE compels those who use it to make their analysis accountable to the perspectives from which the exploration began (the point of departure). It requires open-mindedness to explore these disjunctures and to see what

64 

F. RIDZI

can be changed through “out of the box” or, in this case, “out of the institution” thinking. In short, it offers a clear path to active allyship. Second, unlike some forms of activism, IE does not require change makers to be in opposition to institutions. They can, like with my situation, be situated within an organization and help “bring about change from within.” Indeed, the mapping strategy offers a ready-made way to move forward beyond pointing fingers and blame. Rather, it offers concrete places where compromises can be made and avoids shaming or villainizing anyone. When there are concrete things to discuss, everyone can be part of the solution. Further reflection and interactions with others in the field have helped me to see that the type of change detailed here did not just happen and required substantial legwork or homework. In our case it was extensive investment in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) work internally that allowed the change to happen. Staff, as well as board members, were involved in two years of learning about race and dynamics of racism and other inequities prior to the death of George Floyd (an African American man who died in May of 2020 at the hands of law enforcement in the United States sparking mass protests) (Elliott & Ridzi, Forthcoming). This work helped to create a foundation of shared understanding from which to spur action. In many ways, the prior two years were filled with the type of race exploration found in introduction to sociology and more advanced race and ethnic relations courses. Looking at it this way, it was a perfect storm of awareness built on traditional sociological methods followed by an action-oriented application of institutional ethnographic thinking.

References Atkinson, R. (2007). The low road to Cy Pres reform: Principled practice to remove dead hand control of charitable assets, 58 Case Western Res. L. Rev. 97 (2007). https://ir.law.fsu.edu/articles/395. https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/ default/files/microsites/career-­s ervices/The%20Low%20Road%20to%20 Cy%20Pres%20Reform.pdf Blackwell, K. (2018). Why people of color need spaces without white people. The Arrow. Retrieved August 9, 2018, from https://arrow-­journal.org/ why-­people-­of-­color-­need-­spaces-­without-­white-­people/ Carr, L. G. (1997). “Color-blind” racism. Sage Publications.

4  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS AN APPROACH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE… 

65

DeVault, M. L., Murali, V., & Ridzi, F. (2012). “Let’s be friends”: Working within an accountability circuit. In L. Tepperman & A. Kalyta (Eds.), Reading sociology: Canadian perspectives, Second Edition, by the Canadian Sociological Association. Oxford University Press. Elliott, D., & Ridzi, F. (Forthcoming). Launching a black equity & excellence fund: Improving community well-being through Black-led change. In M. R. Islam, P. Kraeger, & R. Phillips (Eds.), Social (in)equality, community well-being and quality of life. Edward Elgar Publishing. Gurung, L. (2021). Feminist standpoint theory: Conceptualization and utility. Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 14, 106–115. https://doi. org/10.3126/dsaj.v14i0.27357 Janz, S., Nichols, N., Ridzi, F., & McCoy, L. (2014). A workshop dialogue: Outcome measures and front-line social service work. In A.  I. Griffith & D. E. Smith (Eds.), Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work (pp.  201–250). University of Toronto Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt7zwbzq.14 Le, V. (2020). Privilege, power, and personal conflicts: The forces preventing change in nonprofit and philanthropy. Posted on June 8, 2020 Nonprofit AF. Retrieved August 17, 2022, from https://nonprofitaf.com/2020/06/privilege-­power-­ and-­p ersonal-­c onflicts-­t he-­f orces-­p reventing-­c hange-­i n-­n onprofit-­a nd-­ philanthropy/ McGhee, H. (2022). The sum of us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. One World/Ballantine. Reynolds, J., & Kendi, I. X. (2020). Stamped: Racism, antiracism, and you. Little, Brown and Company.. Ridzi, F. (2008). Exploring problematics of the personal responsibility welfare state: Issues of family and caregiving in welfare-to-work and Medicaid consumer directed care programs. In M. L. De Vault (Ed.), People at work: Life, power, and social inclusion in the new economy (pp.  223–247). New  York University Press. Ridzi, F. (2009). Selling welfare reform: Work-first and the new common sense of employment. New York University Press. Ridzi, F. (2021). Mapping institutional relations for local policy change: The case of lead poisoning in Syracuse New York. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  309–328). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_17 Sacks, E. W. (2000). The growth of community foundations around the world. The Council of Foundations. Smith, D.  E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic. A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Wines, F.  H. (1898). Sociology and philanthropy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 12(1), 49–57.

PART II

Critical Commentary on Institutions

CHAPTER 5

Reflections on Social Relations and the Single Institution Tendency in Institutional Ethnography Colin Hastings and Eric Mykhalovskiy

This chapter offers reflections on institutional ethnographic analyses of ruling relations. Our primary goal is to invite readers to reflect on how the notion of an institution or “functional complex,” as conceptualized by Dorothy Smith (2002, 2005) is commonly taken up and used in institutional ethnographic inquiry. In our experience, there is a tendency in some institutional ethnographic research to focus on a single institution (e.g., health care, education, policing, or social services) rather than on how institutional practices intersect across functional complexes. Throughout this chapter we refer to this as “the single institution tendency.”

C. Hastings (*) University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] E. Mykhalovskiy York University, York, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_5

69

70 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

We do not wish to dismiss institutional ethnographic scholarship that investigates a singular institution. Institutional ethnographies that focus squarely on ruling relations within a given functional complex have been extremely important for enhancing understandings of how our everyday lives are shaped by the activities of government, management, the professions, and other constituents of the ruling relations. We also wish to avoid painting a “strawman” version of IE. We recognize that there is important work within the institutional ethnographic research community that investigates intersecting functional complexes, some of which we highlight in this chapter. We hope to encourage a dialogue about how to explore institutions within institutional ethnography (IE). We are concerned about institutional ethnographic research being overidentified with a style of inquiry in which the scope of analysis is restricted by a particular functional complex. Left unproblematized, the single institution tendency can restrict the power of institutional ethnographic analyses of relations that, from the standpoint of everyday experience, are not neatly packaged, bounded, or contained (McCoy, 2006). In this chapter we explicitly encourage institutional ethnographies that investigate intersecting institutions. We do so from a place that orients to IE as a continually growing and changing sociology, rather than a finalized and finished research approach. We invite institutional ethnographers to relate to IE as a sociology that researchers can adapt, expand, and place into conversation with other sociologies to illuminate ruling relations that coordinate people’s everyday lives. Responding to that invitation requires a measure of internal criticism and self-reflection as well as an openness to the conceptual resources of companion intellectual projects. Our reflections on the analysis of institutional relations in IE are organized into four parts. To begin, we expand on our understanding of the single institution tendency and situate our account alongside other critical scholars who call attention to the inclination, within IE, to concentrate on a specific institution or functional complex. We relate to this trajectory of critical IE as an invitation to envision how we might expand analyses of intersecting ruling relations. We then propose a few ways we might account for the single institution tendency. We ask whether there is something about the conceptualization of an institution, within IE itself, that limits our capacity to think about ruling relations across functional complexes. We suggest that the single institution tendency has more to do with the institutional organization of IE as a sociology than with any specific

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

71

shortcomings of the conceptualization. Next, we offer some examples of IE studies that investigate ruling practices across institutions. Finally, we offer some provisional thoughts about how to support institutional ethnographic investigation of the organization of ruling as intersecting functional complexes. We suggest how, in our own experience, critical social science scholarship beyond IE can support such possibilities.

Recognizing the Single Institution Tendency Our trajectories of engagement with IE are both independent and interconnected. Colin was introduced to IE in a graduate seminar during his master’s degree. Reading the institutional ethnographies of George Smith, Dorothy Smith, and others opened up ways of thinking about how sociology can enlarge the scope of what people can see from their everyday worlds (McCoy, 2006; G. Smith, 1990). Colin has since applied IE to studies of the social organization of community-based HIV advocacy, the social relations of news media production, and the intersection of health, law, and digital media technologies (Hastings, 2019, 2022). Eric first encountered IE thirty years ago as a community-based researcher participating in a study of the social organization of access to social services for people living with HIV (G. Smith, et al., 1990). The experience propelled him back to the university to complete his PhD and his subsequent IE research has focused primarily on the institutional relations of health care and of public health (Mykhalovskiy, 2001; Mykhalovskiy & Farrell, 2005; Weir & Mykhalovskiy, 2010). HIV criminalization, produced through mechanisms of overlapping governance involving public health, medicine, and the criminal legal system, is an area of shared IE research interest and publication (Hastings et  al., 2022; Mykhalovskiy et  al., 2020). It is the primary empirical site through which our concerns about the single institution tendency have been developed. Beyond research, we have collaborated in organizing IE conference sessions, connected over our respective organizational roles in IE associations and have been fortunate to hold, in common, important friendships and relationships with accomplished institutional ethnographers with whom we get to chat about IE “off the clock.” As we’ve described in previous work, we relate to IE as a sociology that begins from the standpoint of people’s everyday experiences and examines “how what people do in given local settings is coordinated with what other people are doing at different times and in different places” (Mykhalovskiy et al., 2021, p. 47). IE is surely a diverse and wide-ranging

72 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

project—the specific character, empirical sites, and concerns of institutional ethnographic inquiries vary considerably. However, a stable defining feature of IE is its commitment to empirically investigate how our worlds are “put together” with an emphasis on “how our lives and experiences are [translocally] shaped by the activities of government, management, the professions, and other constituents of the relations that govern us” (Mykhalovskiy et al., 2021, p. 48). As we have read institutional ethnographic research, taught, and talked about IE, and carried out our own research projects, we have noticed a tendency in some IE literature to direct researchers towards the study of a single institution. At the risk of over-simplifying and generalizing an account of the single institution tendency, our sense is that IE research is often organized by functional complex, such that one finds, for example, IE studies of health care that focus on hospitals and other medical settings, IE studies of education that focus on schools and schoolboards, and IE studies of social services that focus on a particular area of the welfare state. It is less common to see studies of social organization that prompt the institutional ethnographer to recognize how people’s everyday work is shaped by ruling relations that cut across health care and the education system or the criminal legal system and social services. This is what we have in mind when we refer to the single institution tendency. IE studies with a primary empirical focus on a single functional complex have been extremely important for establishing IE as an alternative sociology. Much of the most significant and widely-cited institutional ethnographic research focuses on the social organization of a single institution. For example, Rankin and Campbell’s influential studies of how nursing work is coordinated by managerial technologies focus on the functional complex of health care, with particular attention to the inner workings of hospitals (Rankin & Campbell, 2006, 2009). The authors show how health information technology is mobilized in hospitals to produce objectified knowledge that is geared towards the “efficient and effective” use of hospital funds. Rankin and Campbell further illustrate how nurses must subordinate their professional judgement to these forms of objectified knowledge that externalize their clinical decision making. Rankin and Campbell’s work has been extremely important. It has been widely cited by IE and other scholars and has helped popularize IE research on health care beyond sociology to nursing and health sciences scholarship. This is testament to the tremendous influence that institutional ethnographies of single institutions can have. Perhaps what makes Rankin and

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

73

Campbell’s work so compelling is that it equips nurses with ways to talk back to objectified forms of health care knowledge that coordinate and manage their everyday work. Our own IE research has been shaped by the single institutional tendency. We have each approached IE research in ways that have circumscribed the field of investigation to a single functional complex. Like Rankin and Campbell, we have tried to offer insights that research participants can draw on to make sense of, and talk back to, the ways that their everyday work practices are organized within a particular institution. Take, for example, Colin’s recent institutional ethnographic study of HIV criminalization that focused on the functional complex of news media (Hastings, forthcoming). Colin wanted to do an IE of newsrooms to better understand how news stories about the issue of HIV criminalization are produced. In particular, he was interested in figuring out how a standard genre of sensational crime news story about HIV non-disclosure criminal cases came to be such a stable and enduring news discourse. To do so, he interviewed reporters about their newswork activities—how they identified a newsworthy story; how they pitched an idea for a news story to an editor; the steps they took to identify sources that could provide more information about the event; and the routine process they followed to move their article into print and online. Reporters’ interview accounts revealed that their newswork is coordinated by the relevancies of corporate convergence journalism that relies on the production of fast, efficient, and widely spreadable digital news content. Much like the nurses in Rankin and Campbell’s studies, the reporters Colin interviewed described how they subvert their professional news judgement and journalistic ideals to keep step with the frenzied pace of online news. For example, to continuously provide news content that will attract “clicks” online, reporters described that they often repurpose common source texts (most often police press releases) as news texts. Thus, Colin’s IE tells us something about the ruling relations that shape reporter’s everyday work within the functional complex of corporate news media.

Critiquing the Single Institution Tendency As Colin continued his IE of HIV criminalization, he came to recognize that the everyday work reporters were doing in the newsroom was coordinated by work that others were doing well beyond the walls of the newsroom. The news stories that reporters wrote about HIV criminalization

74 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

would not be possible without the work that others do within other functional complexes—for example, the work that police do to produce press releases about HIV criminal non-disclosure cases; the work that community-based HIV advocacy organizations do to intervene on and contest stigmatizing news discourse; and the work that software technicians do to produce programs that track and report to journalists how news readers engage with their stories online. Keen to investigate how these work activities were concerted across institutions and convinced that doing so would yield a broader perspective on how news about HIV criminalization is put together, Colin expanded the originally imagined empirical scope of his study. This meant moving his ethnographic focus to sites he could not have anticipated at the outset of his project. While Colin’s study began with a series of interviews with reporters in newsrooms, he eventually found himself traveling to police stations, community-based HIV organizations, and analytic software company offices to conduct interviews. Collecting accounts of people’s work practices in this range of settings made it possible to show how news reports of HIV criminalization are the product of everyday work activities that are coordinated across diverse functional complexes. The move to explore how ruling relations are organized across functional complexes has been encouraged by scholars who have brought critical attention to the single institutional tendency. For example, our friend and colleague Viviane Namaste (2006) has studied the institutional management of sex and the ways that transgender people negotiate the bureaucratic process of changing their legal identity on government documents. She points out that transgender people must navigate a complicated “period in time in which their legal identity does not correspond to the physical image they present to the outside world” (Namaste, 2006, p.  160). Namaste highlights how the work that transgender people do throughout the process of changing their sex is complicated by how it “involves fundamental adjustments to all aspects of one’s life: the physical body…as well as social life more generally (employment, housing, education)” (p. 160). To make sense of the knotty social relations that coordinate the institutional management of sex, Namaste calls for research that shows how different institutional complexes are connected with one another. She writes: analysis that restricts itself to one institution can be limited to the extent that it does not understand the links or the lack of connection among different

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

75

institutions, as well as the attending consequences for the institutional ordering of experience. (p. 167)

Here, Namaste prompts institutional ethnographers to consider what we might reveal about ruling relations if we work from the assumption that these relations cut across functional complexes. Her research is an important reminder that people’s lived experiences of negotiating complex bureaucratic processes are rarely an exercise of dealing with a single institution—the process of changing one’s legal identity does not end when one’s name is corrected on a university student ID card or a drivers’ license. Instead, the process of attaining government documents is lived through a variety of institutions. The ruling relations cut across institutions such as gender identity, health care, and immigration systems. Namaste (2006) underlines, “given this…practitioners of institutional ethnography ought to devote some attention to the development of methodologies that allow us to understand the relations between different institutions” (pp. 170–171). Rachel Fishberg (2022) echoes Namaste’s call to expand empirical inquiry beyond the common edges of IE research. While there is nothing about Smith’s conception of institutions that limits institutional ethnographers to locating studies within bounded physical spaces, Fishberg’s conception of transnational IE strives to overcome the common tendency for institutional ethnographic research to remain within a local or national empirical site. The author promotes the exploration of geographically dispersed institutions that cross borders and span regions. She acknowledges that there are often good reasons for concentrating an IE within a given geographic locale—borders can provide a boundary for empirical inquiry and represent a reasonable end-point for analysis. However, Fishberg urges that as “the global state of climate and technology continues to transform, so should our approach to studying people and their everyday work” (Fishberg, 2022, p.  9). Inspired by other institutional ethnographers who tackle transnational questions (Eastwood, 2006, 2018, 2021; Grace, 2013), Fishberg’s article invites institutional ethnographers to explore the ways people are connected and coordinated in transnational and global processes, while remaining committed to studying the materiality of everyday practices (p. 9).

76 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

Accounting for the Single Institution Tendency How might we account for the single institution tendency in IE? One approach is to interrogate the concept of institution itself. We might ask: is there something inherent in the concept of institution, as developed within IE, that limits its application to single functional complexes? Over the years, Smith has offered different, but related, definitions and discussions of the concept of institution. Understanding institutions as functional complexes is a recurring feature of the concept in her work. For Smith, to think of an institution is to think of how some set of relations within a ruling apparatus is organized around a distinctive function like education, health care, or social work. The concept is meant to displace the notion of a bounded organization in favor of a vision of multiple strands of varied activity that are coordinated into a functional complex. Of the many examples of the concept of institution that Smith has provided, the one she offers in Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People is of particular interest to us. She writes, I have suggested that we recognize institutions as functional complexes within the ruling relations. By “functional complexes” is meant nothing more than the observables of complexes of organizations and discourses that are focused on functions such as education, science, law, health care, government, corporate profitability, and so on. They do not become, in institutional ethnography, objects of investigation as such. Rather, they come into view only partially as they are explored from the standpoint of people who in one way or another are involved in them. Indeed inquiry may reach into intersections or interconnections of more than one functional complex or of all the more inclusive ruling relations. Characteristically, any such exploration will not conform to the conventional circumscriptions that define a particular entity. Actuality isn’t bounded by institutional categories; in the real world, the social relations that are significant in organizing people’s ordinary participation do not conform to what can be represented institutionally. The researcher does not know in advance where her or his investigation will go. Directions come from the original problematic as it was brought forward in the experiences of those with whom the researcher was working at the inception of her or his study. (Smith, 2005, p. 68 italics ours)

This passage clarifies that Smith’s thinking about institutions and the scale of IE is not contained by the notion of a singular functional complex. In fact, she encourages institutional ethnographers to “reach into” the

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

77

ways that multiple functional complexes intersect and interconnect with one another. In a way that anticipates the concerns of Namaste and Fishberg, Smith wants researchers to take seriously that the social relations that organize our everyday lives rarely conform to bounded institutional categories. Smith’s definition of institution resolves doubts about the concept itself; however, it leaves open the question of how the single institution tendency has come to inform contemporary IE.  Some of the leaning towards studies of single institutions likely has to do with lay semantics. While there is nothing inherent in the concept of “institution” as developed within IE that limits the scope of institutional ethnographic inquiry to a single institution, in popular usage the term “institution” would seem to be less about exploding or traversing boundaries than about evoking bounded spaces. One thinks, for example, of popular representations of institutions as discrete physical sites (e.g., this particular school or that specific hospital). It is also the case that there is a long lineage of ethnographies that focus on particular settings of this sort. Part of the effort to expand IE beyond the single institution tendency involves reinforcing Smith’s call to explore inter-institutional complexes of practices and discourses. We would like to suggest that extending IE beyond the study of single institutions is less a matter of any particular conceptual problem within IE than of how IE is commonly taken up in the university. The single institutional tendency, we emphasize, is a problem of the very social organization of the academy and of IE teaching and research. Elsewhere, we’ve noted that IE has been developed and popularized in disciplinary and professional sites outside of sociology. The traction that IE has gained in schools of nursing, education, and social services has outpaced its development in sociology departments where its approach to social theory and critique of established sociological discourse, and where concerns about scholarly orthodoxy, can deter sociology graduate students and emerging sociologists from engaging with IE (Mykhalovskiy et al., 2021, p. 60). When considering the areas in universities where IE is most commonly taught and taken up, we can recognize good reasons for the single institution tendency. It makes perfect sense, for example, that someone who is trained in IE in a health sciences department or someone with expertise in IE who is hired as a faculty member in a medical school will fix their attention on the functional complex of health care. So too, it is to be expected that someone who is trained in IE in a faculty of education will focus their

78 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

study on the functional complex of schooling. The widespread use of IE in these professional settings is an exciting development that has propelled IE across disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, our sense is that IE’s embeddedness in professional areas of study has reinforced a practice of IE research that is circumscribed by a singular institution. Another reason that it is challenging for us as institutional ethnographers (perhaps especially those of us who are sociologists) to think across functional complexes, is because academic subdisciplines are firmly organized by specific empirical zones. This organization of subdisciplines encourages us to identify as sociologists of health, or socio-legal scholars, or media sociologists and can promote siloed analyses of social relations. We see this taking shape when the peer-review processes of specialized journals (e.g., of education or public health) condition us to think along narrow, topical lines or when tenure-track job postings encourage applicants to position themselves as experts dedicated to a particular subdiscipline. This carries over to how we organize the spaces where we come together as institutional ethnographers to discuss and share ideas. We have noticed over the years of attending IE sessions at conferences, that there is a tendency to organize sessions by topical areas (sessions are often about health, or law, or education). It can be exciting to also consider the possibilities that lie in sessions that position researchers to think about the social relations that traverse these disparate sites.

Some Promising Exemplars As we call attention to the single institution tendency in IE, we want to avoid overstating the problem. There are certainly times when it makes sense for practical, methodological, or political reasons to focus on a single institution. We also recognize that there are institutional ethnographers who are pushing IE in creative and innovative ways to trace ruling relations across functional complexes. Given space limitations, we cannot address all such work and so, focus on four exemplars. The first is Paul Luken and Suzanne Vaughan’s institutional ethnographic study of housing (2006). The authors’ work focuses on how childrearing and housing practices in the early twentieth century were organized around a standard ideological code that coordinated the disparate work of numerous agents, including, but not limited to, government and local public health officials, home builders, lumber companies, savings and loans agencies, real-estate associations, academics, child welfare activists, medical doctors,

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

79

and newspaper and magazine publishers. Together, work across these various sites reproduced the textual discourse that established what the authors call the “Standard American Home” (SAH) as the appropriate form of dwelling for infants and children. Luken and Vaughan show how, at the turn of the twentieth century, the ideological code of the SAH hooked parents up to ruling relations across multiple functional complexes, including newly professionalized child welfare services, an emerging commercial market of consumer home goods and services, and the depressed housing market between 1900 and 1930. Another insightful exemplar is Naomi Nichols’ book Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness (2014). Nichol’s project calls attention to the institutional cracks that young people describe falling through when trying to access social services. Rather than situate her IE within a particular social service sector, she surfaces how young peoples’ attempts to accomplish seemingly simple institutional tasks insert them into a complex institutional field that consists of child welfare, the shelter system, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Service Canada, the school system, and the labor market (Nichols, 2014). Youth Work illustrates for readers how the lives of young people who live outside the care of parents or guardians are organized by overlapping institutional relations as well as a lack of connection between institutions. We can also look to the work of Agnieszka Doll (2020) as a model for how to use IE to investigate ruling relations that reach across institutions. Doll’s study of involuntary psychiatric admission considers the usefulness of IE as an approach for revealing the work of law in medico-legal borderlands (Doll, 2020, p.  94). Her work is premised on IE’s characteristic attention to how professionals interact with texts to bring into view “the organization of work activities that are involved in the production of involuntary admission cases across various sites of the medical and legal systems” (p.  98, emphasis ours). By paying close attention to the work that people do in various organizational sites to produce facts that find their way into medical texts and are subsequently used as a basis for expert opinions and judicial decisions, she broadens understandings of how medical knowledge is organized by medical institutions, but also how this knowledge is organized legally and socially (p. 108). Finally, Magdalena Ugarte (2021) clearly shows how ruling relations traverse across various institutions in her account of Indigenous dispossession in Chile. Ugarte looks closely at “the creation of a key governing text that regulates the Chilean state’s duty to consult” Indigenous peoples on

80 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

development projects and the ways the text organizes the action of government planners in relation to Indigenous peoples (p. 215). Notably, she recognizes how the development of the text “reveals how different forms of institutional dominance and power get enacted through the actions of government planners in the seemingly beneficial landscape of the international Indigenous rights discourse” (p. 231). Her work brings into view that Indigenous dispossession is the product of overlapping colonial processes (that have to do with planning practice, legal frameworks, economic development, and more) rather than a single institution.

Some Ways Forward To close this chapter, we offer some modest proposals for responding to the single institutional tendency in IE. The spirit of our efforts is suggestion rather than injunction. Inter-institutional linkages should not be positioned as some type of preferred object of institutional ethnographic analysis, nor will the field of IE benefit from proliferating required dimensions of IE inquiry. That said, the ruling relations that are the focus of IE research are unbounded phenomena. While there will always be practical, intellectual, and other limitations on the scope of IE studies, they should not discourage a practice of IE research that is open to, and prepared to investigate, linkages across institutions that are salient to the study of ruling relations from embodied locations. In our view, moving toward such a practice is a matter of the intersection of individual efforts of IE researchers; collective interventions in IE training, research design, and dissemination that reinforce existing IE approaches to researching across functional complexes; and closer connections between IE and intellectual movements that challenge the fragmentation of academic scholarship. We hope that the attention we have drawn to the single institutional tendency is interpreted by IE scholars as an invitation to become more open to the possibility of exploring inter-institutional linkages in their research. We imagine IE scholars pausing at those places in their research where people’s activities open onto other institutional sites and moving into them rather than retreating or closing off inquiry. The form that such research forays might take will, or course, depend on researchers’ individual interests, the particularities of their unfolding investigations, and the circumstances under which they work. As we have already indicated, the latter include centripetal forces that would constrain inquiry within subdisciplines and discrete areas of empirical inquiry. Disrupting those

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

81

forces will require creativity, strategy, and the careful act of balancing established career expectations with opportunities to conduct research that moves beyond the area in which one has been hired or the research mission of a professional faculty. Innovations in research design are one way forward. For example, George Smith recommended a strategy whereby successive research projects, pursued over time and with different funders, would provide institutional ethnographers an opportunity to deepen and extend their inquiries across institutional relations, building on what had been discovered in earlier stages.1 Alternatively, or in addition, researchers might create teams in which institutional ethnographers who work on different institutional sites collaborate with one another on a given project. Established IE networks and research communities can support research open to exploring the inter-institutional organization of ruling in several ways. Shifts in IE training that bring forward exemplars of such work and that explore methodological and conceptual supports for inquiry that reaches across institutional boundaries would be helpful. So too would changes in the organization of the dissemination of IE research. For example, at recent annual meetings of the SSSP we have organized sessions that invite institutional ethnographers to present research on how institutional practices intersect across functional complexes rather than on a single institution (Mykhalovskiy & Hastings, 2021, 2022). Encouraging institutional ethnographic research across institutions might also be supported by closer links between IE and trajectories of scholarship that are attuned to the complex, relational, and cross-cutting nature of contemporary forms of governance. Numerous possibilities suggest themselves.2 Drawing from our own experience, we offer three examples of how we have engaged with concepts from other fields of scholarship to support analyses of how ruling is coordinated across institutions. In our view, the question of IE’s relationship to other approaches to social inquiry is underexamined. We do not turn to concepts or approaches beyond IE because of any specific deficiency in IE’s conceptual apparatus. Rather, we orient to such concepts and literatures as resources that can sensitize institutional ethnographers to ways that IE is already equipped to examine how ruling relations cut across disparate institutions, and to support that trajectory of research.

82 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

Professional Writing Studies and Recontextualization In our institutional ethnographic research, we have drawn on approaches to the analysis of discourse developed within studies of professional communication (Bazerman & Paradis, 1991; Trosborg, 2000). We have found particularly helpful, work that attends to communication across discourse communities that recognizes how discourse is always “travel[ing] across situations” (Linell, 1998, p. 144). To home in on the mobile character of professional communication, Linell recommends the concept of recontextualization, which he defines as the “dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context…to another” (Linell, 1998, p.  144–45). The notion of recontextualization offers a vantage point to observe how professionals strategically select, endorse, edit, subdue, or silence parts of discourses “when information is recontextualized from one professional’s perspective to another’s” (Linell, 1998, p. 151; Solin, 2004). We have each drawn on the notion of recontextualization to put into view how fragments of discourses developed in one institutional context are selected, transformed, and used as resources to create meaning and drive action in a different institutional context. We find the concept useful for illustrating how professional writing practices hook up the work people do in a functional complex to the work that others do in different functional complexes. For example, in his work on HIV criminalization, Eric has employed the notion of recontextualization to underscore the circularity of public health and criminal law relations. He has explored how public health nurses counsel clients about their disclosure obligations with “an eye to the [criminal] law” and how their counseling notes have been subpoenaed in criminal proceedings and influenced judicial decisions in ways that extend criminal liability for HIV non-disclosure (Mykhalovskiy, 2011, p.  672). Colin has drawn on recontextualization to make visible how news reporters repurpose police communications documents as news media texts (Hastings, 2022). In both instances, the concept of recontextualization helped us to be mindful of how people move and process texts across functional complexes and how  these text-processing activities are central to accomplishing widespread textually-mediated social organization.

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

83

Medico-Legal Borderland In our ongoing research on HIV criminalization, we situate our work within a broad research analytic that Timmermans and Gabe have called the medico-legal borderland (Timmermans & Gabe, 2002). Timmermans and Gabe conceptualize the medico-legal borderland as a framework, situated between the fields of critical criminology and medical sociology, that supports interdisciplinary analysis of issues in which criminality and health and illness overlap. While prior work on the medico-legal borderland has focused on jurisdictional skirmishes between medical and legal domains, recent, important updates in this research area concentrate more on how forms of hybridity emerge wherein something new is produced through a blending of law and health (Jacob & Kirkland, 2020). In our work, we have oriented to the medico-legal borderland as a methodological concept to direct our ethnographic attention to forms of knowledge and professional activity that traverse public health, media, and criminal legal work sites.3 We have tried to show empirically how the criminal law governance of HIV non-disclosure is not the sole preserve of the criminal legal system but relies on a range of actors (police, public health authorities, medical professionals, news media organizations, community-based HIV advocacy organizations) whose activities are textually mediated across multiple institutional settings. The Relational Turn Institutional ethnographers might also find the relational turn in the social sciences a kindred intellectual location for inquiry concerned with inter-­ institutional connections that shape our world. While wide-ranging, with many distinctive features, actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour, 2007), new materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2016), and relational sociologies (Dépelteau, 2013; Powell & Dépelteau, 2013) share a focus on exploring complex and extended forms of association—conceptualized variously as assemblages, networks, interconnections, and relations—formed by human and, for some traditions and literatures, human and non-human actors. In an argument encouraging a broader awareness among institutional ethnographers about how translocal forms of coordination are organized, McCoy (2021) suggests that the warrant for exploring the things and places (beyond texts) that figure into contemporary forms of translocal coordination exists in IE’s materialist ontology, but

84 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

that institutional ethnographers nevertheless can benefit from reading contributions to the relational turn in the social sciences. We concur. Recently, Eric has found work in ANT and relational sociology helpful in thinking through the scope of an emerging study of the social organization of urban residential “nuisance noise.” A conventional institutional ethnographic approach to the study of urban noise might involve mapping how people’s experiences of urban noise, and their attempts to address it, are geared into the textual and institutional mechanisms of city governance and noise by-laws. The textual processes through which people’s experiences of noise from construction projects, neighbors, urban transportation, and other sources, are objectified as actionable complaints, and the resulting disconnections between experience and governance might be the focus of the analysis. Such an approach would privilege an established institutional ethnographic analytic focus on objectification and be limited to city governance as a functional complex. The notion of complex, heterogeneous, nonlinear forms of association involving multiple forms of coordination and varied actors—something far more developed in areas of research such as ANT than IE—has proven a source of inspiration for extending the boundaries of Eric’s study of nuisance noise beyond a single institution. It has also helped encourage thinking about noise as active in coordinating social relations alongside other forms of translocal coordination such as building design, that are not fully captured by IE’s understanding of texts. Curiously, reading through the relational turn has helped return Eric’s study of urban nuisance noise to a basic principle of IE research—studying how our worlds are “put together” through people’s activities across time and place—in ways that do not privilege an analytic focus on a single functional complex or on texts as the exclusive mediators of translocal social relations. What has followed is an attempt to understand the broad institutional, temporal, and sonic relations that tend to align for “noise” to emerge as such and “to matter” for people. Based on interviews conducted thus far, noise tends only to become an experience that bothers people when sonic phenomena of a particular volume, quality, and duration are audible. Such noise is often sourced in specific types of machines and mechanical devices (e.g., leaf blowers and jackhammers) and the arrangements that bring those machines into proximity with people’s dwellings. As a study centered in downtown Toronto, the noise that matters for people is produced through multiple large-scale condominium construction projects all occurring within a few city blocks. In that case, noise arises as a concern

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

85

for people when they are at home during times when construction is permitted. That co-occurrence is of course, produced by city-by-laws, building codes, and other mechanisms that govern noise temporally, but also the organization of labor markets, class, gender, and other arrangements that create opportunities for people to do their paid work at home or be retired from paid employment and that give them the financial means (e.g., installing soundproof windows) to mitigate noise. Thinking broadly, the social organization of noise, considered as  a complex of inter-­ institutional relations coordinated by more than texts, involves histories of land use within urban environments and the inter-institutional organization of the built environment, which draws upon architectural conventions, practices of design, and the operation of housing and financial markets that support the creation of large-scale multi-unit dwellings. It also involves the activities of realtors, developers, and the construction industry, the extended economic and other relations that organizes those activities, as well as fractious political developments that bring neighborhood associations into relationship with city politicians and bureaucrats, lawyers, developers, and the complex bureaucratic processes for approving new constructions projects.

Conclusion In this chapter we offered critical reflections on how the notion of institution is taken up and used in institutional ethnographies and interrogated the single institution tendency in IE. We began by describing what we see as the key differences between institutional ethnographies that investigate single functional complexes and those that examine how ruling relations reach across multiple functional complexes. We emphasized that while influential studies of single institutions offer valuable perspectives about how our lives are organized by the managerial settings of the public sector, critical scholars also highlight the potential for IE to illuminate how our lives are organized by ruling relations that connect (or fail to connect) various functional complexes. In the second section, we proposed possible ways we might account for the embeddedness of the single institution tendency in IE.  Rather than finding something lacking with the concept of “institution” itself, we propose that the single institution tendency is tied to how IE has developed as a research approach. While there are ways in which the academy organizes thinking around the study of single functional complexes, this also

86 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

presents exciting opportunities to foster spaces (in publications, at conferences, in our teaching) that encourage institutional ethnographers to think about how social relations traverse across multiple institutions. Third, we highlighted recent examples of research that expands the scope of IE by analyzing ruling relations that cut across functional complexes. The promising exemplars that we presented model approaches to IE that accentuate how people’s everyday experiences are organized by overlapping and intersecting institutional relations, as well as gaps between institutions. Finally, we suggested possible interventions for expanding IE beyond the single institution tendency. There are important exemplars and concepts in IE that can support thinking about widespread social relations, but institutional ethnographers can also borrow from other critical sociologies to uncover the mechanisms of interdependence that shape our social worlds. Overall, we hope this chapter contributes to scholarly discourse that help IE to continue to grow and adapt in order to investigate the broad, multi-sited, and rapidly changing translocal ruling relations that shape our everyday lives. We advocate a critical stance that conceptualizes IE as an open project that strengthens moves within the IE research community to explore relations across functional complexes and that places IE into conversation with other approaches to critical empirical social research.

Notes 1. Liza McCoy, personal communication. 2. Here we have in mind approaches to research such as actor-network theory, varieties of relational sociology and Indigenous scholarship dedicated to decolonizing research. Relationality is a central concept within Indigenous research. While settler institutional ethnographers can certainly look to Indigenous, decolonizing research for models of how to understand the world as relational, non-Indigenous scholars must also take tremendous care to avoid the tendency for, as trawlwulwuy scholar Lauren Tynan writes, “fragments of Indigenous knowledge [to be] extracted, assimilated and consumed by the settler” (Tynan, 2021, p. 604). The extraction, standardization, and over-simplification of Indigenous knowledge is reproduced when, for example, non-Indigenous scholars include “Indigenous scholarship and concepts in the methodologies section, without practicing those methodologies in the data collection, research design or ethical engagement with research participants” (605).

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

87

3. For other institutional ethnographic work examining borderlands where human services, legal, and medical institutions overlap see Pence (2001) and Turner and Bombrey (2021).

References Bazerman, C., & Paradis, J. (1991). Textual dynamics of the professions: Historical and contemporary studies of writing in professional communities. University of Wisconsin Press. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Duke University Press. Dépelteau, F. (2013). What is the direction of the “relational turn”? In C. Powell & F.  Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing relational sociology: Ontological and theoretical issues (pp. 163–185). Palgrave Macmillan. Doll, A. (2020). Work, facts and the textual organization of psychiatric admission: Insights from institutional ethnography. In M. A. Jacob & A. Kirkland (Eds.), Research handbook on socio-legal studies of medicine and health (pp.  93–109). Edward Elgar Publishing. Eastwood, L. E. (2006). Making the institution ethnographically accessible: UN document production and the transformation of experience. In D.  E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp.  181–197). Rowman and Littlefield. Eastwood, L. E. (2018). Negotiating the environment: Civil society, globalisation and the UN. Routledge. Eastwood, L. E. (2021). Using institutional ethnography to investigate intergovernmental environmental policy-making. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  193–211). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_12 Fishberg, R. (2022). Thinking with transnational institutional ethnography: Moving towards spatially conscious methods for studying geographically dispersed people and institutions. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, 1–10. Fox, N.  J., & Alldred, P. (2016). Sociology and the new materialism: Theory, research, action. Sage. Grace, D. (2013). Intersectional analysis at the medico-legal borderland: HIV testing innovations and the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure. In A.  R. Wilson (Ed.), Situating intersectionality: Politics, policy, and power (pp. 157–187). Palgrave Macmillan. Hastings, C. (2019). The social relations of disclosure: Critical reflections on the community-based response to HIV criminalization. In E.  Mykhalovskiy &

88 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

V. Namaste (Eds.), Thinking differently about HIV/AIDS: Contributions from critical social science (pp. 278–302). University of British Columbia Press. Hastings, C. (2022). Writing for digital news about HIV criminalization in Canada. Canadian Review of Sociology, 59(2), 181–199. Hastings, C. (Forthcoming). Newswork and policing beyond the police: The social organization of digital knowledge about HIV criminalization. University of Toronto Press. Hastings, C., Massaquoi, N., Elliott, R., & Mykhalovskiy, E. (2022). HIV criminalization in Canada: Key trends and patterns (1989-2020). HIV Legal Network. Jacob, M. A., & Kirkland, A. (2020). Research handbook on socio-legal studies of medicine and health. Edward Elgar Publishing. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-­theory. Oxford University Press. Linell, P. (1998). Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse. Text and Talk, 18, 2, 143–157. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (2006). Standardizing childrearing through housing. Social Problems, 53(3), 299–331. McCoy, L. (2006). Keeping the institution in view: Working with interview accounts of everyday experience. In D.  E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnogrpahy as practice (pp. 109–124). Rowman and Littlefield. McCoy, L. (2021). Materialist matters: A case for revisiting the social ontology of institutional ethnography. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  35–46). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_3 Mykhalovskiy, E. (2001). Troubled hearts, care pathways and hospital restructuring: Exploring health services research as active knowledge. Studies in Culture, Organizations, and Societies, 7, 269–296. Mykhalovskiy, E. (2011). The problem of significant risk: Exploring the public health impact of criminalizing HIV non-disclosure. Social Science and Medicine., 73, 668–675. Mykhalovskiy, E. & Farrell, K. (2005). ‘Nothing happens in medical school that prepares you for working with anyone who’s different:’ Exploring informal learning and the development of socio-clinical knowledge amongst family physicians. Research in the Sociology of Health Care, 23, 161–183. Mykhalovskiy, E., & Hastings, C. (2021). Reflections on institutions, social relations, and the “relational” in institutional ethnography [conference presentation]. SSSP 2021 Annual Meeting, online. Mykhalovskiy, E., & Hastings, C. (2022). Mapping intersections across institutions [conference panel]. SSSP 2022 Annual Meeting Los Angeles, CA, United States. Mykhalovskiy, E., Hastings, C., Comer, L., Gruson-Wood, J., & Strang, M. (2021). Teaching institutional ethnography as an alternative sociol-

  REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE SINGLE INSTITUTION… 

89

ogy. In P.  C. Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  47–65). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_4 Mykhalovskiy, E., Sanders, C., Hastings, C., & Bisaillon, L. (2020). Explicitly racialised and extraordinarily over-represented: Black immigrant men in 25 years of news reports on HIV non-disclosure criminal cases in Canada. Culture, Health, & Sexuality, 23(6), 788–803. Namaste, V. (2006). Changes of name and sex for transsexuals in Quebec: Understanding the arbitrary nature of institutions. In C. Frampton, G. Kinsman, A. K. Thompson, & K. Tilleczek (Eds.), Sociology for changing the world: Social movements/Social research (pp. 160–173). Fernwood Publishing. Nichols, N. (2014). Youth work: An institutional ethnography of youth homelessness. University of Toronto Press. Pence, E. (2001). Safety for battered women in a textually mediated legal system. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7(2), 199–229. Powell, C., & Dépelteau, F. (Eds.). (2013). Conceptualizing relational sociology: Ontological and theoretical issues. Palgrave Macmillan. Rankin, J., & Campbell, M. (2006). Managing to nurse: Inside Canada’s health care reform. University of Toronto Press. Rankin, J., & Campbell, M. (2009). Institutional ethnography, nursing work and hospital reform: IE’s cautionary analysis. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10(2), 1–20. Smith, D.  E. (2002). Institutional ethnography. In T.  May (Ed.), Qualitative research in action (pp. 17–52). Sage Publications. Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. AltaMira Press. Smith, G. (1990). Political activist as ethnographer. Social Problems, 37(4), 629–648. Smith, G., Mykhalovskiy, E., & Weatherbee, D. (1990). Getting hooked up: An organizational study of the problems people with HIV/AIDS have accessing social services. A research proposal prepared for National Welfare Grants and Health and Welfare Canada. Solin, A. (2004). Intertextuality as mediation: On the analysis of intertextual relations in public discourse. Text and Talk, 24(2), 267–296. Timmermans, S., & Gabe, S. (2002). Introduction: Connecting criminology and sociology of health and illness. Sociology of Health & Illness, 24(5), 501–516. Trosborg, A. (Ed.). (2000). Analysing professional genres. John Benjamin. Turner, S., & Bombrey, J. (2021). Building change on and off reserve: Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  283–308). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_16 Tynan, L. (2021). What is relationality? Indigenous knowledges, practices and responsibilities with kin. Cultural Geographies, 28(4), 597–610.

90 

C. HASTINGS AND E. MYKHALOVSKIY

Ugarte, M. (2021). Regulating the duty to consult: Exploring the textually mediated nature of Indigenous dispossession in Chile. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  213–235). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_13 Weir, L., & Mykhalovskiy, E. (2010). Global public health vigilance: Creating a world on alert. Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Institutional Ethnography and Feminist Pedagogical Praxis Nancy A. Naples and Ashley N. Robinson

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a powerful tool that simultaneously requires engagement at a variety of levels: epistemological, political, practical, and methodological. As Dorothy Smith has long argued, it is a different kind of sociology, one that does not start in abstraction but in the everyday lives of people engaged in the various and far-reaching tasks of living. Yet, it does not remain narrowly focused, but through close examination of the everyday world it opens up to the complex ways “relations of ruling” (Smith, 1987) organize the seemingly mundane tasks associated with work, family, education, politics, and health care, among other arenas that shape our lives. More importantly, IE starts from and further reveals the interconnectedness of all these arenas of social life and offers a rich basis to identify strategies for social change, which is inherent in both its origin and goals. Nancy first discovered Dorothy Smith’s writing in a radical bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was the now famous essay titled

N. A. Naples (*) • A. N. Robinson University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_6

91

92 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

“Sociology for Women” (Smith, 1979) suitably presented in pamphlet form. It was exactly what she needed to make sense of the abstracted world of Sociology. It came to her just as she was trying to figure how she fit into graduate school after reluctantly leaving her social work and advocacy efforts to find answers to the obstacles faced in an attempt to make change that would improve the lives of the young pregnant teens and teen mothers she was working with through a non-profit organization in New York City Ashley came to her PhD studies from a long engagement in student services that began when she was still an undergraduate. She joined Nancy’s Qualitative Methodologies class offered in the Department of Sociology in search of training that would move her research forward with the goal of contributing to antiracism praxis in educational settings. Her response to IE was one of discovery of a new way to conceptualize and investigate the gap between policy and practice, goals and outcomes, and, more importantly, to prevent further harms to students who were experiencing racist harm on campus. She took to IE like many students in Nancy’s classes and, of course, made it her own. Nancy and Ashley, while differently situated within the academy, found themselves teaching and learning IE in large neo-liberal research universities that emphasize efficiency through standardized curriculum development that left no room for the development of courses with more specialized topics. In Nancy’s case, in over thirty years of graduate education, she was never able to offer a course that was entirely focused on IE.  As a result, Nancy introduced IE in a general qualitative research methods course in which she covered a wide array of qualitative approaches. Consequently, she was unable to devote no more than one or, at most, two classes to IE. Most sociology students she taught did not take up IE as a mode of investigation for their MA or PhD research, although, she found, many did produce studies that were informed by IE as an epistemology, if not a methodology. For those who were also drawn to the power of IE methodology for their research, Nancy provided either focused individualized studies or a list of recommended readings to deepen their knowledge about IE. Most of these students were in the fields of education and social work, and, in these cases, Nancy was invited to serve as an Associate Advisor on their committee where she also found that one of her major roles was to explain IE to other committee members to legitimate it as a research framework. This pedagogical role was made easier as the archive of IE papers, edited

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

93

books, and sole authored monographs expanded. In Ashley’s PhD coursework in the School of Education, the emphasis was primarily on quantitative approaches, reflecting the increasing reliance on research funding that rarely supported qualitative faculty and students in the school. As a student in the process of applying IE, Ashley was, therefore, also placed in a pedagogical role explaining how she was applying the framework. This, in turn, pushed her to be more articulate in explaining what she was doing and why. In the next section Nancy reflects on Dorothy Smith’s commitment to her pedagogy and mentoring and then provides a brief overview of developments in the growing literature that enhanced her training tools and her students’ understanding of IE praxis. She then highlights how three of her students took up IE for their MA and PhD research. In the latter part of the chapter, Ashley shares her experience in adapting IE for her PhD study.

Nancy’s Reflections Dorothy Smith as Feminist Pedagogue and Mentor Dorothy’s career in academia was shaped by a yearning to understand the social world that did not end in an abstract and often inaccessible publication or report. Rather, she argued for the goal of understanding the social world in order to change it. This fundamental feature of IE is especially appealing to students who enter academia to gain knowledge and epistemologies that are useful for activist goals. She also valued her role as teacher and mentor. She conducted classes and workshops and advised students well into her 90s and continued to publish works designed as pedagogical research tools (see, e.g., Smith & Griffith, 2022). She saw these goals as intertwined as she learned from her students as well as imparted her own insights to them as they helped reshape or deepen her articulation of IE praxis. The value she placed on mentoring is evident in everything she did including co-authoring many papers and books with former students and co-leading workshops for faculty and other students who were also searching for another way to produce knowledge that was not abstracted or dispassionate. It is telling that on the CV she shared with me in 2004, when she was invited to work with other IE practitioners and Dorothy’s mentees on a workshop she organized at the University of Connecticut (UConn), she listed her PhD students and their dissertation titles before her publications.

94 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

At the mini-conference, entitled “Analyzing Relations of Ruling: The Next Generation,” Nancy invited researchers from Canada and the United States who used the IE framework to study the construction and implementation of various social policies and institutions in different national contexts. Nancy’s graduate students from the UConn and the University of California, Irvine, who were adopting institutional ethnography as a basis for their dissertation research, were paired with Dorothy and senior scholars Marjorie DeVault, Alison Griffin, Lauren Eastwood, and Tim Diamond (1992) as discussants of the students’ research. Dorothy took great pleasure in the intellectual growth and success of all her students as well as offered her mentorship to other students and faculty, like myself, in other universities. Like her, I love seeing students who are searching for a way to make Sociology and sociological analysis as meaningful as they thought it would be when they entered graduate school find IE and create rich studies that contribute to the broader collective project of developing an activist sociology for people. Dorothy used every opportunity to mentor in whatever venue she found herself. I remember many a late afternoon tea following sessions at the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) where Dorothy reflected on the presentations and the general and particular take-aways from the varied papers and threads that ran through them. She would ponder some of the complexities and contradictions of these threads and discontinuities with thoughts on where to go next to further clarify and establish IE as a form of critical praxis. Another mentoring insight from Dorothy is that we never do academic work alone. Along with her many students, Dorothy created a vibrant international IE community. It is amazing to chronicle how IE as an activist approach to sociological analysis has grown from Dorothy’s early epistemological and methodological critique to inspire collective, interdisciplinary, and international collaborations that have led to an ever-­ expanding archive of research and teaching tools. Resources for Teaching IE: A Pedagogical Textual History The number of publications that can be drawn upon for teaching IE and for guiding new researchers has grown substantially over the years since Dorothy published her first book in 1987. When I began teaching IE in my graduate qualitative seminars in the late 1980s there were few books available that addressed the ways that IE could be implemented as a

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

95

methodological practice. Dorothy’s foundational essay, “A Sociology for Women,” (1979) critically posited the limits of the androcentric traditions of sociological research and set out to articulate the tenets of a sociology for women (subsequently, redefined as “a sociology for people”) that begins in everyday life. In her first book, entitled The Everyday World as Problematic, (1987), she further developed her approach and included several case studies that illustrated the power of starting in the everyday world. I continue to draw on this important text in teaching to provide students with a foundation for understanding the epistemology that informs IE. The naming of the framework as “Institutional Ethnography” first appeared in the mid-1980s (Smith, 1986). This goal had been part of an ongoing conversation among Dorothy and her students for some time, but until the late 1980s, no framing adequately worked to capture the core features of the approach. In adopting IE as a name for the framework, Dorothy also understood how important this was for helping to legitimize her approach in academia and as a resource for students and faculty who were taking up her approach. I found it particularly useful in working with students in other departments whose advisors were unfamiliar with Dorothy Smith as an eminent scholar who was internationally known for her “studies in the social organization of knowledge with roots in the women’s movement, Marx[ism], phenomenology, and ethnomethodology” (Grahame & Grahame 2007, p. 1). During the 1980s, researchers, scholar activists, and teachers of IE had the added benefit of dissertations published by Dorothy’s students thus expanding the number of topics addressed [see, for example, Campbell (1984),  Griffith (1984); DeMontigny (1989), Manicom (1988), Kinsman (1989), Mueller (1987), and Ng (1986)]. Dorothy’s students continued to produce dissertations in the 1990s and beyond that reflected the deepening understanding IE for feminist praxis. In this vein, one of the most important dissertations that I used both in the classroom and in my mentoring was produced by Dorothy’s student Ellen Pence (1996) who examined how textual and related practices of police departments contribute to making battered women less safe. From this research Ellen developed what she called a “community audit” that was designed to bring all the relevant actors who are involved in a domestic violence case together to get a clearer sense of how the different actors work with texts in a way that increases rather than decreases risk for women and their families. Ellen captures the motivation for using IE that reflects the motivations of many of my students who adopted

96 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

IE. Ellen explains that “choosing her [Dorothy’s] work was not so much the result of a careful examination of the many alternative research methods as it was a commitment to the political possibilities that her method of ethnographic studies offers activists like myself” (1996, p. 8). As a prominent figure in the battered women’s movement, Ellen’s work with Dorothy built on her own insights generated from her activist work and found IE well-suited for social change efforts. In the early 1980s and prior to pursuing her graduate education with Dorothy, Ellen cofounded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (see, https://www.theduluthmodel. org/; Pence, 1983). She subsequently founded Praxis International in 1998 that drew on insights from IE to assess, analyze, and address the institutional failings that increase the vulnerability of people in their interactions with law and social services as a result of violence and poverty (https://praxisinternational.org/). The 2000s was a watershed decade for the publication of books on IE that further elaborated the approach and provided tools for students who were new to the approach. Two books stand out as invaluable teaching tools: Marie Campbell and Frances Gregor’s highly accessible text that walks a student through the process of producing an IE project entitled Mapping Social Relations: A Primer in Doing Institutional Ethnography (2004) and Dorothy’s Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005). The mid-2000s also brought forth another book that I have often used as an exemplar by Lauren Eastwood (2005).1 Lauren produced a powerful IE analysis that draws on UN Forest Deliberations to highlight the significance of even one word on shaping international forest policy. Many of my students of IE worked in the area of global governance, social welfare, and education. This work is brought together in another useful pedagogical tool edited book by Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith (2015) and titled Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-Line Work that fleshes out and demonstrates threads across these diverse areas and others as it details the practices of new managerial strategies to bureaucratically organize and control institutions that include “new accountability regimes, cutbacks in the public sector, and the decline of professional autonomy” (p. 8). With little exception the expansion of the number of edited collections derived from thematically developed workshops, conferences, and sessions sponsored by the workshops held by Dorothy and her students as well as the SSSP, and the International Sociological Association (ISA). Through

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

97

the advocacy of IE practitioners and SSSP members, the society established a division on Institutional Ethnography in 2005, and the ISA created a new research group on IE in 2011. SSSP is an especially important site for new scholars that also features long recognized leaders in the field. It is also a place where my students from education and social work feel welcome and, in that way, fosters an interdisciplinary venue as well as a strong mentoring tradition. One of the two most important recent publications is The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography, co-edited by Paul Luken and Suzanne Vaughan (2021). The Handbook chronicles the growing international and interdisciplinary field written by some of the top IE researchers including an essay by Dorothy and cutting-edge work by new scholars who are taking IE research into new directions. I look forward to drawing upon the work included in this text to further deepen my students’ IE training. The most recent book in this archive, entitled Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People, is co-written by Dorothy and her former student and frequent co-author Alison Griffith (2022). Their book outlines the origins of the field and further fleshes out the approach as informed by decades of activist scholarship shaped by IE.  This book leaves us with a final legacy of these powerful feminist scholars that will inform pedagogical praxis for decades to come. As is clear from this textual history, new scholars and instructors now have a plethora of research tools and exemplars to learn from and build on as they take up IE praxis. Despite the rich archive IE remains a work-in-­ progress in which diverse studies call forth ways of seeing the methodological, theoretical, and practical challenges to implementation of the IE approach. This could be said for any new research project. However, from an IE perspective the local context requires situated knowledges for effective research design and implementation to bring the extra-local into view. I also discovered over many years of teaching that students who brought their own experiences and questions from local engagements in a variety of different institutions and organizations were more likely to be drawn to IE than students whose research questions were less grounded in their local actualities. In the next section, I highlight experiences of three of my former students who produced IE-informed dissertation projects to illustrate these insights.

98 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

Conceptualization and Key IE Concepts One of the major challenges in teaching IE is to introduce and explain the different ways that concepts that appear to be everyday terms are taken up by IE researchers in ways that differ from the taken-for-granted understandings. This includes “the problematic,” mapping, work, texts, and discourse. Dorothy also introduced new concepts such as “the relations of ruling” that she offered as a foundational concept for IE analyses. As the IE archive grew, these concepts were further elaborated so that graduate student educators and new IE researchers had a clearer idea of what is meant by each of them. In this section I discuss six different concepts that are now central components of IE analysis: ruling relations, the problematic, work, mapping, discourse, and texts (Smith, 1987; Campbell & Gregor, 2004; Smith & Turner, 2014). One of the most fundamental concepts that draws students into Dorothy’s framework is “the relations of ruling” which offers a powerful way to examine the ways in which local experiences are shaped by processes and discourses generated by systems and relationships far the particular social location. In The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), Dorothy included several case studies that illustrated the power of starting in the everyday world to reveal “the relations of ruling” that shape everyday life. She explains that: “When I write of ‘ruling’ … I am identifying a complex of organized practices, including government, law, business, and financial management as well as the discourse in texts that interpenetrate the multiple sites of power” (p. 3). Another concept that students grappled with in their effort to implement IE is that of “the problematic.” Marie Campbell and Frances Gregor (2004) explain that “the problematic in institutional ethnography is not the problem that needs to be understood as an informant might tell it, or as a member of an activist group might explain it. It is not the formal research question either” (p. 47). What I have noticed in advising students producing an IE study is that coming to discover the problematic is experienced somewhat like an “a-ha moment” of discovery where seemingly disparate experiences and concerns are brought into view in a way that links these local experiences to a wider set of concerns that were less visible. The concept of “work” is a third concept that plays a significant role in IE which is often conflated with more colloquial usage of the term. This is well-illustrated in a book that I strongly recommend to my students, Feeding the Family by Marjorie DeVault (1991). This is a fascinating study

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

99

of the work that mothers do in feeding the family that is often invisible to them as well as other family members. Marjorie’s analysis builds upon the insights of Dorothy’s early research with her former student and close collaborator Alison Griffith (1990a, 1990b) on the hidden work that women perform to support the school curriculum, and how these expectations are shaped around social class. As Dorothy’s explication of IE research deepened in dialogue with her students and other IE practitioners, she developed a number of tools and research strategies that advanced the research design and analytic power of IE. “Mapping” was one of the most valuable tools for visually depicting “the ruling relations and specifically the institutional complexes in which they participate in what every fashion” (Smith, 2005, p. 51). However, it is not something that students easily understand from the start. However, there are now wonderful resources that help students further interrogate the processes involved in producing an IE map (see, e.g., Campbell & Gregor, 2004, Rankin, 2017a). Dorothy explains that mapping is a tool for visually depicting that begins with “a particular spot.” She compares the IE map as similar to one in a mall “with its arrow pointing to a particular spot accompanied by the words YOU ARE HERE!” (p. 51). Rankin (2017) explains further: In mapping work, the ruling relations are first tracked from the local work of people into the work of other people. Then, the goal is to lay out a display of what is happening (the map), either in words or diagrams, that describes the features of the social practices and their respective material forms and relationships. (n.p.; also see Campbell & Gregor, 2004, for a more extended discussion and exemplars)

In the next section my students illustrate the importance of mapping for their studies and how flexible it is for adapting IE to their own research context. “Text” is another term that holds a central place in IE analysis. Dorothy understands “texts” as venues to examine how to investigate “aspects of power operating in social life that otherwise lie hidden and mysterious” (Smith 1990, quoted in Campbell & Gregor, 2004, p. 31; also see McCoy, 1999; Smith & Turner, 2014). Campbell and Gregor (2004) further explain:

100 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

If people handle and process the same texts, they find their actions coordinated by the requirements of working with the text. That is how a text has the power to coordinate and concert – to hold people to acting in particular ways. On the other hand, people who do meet face-to-face and think they are relating to each other as individuals may not recognize how, without their knowing it, their actions are also being shaped by texts. (p. 32)

In her discussion of her IE analysis of anti-racism policy and practices in higher education, Ashley illustrates below how she defined and effectively marshalled textual analysis and its significance as a locus of relations of ruling. “Discourse” is another term that is challenging for students to distinguish the IE understanding of the term from its more colloquial use which is often a stand-in for talk or conversation or the post-modern Foucauldian understanding. Regarding Foucault’s use of “discourse,” Dorothy distinguishes her understanding of discourse in IE from Foucault’s as follows: In Foucault’s work and in work taking up his approach, for example, the notion of discourse designates a kind of large-scale conversation in and through texts… For Smith, discourse refers to a field of relations that includes not only texts and their intertextual conversations, but the activities of people in actual sites who produce them and use them and take up the conceptual frames they circulate. This notion of discourse never loses the presence of the subject who activates the text in any local moments of its use. (DeVault & McCoy, 2002, p.  772, n. 2). [Quoted in Campbell & Gregor, 2004, p. 40)]

I do include explications of all three of these understandings in my graduate methodologies courses, but I strongly recommend students consult Dorothy’s and her students’ discussions to further their understanding. In the next section, I highlight the work of three of my former students who have been informed by and worked to make IE their own in their dissertation research. They draw upon and implement different aspects of IE and adopt it to their own research questions and illustrate how they applied the concepts outline above in their own process of IE analysis.

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

101

IE Praxis: Three Case Studies As mentioned, despite all the wonderful resources, workshops, and sessions offered by SSSP and ISA, among other venues, IE as a praxis is best understood through the implementation process. IE often challenges many of the tenets taught in most other methods courses and focuses more on strategies that investigate phenomena that are not in plain sight which results in uncovering the threads of the relations of ruling in everyday life (see, for example, Kendrick 2008). As Karen Kendrick (2004) notes about her appreciation of IE: In traditional ethnographies the researcher immerses themself [sic] in a particular social world (a tribe, a street corner, a hospital) and attempts to understand that world from the point of view of local members. In institutional ethnography the researcher still attempts to understand the social world from the point of view of local actors, but deliberately explores outside the boundaries of specific social institutions in order to understand how our everyday lives are patterned and directed by the intersection of multiple social institutions. (Campbell & Manicom, 1995; Smith, 1987, p. 259)

Karen defined her goal as explicating how “multiple institutions help women learn what it means to have cancer, what their options are for treating the disease and what they can do to mitigate the side effects of treatment” (Kendrick, 2004, p. 259). As she delved into the links between the discourses and the practices of care workers and women cancer survivors’ experiences, Karen made IE her own in a way that reflected the particular ways in which she entered the research setting. In Karen’s case, I recall us discussing the distinction that I have come to make between doing an IE study and being inspired by IE. Karen became aware of the Look Good Feel Better (LGFB) program that became the focus of her study, through her mother’s experience as a breast cancer survivor. Karen utilized her personal standpoint to explore the heteronormativity of the discourse and representation of women’s cancer diagnosis and approach to the institutional pressure to look good in order to feel better. Karen’s study clearly built on Dorothy’s interest in the work that the discourse of femininity does in contouring women’s experiences (see Smith, 1990). As Karen explains: “Through an analysis of my participant observation data and textual material used in the LGFB program I found that the dominant discourse on health and femininity used in image programs like this constructs ‘normal’ women as heterosexually feminine and,

102 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

other than the ‘temporary’ problem of cancer, not disabled” (Kendrick, 2004, p. 263). Karen focused on the constructions of femininity as well as the privileging of whiteness, and the neoliberal individualist approach to illness and health care embedded in the LGFB program. Karen explained in the LGFB program’s marketing and implementation: “In reality, the imagined patient is both white and middle-class, and psychosocial programming for women with cancer is shaped simultaneously by these factors (as well as sexuality and ability/dis-ability)” (Kendrick, 2004, p.  88). Karen draws upon her mother’s experience to highlight both the anti-disability and illness denial in the following: “My own mother’s oncologist never once talked about the cancer in her body, but only the ‘spots on her X-rays’” (Kendrick, 2004, p. 267). The social construction of the disembodied patient also resonates with the way in which students are viewed as unencumbered in higher education despite family or work demands, among other things, that shape their lives. As a young mother in graduate school, Laura West Steck (2006) was struck by the ways in which higher education presumed an unencumbered student. Before beginning her dissertation, she started a support group for other student-parents like herself. She drew upon the conversations and experiences interacting with parents and her own efforts to advocate for support services for other student-parents for her dissertation research. Laura begins her dissertation by locating her position as a new mother during her second year of the PhD program and the decision to have a second child while she was working on her dissertation. A third child was born shortly after she completed her dissertation. At the time, there were no policies for parental leave for students at the UConn and since students are reliant on research and teaching assignments, she had to draw on the informal support of faculty members but also on her own ability to return to work as quickly as possible. She had more flexibility as a research assistant during the semester her first child was born, but as a graduate instructor she found it necessary to return to work only one week after the birth of her second child. Her own experience motivated her to reach out to identify others dealing with the complexity of juggling graduate studies work assignments and parenthood. In many ways, graduate students did have somewhat more flexibility in managing demands of parenthood than undergraduate students. As an instructor, Laura began to consider how much less flexibility undergraduate students have in this regard. When choosing a dissertation topic, she decided to explore the problematic of

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

103

“how the institutional organization of higher education coordinates and constrains the lives of undergraduate college students with children” (Steck, 2006, p. 1) and how these students negotiate these challenges in their everyday lives. Laura creatively developed a multi-level strategy of interviewing that she found best served her needs in the study. She first described how her approach was a way to operationalize her understanding of Smith’s approach to “work” and “work processes.” She describes how she drew upon IE’s conceptualization “of ‘work’ in the analysis of people’s experiences within institutional settings, institutional ethnography interviews are designed to get at the ‘work processes’ that constitute social and material relations within a given institution (DeVault & McCoy, 2002; Smith, 1987)” (Steck, 2006, p. 34). Another feature of Dorothy’s approach that stood out for Laura was the conceptualization of “the social.” She came to understand that: “‘The social’ emerges from people’s activities and interactions with one another, as well as from the conferral of meaning to everyday life; that is, the meanings people apply to action and interaction, to themselves, and to those around them” (p. 2). Following the IE framework, Laura emphasizes that: “Local decision- and meaning-making processes do not occur in a vacuum” but that they “are coordinated by extra-local proceedings that occur beyond the visible scope of everyday interaction” (Steck, 2006, pp. 24–25). In order to make this evident Laura discovered the importance of mapping which, as she explains: Building an institutional ethnography requires the researcher to piece together the multiple, cumulative sketches of institutional experience emerging from the entry-level data to construct a map of social relations. This mapping process systematically identifies the channels through which local-level, everyday experience is regulated, organized, and coordinated by broader power relations within a given institution. (Steck, 2006, p. 28)

Laura generated a map of the “social organization of everyday life among student-parents” that helped shape her analysis. In this way, Laura was able to offer a list of recommendations for institutional change including ways to expand access to higher education for student-parents through changes in educational support services, curricular design, and welfare reforms.

104 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

Both Karen and Laura had the opportunity to meet Dorothy during challenging times in their dissertation process at the workshop I organized at the University of Connecticut. Laura explained the powerful impact of Dorothy’s mentoring in a setting where there were numerous others and faculty present. I met Dorothy at perhaps the most opportune time in my mission to tackle and complete my research. The advice she offered was delivered at a critical moment, and her reassurance gave me the confidence I needed to “keep keepin’ on.” Dorothy let me know that the dissertation is not the culmination of my life’s work as a sociologist, but rather a steppingstone to an expansive career that will move far beyond my dissertation work. (Steck, 2006, p. 279).

In thinking back to the time when she was developing her dissertation research, Laura noted that although she did follow her own path in constructing and analyzing the data for her dissertation, “Dorothy’s guidance has helped give shape to future directions of my (and others’) research on the social and material organization of everyday life among undergraduate students with children” (Steck, 2006, p. 279). Lauren also was present at the UConn mini-conference. She was considering a topic that had not received much attention in the sociological literature; namely, “the routinization of prophylactic neonatal male circumcision” (Ross, 2009, p. 1). She was drawn to the topic when considering the lack of options she observed from discussions with new parents in her own family and friendship network. In recalling her meeting with Dorothy at the conference when she was in the early stages of defining her dissertation, she shared that Dorothy was not convinced that this topic was applicable to an IE project. However, Lauren did see merits in understanding the gendered dynamics of male circumcision, the “central role” that “women often play … in this decision and in the maintenance of this practice in the US” (Ross, personal communication, August 15, 2022). She also pointed out “that it also directly affects women who engage in sexual activity with men” (Ross, personal communication, August 15, 2022). She went on to discuss her concern about the practice of female genital cutting and, as she recalled explaining to Dorothy, “we must necessarily consider the overlap in practices, reasons, and discourses” with male circumcision. However, Lauren concluded, “I don’t think she bought into my argument, though!” (Ross, personal communication,

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

105

August 15, 2022). Despite this interaction Lauren was inspired by IE to examine how institutionalized policies and processes in hospitals and constructions of male sexuality contours new parents’ decisions regarding circumcision. She further explains how “the intersection of hospital settings and popular conceptions of male circumcision shape newer (albeit rehashed) discussions of hygiene, medicalization of ‘normal’ body functions, disease prevention, and even bodily aesthetics” (Ross, 2009, p. 1). Through ethnographic observations and interviews with patients and health care professionals in two different hospital settings (a public and a private hospital) she also discovered that: “Both groups of people simultaneously uphold and challenge existing popular beliefs regarding the procedure, and it is these conflicts that bring to the surface inconsistencies in official policy, traditional, cultural, and religious beliefs, and personal feelings” (Ross, personal communication, August 15, 2022). Lauren also examined the work of anti-circumcision activists and highlighted the debates between differently positioned groups within this movement and the tensions between medical professions and the activists. As with other IE-informed dissertations I supervised, Lauren also includes recommendations for changes in hospital consent practices including the time provided parents to consider their options. While recognizing the power of non-medical and cultural factors such as normalized notions of penile aesthetics, religious beliefs, and family tradition, she did identify a number of specific steps that hospitals could take to improve the decision-­ making context. Therefore, Lauren’s study uncovered both the complexity of parents’ decision-making around male circumcision and how hospitals can provide a better context to thoughtfully consider all the factors even if cultural and social factors ultimately taken precedence over medical decision-making. In the next part of the chapter, Ashley discusses how she adapted and expanded on IE praxis for her dissertation entitled Responding to Racist Harms: An Institutional Ethnographic Study of Antiracist Work in Student Affairs (2022). As a result of her situated knowledge and detailed analysis, she too made IE her own and enhanced the approach through her incorporation of critical whiteness epistemology.

106 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

Learning by Doing: “Responding to Racist Harms”: Ashley’s Reflections In my dissertation study (Robinson, 2022), I used an IE approach that was informed by a critical whiteness lens to examine frontline student affairs educators’ attempts to do antiracist work when responding to racist harms. Whiteness is embedded in the culture, climate, and ecology of colleges and universities through taken-for-granted norms that minimize and avoid the contours of systemic racism (Cabrera et  al., 2017; Gillborn, 2005). Student affairs, as a subfield in higher education, is no exception to the influence of discourse of whiteness (Bondi, 2012; Cabrera et  al., 2017). Given this, even practices that aim to address racism may be drawing on ideas and practices that perpetuate white supremacy and uphold systemic racism, by individualizing notions of racism and casting race-­ evasiveness as good and desirable (Annamma et al., 2017; Cabrera et al., 2017; Iverson, 2007; Patel, 2015). I was drawn to IE because of how it examines the actualities of people’s everyday work to understand the social organization of the institutions of which they are a part. An IE approach allowed me to closely examine how the discourse of whiteness was actualized in the institutional ideas and practices that student affairs educators took up as they talked, wrote, and used texts in coordinating their own and others’ activities. As a novice institutional ethnographer, implementing IE during my dissertation study was a pedagogical praxis in which I learned how to do IE along the way, assuming the roles of both student and teacher. That is, I was in a position to learn about IE through Nancy’s teaching and mentorship, to engage IE texts as teachers in my own journey of experiential learning, and to teach others on my advisory committee about IE through my doing IE research. Furthermore, by situating my inquiry in my own experiences and standpoint, doing IE involved reflecting on my experiences, my data, and analysis to move my project forward in an iterative process. A cycle of reflection and action based upon data collection and analysis, reading and writing, allowed me to embrace an openness to being changed by the practice of IE and to change IE by my doing it (refer to Fig. 6.1). I conceptualize my IE journey as a cycle because of the iterative and reflective nature of my experience. I completed the steps in this cycle many times in varying orders over two years, with each phase including reflection, integrating knowledge about IE, and action.

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

Teaching about IE through research practice/ writing

107

Reflection on my practice from the standpoint as a researcher)

Research activities (data collection, analysis, writing)

Learning about IE (courses, texts, experiential)

Descisions about research design Fig. 6.1  My cycle of doing IE

In this section, I reflect on my experiences of using IE to study responses to racist harm in U.S. higher education and how conducting my study was an experience in pedagogical praxis. I focus on three phases of the above cycle of pedagogical praxis: • how IE drove reflection on my practice from the standpoint as an educational practitioner; • how my experience of data analysis was an exercise in experiential learning; and • the role that teaching others about IE played in my research experience. My aim is to illustrate for novice researchers some of the ways that conducting IE can be enhanced by conceptualizing the research process as one of learning and teaching.

108 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

Doing IE as a Reflection on Standpoint Experiences My study began in my own experiences as a student affairs educator responding to racist incidents, specifically within the process of developing and implementing a protocol to respond to incidents of identity-based bias on-campus. I used my experience of tensions and contradictions as data to identify the disjuncture involved in frontline response to racist harms. However, as a white woman, I have not personally experienced racist harm incidents. My understanding of this experience as a researcher was limited by my social identity, just as it limited my work as a practitioner. Racially minoritized participants in this study were often personally affected by the racist harm incidents to which they responded. They may have related to the incidents based on prior experiences or have actually been a target of the incident at hand. I came to understand through my IE research how I have acted in racially harmful ways toward students and colleagues, knowingly and unknowingly perpetrating some of the types of harms that were the interest of my study. Given this, I sometimes saw myself reflected in recounting of racist harm incidents or in the recounting of harmful responses to those incidents. Drawing on the feminist practice of reflexivity (England, 1994), I engaged in continuous self-reflection and self-interrogation to work through and engage my own racial discomfort and racial bias. My interactions as a researcher were also mediated by my relative “insider” position in matters of university policy, incident response, and student behavior management. As a former student affairs educator, I occupied a position close to that of many administrators involved in responding to incidents. I found that my knowledge and professional acumen in the field enhanced my ability to connect professionally with informants—indeed, it was a foundation of my IE approach. At the same time, as a doctoral researcher, I was no longer on the frontlines, doing the difficult daily work that I researched. My own memories of such work were incomplete, and my experiences were different from those of the informants in the study. Again, my reflexive practice pushed me to foreground the actual, everyday experiences of frontline informants, deepening my understanding of how white supremacy and racism contoured their work from the local to the extra-local context.

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

109

IE Analysis as Experiential Learning Conducting analysis within my IE study challenged my understanding of what exactly IE was and how to do it. Before I began my research, I was able to reliably draw from my coursework, books, and articles on IE to propose a study that drew on the IE tradition while reflecting my unique experiences, research interests, and epistemological commitment to critical interrogation of whiteness. However, the IE analytical process of uncovering disjunctures, identifying a problematic, and explicating ruling relations was largely abstract until I began doing it. During this time, re-­ engaging IE texts, including Campbell and Gregor’s volume (2004), Rankin’s two papers on conducting institutional ethnography (2017a, 2017b) and Dorothy Smith’s (2006) Institutional Ethnography as Practice proved invaluable. I often found myself “memoing” on what I felt were “basic” IE concepts. My memos included reflecting on the following questions: • What exactly are ruling relations? • What am I mapping? • How do I get from disjunctures to ruling relations? • How do actors matter? Rather than viewing these questions as a crisis of confusion about IE, revisiting core concepts during analysis helped me to foreground the actualities of the research as I was doing it and assisted me in breaking down the analytical process into specifics. Now that I was working with actual people’s experiences and texts, any abstractions I came into the research with necessarily needed to be stripped away. Terms that I had discovered through my reading such as: identifying disjunctures, formulating the problematic, examining data using the problematic, and explicating ruling relations came to life through the iterative analytic process. As I proceeded with each step of my analysis, it became clear that my task was not only to apply the various strategies and ideas of IE to my data to gain new insights and findings. Rather, my task was to use the strategies and ideas of IE to transform my own perspective and understanding of institutional social relations that I, too, was embedded in. Each of the data analysis techniques I used fed into and informed each other, clarifying and bringing me closer to articulating the ruling relations that socially organize the work of frontline informants. No single step resulted in

110 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

identifying the ruling relations, but the iterative process of mapping, writing accounts, returning to the data to index, creating a more detailed map, writing another account, and so on clarified the ruling relations over time. Making the analytical shifts within an iterative process required continually transforming my understanding of the social world around me to focus my analytical lens on “what was actually happening,” shedding my own internalized institutional knowledge along the way. This transformation and learning allowed me to explore how common and normalized ideas and practices within U.S. higher education institutions systematically prevented accountability for pervasive racist harms and created a dead-end for institutional change and alternative response practices. Doing IE as Pedagogical Praxis Research mentorship from Nancy was essential to my implementation of IE and without her teaching, I would not have been introduced to the approach at all. However, Nancy was not my major adviser, and IE was novel not only to me as a graduate researcher, but to most members of my dissertation committee and other faculty in my school of education. Given this, I had the task of teaching others about IE as I learned how to do it. Given that IE is a growing but still relatively new approach to inquiry (Rankin, 2017a), many other graduate researchers interested in using IE may be faced with a similar challenge. From writing my dissertation proposal to my oral defense more than two years later, I found myself continually communicating what I was learning about IE to audiences who were evaluating my work and unfamiliar with this approach. I often found myself wishing that everyone just knew about IE so that I could skip the teaching and get right to gaining feedback that I knew was relevant to my chosen methodology. However, even when I had to return to books and articles for hours at a time to revisit core concepts of IE, I was motivated by a sense of responsibility to IE. This sense of obligation required a unique balance: staying true to what IE is “supposed to be” without being overly prescriptive or rigid in my conceptualization of my research. I needed to be confident enough about core tenets of IE such as explication of ruling relations, textually mediated social organization, and not abstracting data to theory, that I could teach others about these ideas while maintaining openness to feedback and critique.

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

111

The teaching and explanation that I did through my dissertation research improved others’ understanding of IE and ability to evaluate my work in a more nuanced way. However, I believe that the more significant impact of teaching others about my research was that it improved my own learning, understanding of IE, and integration of IE into my research activities and scholarly identity. I could not teach others what I was unable to understand myself, therefore I was pushed toward greater clarity in my decisions about designing my research and conducting analysis. Each time I had to explain IE to a member of my committee or another graduate student, that pedagogical act translated into improvements in how I wrote up my methods and my findings.

Conclusion The pedagogical and research journeys we chronicle here are intertwined and provide different windows into the ways in which IE praxis has the potential of changing the world around us as well as our approach to research and activist scholarship. The later fulfills Dorothy’s primary goal outlined as early as 1974; namely, to transform how we think about and conduct sociological research (Smith, 1974). The iterative process is reflective and interactive and, as a result, it is open to revision and diverse modes of adaptation that expands its application across fields both inside and outside of the academy (Naples, 2003). The growing archive of IE work has been especially valuable to instructors and students like us who do not have the institutional support for more in-depth IE  training in courses and for students in other departments. However, given the local and activist context for many research projects that draw on IE, it is also clear that with basic understandings of this approach, students and other researchers have produced important work that offer powerful insights about how the relations of ruling contours and is resisted in everyday life. IE praxis is further enriched by mentorship and ongoing collaborations of student, teachers, and practitioners. These engagements also change IE praxis itself as insights and lessons we teach each other through peer mentorship, workshops, and contributions to the written archive expand what can be understood as IE praxis as well as the many other forms of critical praxis that are inspired by it. The power of IE derives from its origins in the feminist social movement as well as from Dorothy’s passionate personal commitment to resist the disciplining and conservatizing tendency of academic sociology. Her

112 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

decades-long persistence in this endeavor is exemplary, but as important here is the passion through which her students and others who engage with IE praxis continue to embrace, implement, produce new insights through their research, and adapt this significant epistemology and methodology in innovative ways.

Note 1. Lauren’s book was published in the Routledge Book Series “New Approaches in Sociology: Studies in Social Inequality, Social Change, and Social Justice.” Nancy served as academic editor for the series.

References Annamma, S., Jackson, D.  D., & Morrison, D. (2017). Conceptualizing color-­ evasiveness: Using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society. Race and Ethnicity in Education, 20(2), 147–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2016.1248837 Bondi, S. (2012). Students and institutions protecting whiteness as property: A critical race theory analysis of student affairs preparation. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 49(4), 397–414. https://doi.org/10.1515/ jsarp-­2012-­6381 Cabrera, N. L., Franklin, J. D., & Watson, J. S. (2017). Whiteness in higher education: the invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses. ASHE Higher Education Report (Vol. 42). https://doi.org/10.1002/aehe.20116 Campbell, M., & Gregor, F. (2004). Mapping social relations: A primer in doing institutional ethnography. Rowman & Littlefield. Campbell, M. L. (1984). Information systems and management of hospital nursing: A study in the social organization of knowledge. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Campbell, M. L., & Manicom, A. (1995). Knowledge, experience, and ruling relations: studies in the social organization of knowledge. University of Toronto Press. De Montigny, G. (1989). Accomplishing professional reality: An ethnography of social workers’ practice. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. DeVault, M.  L. (1991). Feeding the family: The social organization of caring as gendered work. University of Chicago Press. DeVault, M. L., & McCoy, L. (2002). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In J.  F. Gubrium & J.  A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context and method (pp.  751–776). Sage Publications.

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

113

Diamond, T. (1992). Making gray gold: Narratives of nursing home care. University of Chicago Press. Eastwood, L. E. (2005). The social organization of policy: An institutional ethnography of UN forest deliberations. Routledge. England, K. V. L. (1994). Getting personal: Reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research. The Professional Geographer, 46(1), 80–89. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.0033-­0124.1994.00080.x Gillborn, D. (2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy: Whiteness, critical race theory and education reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20(4), 485–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930500132346 Grahame, P., & Grahame, K. (2007). Institutional ethnography. In G.  Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (pp. 1–4). John Wiley & Sons. Griffith, A. I. (1984). Ideology, education and single parent families: The normative ordering of families through schooling. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Griffith, A.  I., & Smith, D.  E. (Eds.). (2015). Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. University of Toronto Press. Iverson, S. V. D. (2007). Camouflaging power and privilege: A critical race analysis of university diversity policies. Educational Administration Quarterly, 43(5), 586–611. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X07307794 Kendrick, K. (2004). Health, beauty and femininity: An institutional ethnography of cancer services for women. [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https://www.proquest. com/disser tations-­t heses/health-­b eauty-­f emininity-­i nstitutional/ docview/305217708/se-­2 Kendrick, K. (2008). “Normalizing” female cancer patients: Look good, feel better and other image programs. Disability & Society, 23(3), 259–269. https://doi. org/10.1080/09687590801954042 Kinsman, G. (1989). Official discourse as sexual regulation: The social organization of the sexual policing of gay men. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (Eds.). (2021). The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1 Campbell, M.  L., & Manicom, A., (Eds.). (2015). Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge. University of Toronto Press. Manicom, D.  A. (1988). Constituting class relations: The social organization of teachers’ work. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. McCoy, L. (1999). Accounting discourse and textual practices of ruling: A study of institutional transformation and restructuring in higher education. [Doctoral

114 

N. A. NAPLES AND A. N. ROBINSON

thesis, University of Toronto]. TSpace Repository. https://hdl.handle. net/1807/12792 Mueller, A. (1987). Peasants and professionals: the social organization of women in development knowledge. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Naples, N. A. (2003). Feminism and method: Ethnography, discourse analysis, and activist research. Routledge. Ng, R. (1986). Immigrant women and the state: A study in the social organization of knowledge. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Patel, L. (2015). Desiring diversity and backlash: White property rights in higher education. The Urban Review, 47, 657–675. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11256-­015-­0328-­7 Pence, E. (1983). The Duluth domestic abuse intervention proj ect: Toward a coordinated community response to domestic abuse. Hamline Law Review, 6, 247–280. Pence, E. (1996). Safety for battered women in a textually-mediated legal system. [Doctoral thesis, University of Toronto]. TSpace Repository. https://hdl.handle.net/1807/10972 Rankin, J. (2017a). Conducting analysis in institutional ethnography: Analytical work prior to commencing data collection. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917734484 Rankin, J. (2017b). Conducting analysis in institutional ethnography: Guidance and cautions. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1). https://doi. org/10.1177/1609406917734472 Robinson, A. N. (2022). Responding to racist harms: An institutional ethnographic study of antiracist work in student affairs [Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut]. University of Connecticut Digital Collections. http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:860706881 Ross, L. M. S. (2009). Contradictions in power, sexuality, and consent: An institutional ethnography of male neonatal circumcision [Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https:// www.proquest.com/dissertations-­t heses/contradictions-­p ower-­s exuality-­ consent/docview/250934013/se-­2 Smith, D. E. (1974). The ideological practice of sociology. Catalyst, 8, 39–54. Smith, D. E. (1979). A sociology for women. In J. Shemman & F. Beck (Eds.), The prism of sex: Essays in the sociology of knowledge (pp. 135–187). University of Wisconsin Press. Smith, D. E. (1986). Institutional ethnography: A feminist method. Resources for Feminist Research, 15(1), 6–13. Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D.  E. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Northeastern University Press.

6  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS 

115

Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Rowman and Littlefield. Smith, D. E. (2006). Institutional ethnography as practice. Rowman and Littlefield. Smith, D. E., & Griffith, A. (1990a). What did you do in school today? Mothering, schooling and social class. In G.  Miller & J.  Holstein (Eds.), Perspectives on social problems (Vol. 2, pp. 3–24). JAI Press. Smith, D. E., & Griffith, A. (1990b). Coordinating the uncoordinated: Mothering, schooling and the family wage. In G. Miller & J. Holstein (Eds.), Perspectives on social problems (Vol. 2, pp. 25–43). JAI Press. Smith, D. E., & Griffith, A. I. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography: Creating a sociology for people. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E., & Turner, S. M. (Eds.). (2014). Incorporating texts into institutional ethnographies. University of Toronto Press. Steck, L.  W. (2006). Gender and parenthood in postsecondary education: The social organization of everyday life among undergraduate students with children. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/ dissertations-­theses/gender-­parenthood-­postsecondary-­education-­social/ docview/305322004/se-­2

PART III

Critical Commentary on Ruling Relations and History

CHAPTER 7

Revisiting the Ruling Relations Marjorie L. DeVault

This chapter combines my interest in “the ruling relations” as an element in Dorothy Smith’s sociology1 with my use of an institutional ethnographic way of thinking to make sense of recent happenings that have troubled me. I begin with some observations about Smith’s conception of ruling relations. Then I turn to a discussion of “puzzles” that I’ve recently been considering through an IE lens. I mean to offer a modest reflective chapter, and also to discuss ideas about the ruling relations that I hope others might find useful as they work in their own ways with institutional ethnography.

Introduction It’s sometimes difficult to make sense of what’s happening around me. I’m here, wherever that may be, and I see only glimpses of the worlds of others. I talk to people, I follow the news, I’m often told (by friends or experts) what it all means, and I try to think it through. Sometimes, I find

M. L. DeVault (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_7

119

120 

M. L. DEVAULT

my “IE sensibility” (see B. Solomon, ch. 2, this volume) coming to the fore. While institutional ethnography is usually thought of as a sociology meant to guide formal research, it is at heart a tool that anyone can use for exploring the social relations—the “ruling relations”—that produce people’s experiences. It is a way of thinking that may help me make sense of what I’m experiencing. Along the way to establishing institutional ethnography as a sociology, Dorothy Smith conducted many small investigations of the vocabularies and ideas that organized people and their activities. She suggested that scholars should “botanize” concepts, finding specimens and then examining closely how concepts work, where they come from, how people use them, and where concepts take us, whether or not it’s where we intend to go. These small investigations are focused, but conducted with an awareness that vocabularies and discourses are located in ruling relations, expansive webs of interconnected activities, where people are busily generating, revising, connecting, promoting, and resisting concepts and discourses, sometimes very strategically, and sometimes without attending to them closely. Smith sometimes spoke about the interesting challenges of presenting a specifically located analysis that is also expansive—charting the ruling that is done from afar—and “open at the edges.” She would remind listeners of the maps one might find along a hiking trail in a state or provincial park—a map that displays the full area of the park, with a “you are here” label, and a “magnified,” more detailed map of the immediate surroundings, presented in its own circle or box. An IE analysis, grounded in specific local experiences, is the counterpart to that magnified map, carrying with it an awareness of the broader (ruling) terrain. I rely on this metaphor in presenting what follows.

Foundations: A Brief Review of the Ruling Relations 1) An institutional ethnography is meant to be anchored in and by the experiences and activities of some person or people living in their local and everyday worlds. The analysis is meant to reveal what’s not readily available, from that vantage, to be seen, understood, and confronted. In order to do that work, the analyst looks at entry points to institutional relations, and then more broadly toward “the ruling relations.” Crucially, the investigation includes not only the

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

121

most conspicuous “rulers,” those with formal power, at the top of the heap. It must also include all those whose work underpins ruling activities, whose work is essential but unacknowledged. There are many, many people operating the ruling relations—bringing them into being—whether they do that in lofty or menial roles. 2) Ruling is not an abstraction. When Smith developed the idea of ruling relations (or a ruling “apparatus”), she was pointing toward a vast, complex web of institutions, knowledges, and practices that are located in time, place, and history. In keeping with the ontology of institutional ethnography, the ruling relations are comprised of people who are actively at work, doing ruling. And although I emphasize people’s activities, the ruling relations include people’s knowledge as well, including the vocabularies and conceptual shells, the discourses and ruling ideas, the ideological codes, and so on, that are embedded in talk and texts that guide and coordinate their work. 3) I’ve said above that the ruling relations are located in time, and they are therefore always in flux. There is work within the ruling relations to transmit and codify ideas and there is also revision and contestation over ruling ideas and practices. Recognizing this turbulence in the ruling relations is part of what makes IE an approach that allows us to apprehend and explore changes as they are happening. Dorothy Smith’s writings on the ruling relations are in part historical, and the narratives she develops are the backdrop for her institutional ethnographies. 4) Finally, the ruling relations are regionally and nationally specific. Certainly, one can identify common, transnational frameworks and practices, often seeping into local lives and practices as they are imposed by global leaders and power brokers through the institutional technologies they promote. But ruling relations must connect locally to institutional practices and therefore emerge and evolve in forms that are specific to different places, political entities, and parts of the world. Karin Widerberg (2020, p. 22) has discussed this kind of specificity in relation to the management of academics’ work in Norway. When she shared findings about a complex system for the “accounting of hours” of academic labor, her colleague from the U.K. exclaimed, “That would never work with us!” Reflecting on this response, Widerberg suggests that in Norway, “welfare ruling” in the name of fairness and equality has been instituted through a

122 

M. L. DEVAULT

partnership of politicians and educators, and she sees a willingness, especially in education, to be ruled for the good of all. She doesn’t mean, of course, that there’s no ruling power in the society or that educators cannot see and sometimes resist the management of their work. But she suggests that, as neoliberal accounting practices have come to Norwegian universities, reforms may have been implemented more smoothly than elsewhere—with an easier route to legitimacy—and perhaps more pervasively and insidiously. The point is that there are multiple histories of ruling relations, as they have emerged in different areas. With these observations in place, I turn from ruling relations for the moment and present the first of two accounts of disturbing moments that called up my IE sensibility. I will return to a deeper consideration of ruling relations as I develop the second of these reflections.

You Are Here, 2016 In Smith’s early writing, before “IE,” one finds fascinating analyses that juxtapose accounts of what someone actually did or saw—she calls these accounts primary narratives—with the authoritative accounts that draw people into something larger. In these early articles, she was exploring the operation of language and discourse, focusing on how daily living is transformed as we name it. The language of telling and naming worms its way into consciousness, and the gaps between lived actuality and a socially organized account of “what happened” often produce feelings of unease, frustration, or anger. The “documentary construction of reality” involves two socially organized processes. Telling what happened is a process of inscription; it is a process in which lived actuality is “worked up” into shared language, often using the vocabularies of ruling institutions. The activities of hearing or reading accounts are also socially organized, involving a process of “reading through” language to a “virtual reality” that subsumes and reorganizes what is directly known (Smith, 1990, p.  72, Fig. 3.1). The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States, I went off to the “Women’s March” in Boston. I came home energized, with a sense of hope, wondering about what I’d witnessed and what it might become. The phrase “what actually happened”— a phrase I recalled from The Conceptual Practices of Power (Smith,

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

123

1990)—kept coming to mind. One week after the women’s marches, I was watching (on TV—live, but mediated) the large protests that arose at airports around the U.S. in the wake of Trump’s first attempt to implement a “Muslim ban.” I was uneasy, frustrated, and angry. I felt that I was headed into a tumultuous period of multiple happenings, tellings, and readings, and I wondered if the IE way of thinking about the social organization of knowledge could help me make some sense of it. So, what “actually happened” on January 21, 2017? (Not January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated, but the day after that.) Here is a bird’s-eye (or drone’s-eye?) view: Millions of people gathered in cities around the United States and the world to protest the outcome of the U.S. election, in demonstrations meant to signal resistance to the agenda of this administration and to offer an alternative vision of social justice. And here is (one brief telling of) my own “lived actuality,” in bullet points: as soon as I heard of the march, some short time after the election (via email? or Facebook?), I vowed to attend at least the sister march nearby (in Boston); I was pleased to learn that a multi-ethnic organizing team was taking shape; I read the broadly progressive platform, with a sense of relief; I got there; I marched; I marveled at the spirit and wit on display; and then I returned home, wondering what had actually happened. In the days that followed, I read and contemplated the accounts of others. I reveled in the celebratory stories and photos; I dismissed conservative warnings against “identity politics”; and I considered the reporting on the marches and analyses of whether and how this resistant energy could be channeled politically (e.g., many commentators were asking, don’t the women’s marchers need a policy program?). I was also shaken by some personal, critical accounts that women of color posted on Facebook. As I began to write this chapter, the Washington Post was featuring (in the “Style” section) critics of the march who saw it as no more than White privilege on display; White women are allowed to march “peacefully,” they argued, in ways that people of color—especially African Americans—are not (Ramanathan, 2017). I know that mine was a white body that stood and marched on January 21, and I’ve come to understand better my White complacency that was assaulted by the campaign, election, and inauguration that preceded that day. It does seem true, what I’ve heard some women of color say about (liberal) White women’s feelings: I didn’t get my way! and as a result, I’m shocked, a bit unmoored, and struggling to overcome a new sense of powerlessness.

124 

M. L. DEVAULT

“Not getting my way” is perhaps a bluntly inelegant formulation. I don’t have a specific reference; I believe it’s a phrase I heard (more than once) on the radio (though it could have been Facebook). There were other, more nuanced discussions of the issue. But that phrase hooked me. I didn’t take it literally, as only about the outcome of a head-to-head contest between two flawed candidates. I didn’t think the speaker was claiming that Black women had some innate insight or that no White women could ever be allies. I “read through” the comment to hear it as another moment in the history of tensions between Black and White women in the U.S. women’s movement. As I hear it, “not-getting-my-way” is shorthand for something more diffuse—it reveals (to me, at least) a broader comfort in the world that I now see I’ve been taking for granted (what I called earlier my complacency), and it asks me to examine a sense of fear and vulnerability that is new to me but not to people of color. (That’s not a new reminder, either, but one that I seem to require again and again.) Listening, over the following weeks, I also began to see more clearly than before that I’m part of an “elite.” I heard pundits discussing the President’s call for law enforcement officials not to be “too nice” to criminals—for example, by protecting the head of a suspect being taken into custody and placed in a vehicle for transport. “Elites,” I’m told by a Trump supporter on the Sunday morning news, may hear this statement as condoning “police brutality,” but “ordinary Americans” know that President Trump is simply concerned about “coddling dangerous criminals.” Of course, it’s not only “elites” who know brutality when they see it, and I notice that in that formulation, those who are most vulnerable to police mistreatment are simply not acknowledged as part of the conversation. That discussion was just one of many instances which make clear that conservatives and liberals in the U.S. (like Whites and people of color) have learned two very different practices of “reading through” the “facts” in order to know “what actually happened.” People learn how to read the facts from the media, from friends on Facebook, from Twitter, I guess, and from many other “watering holes” for like-minded souls. People also make sense of the facts and produce these virtual realities of “what’s actually happening” from their diverse histories, as well as the accounts they give of themselves and those they hear from others—in the way that I brought a history of conversation among feminists to the idea of “not getting my way.” Sometime later, as I stood out at the busy traffic circle in our area with a small group of other “resisters”—it was a women’s march-­ sponsored day of action on health care—one man made a point of

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

125

stopping his car by the roadside to yell that we were “crybabies.” That’s a construction that was easy for me to dismiss; it hooks me only as a point of anthropological curiosity. But I saw how some people have learned to read through to that version of “what’s happening,” and I’m sure it felt compelling and true for the shouting man. I was often dismayed and alarmed in 2016, frightened of “normalizing” the nation’s predicament and wondering what that would look like in my daily life. I hung onto hope that “the rule of law” would prevail. I felt some optimism about the ways that people were enacting democratic resistance, as well as some anxiety that “resistance” was becoming a brand. I noticed that I’d picked up new ways of talking. One day, I heard myself joking about needing to “figure out what the hell is going on”—the phrase that Trump used continually during the 2016 campaign as justification for his proposed Muslim ban—experiencing an internal squirm even as I heard it materializing in my voice. Such formulations seem to be the “scraps” of discourse that the linguist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) tells us we’re constantly picking up. I worry that I’m enlivening and sustaining a discourse I want to oppose. Or maybe I’m twisting and transforming these utterances in a more positive way, using them to create a sense of solidarity with like-minded others. I know for sure that I am, like others, caught up in conversations based on the diagnostic “shells” that gather up and organize people’s accounts of what has happened. How might I understand these ideas and vocabularies that I and others take up so easily and that serve such complex purposes? Could they be embedded, perhaps hidden, in the ruling relations?

Writing the Ruling Relations When Smith wrote explicitly about “the ruling relations,” she wrote historically, drawing on historical accounts in order to sketch broad trends in social organization. I’m thinking of her long essay on women, family, and class (1985); a book chapter on the rise of corporate governance (1999); and discussions about the rise of “new public management” in the public sector (2005, 2014). These writings informed and buttressed her institutional ethnographies—the work she undertook with Alison Griffith on mothering and schooling (Griffith & Smith, 2005), and the work of Smith’s students and others during the 1990s and early 2000s on new public management in the public sector and its consequences for

126 

M. L. DEVAULT

professional workers in the human services and their clients (Griffith & Smith, 2014). Smith’s essay on women, family, and class traced processes of industrialization/urbanization, and the ways that middle-class women began to be educated and positioned as caregivers/educators, responsible for reproducing class relations through particular forms of family life. With Alison Griffith, she discovered and analyzed a “mothering discourse,” positioning mothers as solely and ultimately responsible for their children’s welfare (Griffith & Smith, 1987). Thinking about the place of single mothers in that discourse (there wasn’t a place, in fact), she developed the notion of an “ideological code”—the pervasive foundational model of a ”Standard North American Family” (two parents with children, and economic means to support a middle-class life)—naming it to call up the metaphor of a genetic code, which embeds itself invisibly in the tissue of life and expresses itself powerfully as just the way it is (Smith, 1999). I can’t know for sure exactly how these ideas and methods developed for Smith, but I imagine she was tacking back and forth, exploring her own and other single mothers’ experiences, reading and thinking about family and class relations, looking again at the accounts of those she talked with, and so on. With that kind of process in mind, I turn back to my own puzzlements in the next section and consider an account of ruling relations—specific to the U.S.—that I believe may be helpful to my understanding of recent events and the political discourses surrounding them. It is an account that speaks to the particularly racialized history of the United States.

You Are Here, 2022. Since 2016, I’ve lived through four years of fear and disgust, then two more of hope and disappointment; a global pandemic (handled quite badly in the U.S.); brutal police killings of African Americans and inspiring anti-racist activism; gut-wrenching backlash; an attack on the U.S. Capitol building … and … well, once again it’s not so easy to say “what’s actually happening” now, as I continue to write—in the run-up to a nail-biter of a midterm election in which democracy itself seems in peril. As I’ve watched events in my country, I’ve been puzzled by deep and persistent resistance to basic public health measures. I’ve been moved by the huge multiracial crowds protesting the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and dismayed though unsurprised as that energy gradually subsided, alongside newly

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

127

heightened rhetoric about crime and calls for law and order. I’ve struggled to understand conservative resistance to any action to mitigate climate change or the passage of commonsense gun safety legislation. And I’ve been frightened by the increasing visibility and resurgence of White nationalist militia groups. I’m asking now not only “what actually happened,” but how these things can be happening. Of course, there’s more … and, of course, it’s clear that my sense of what’s happening is thoroughly mediated by the news I consume and the people I talk with. If I lived in a right-wing discursive world, I might speak of riots rather than protests, of a “deep state’s” attempts to abridge the rights of citizens, and of patriots rather than extremists. How do these discursive frames arise, and how do they change? In the remainder of this section, I offer an account of ruling relations in the U.S., informed by new—or more accurately, recovered or deepened—knowledge of the history of the nation. I draw on an article by Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015), in which she proposes the framework of “settler colonialism” as a basis for analyzing race and gender formations in the U.S. Glenn’s stated purposes are a bit different from mine; one of her goals is a theoretical synthesis of race/gender frameworks in U.S. sociology. We share other purposes; she is interested in moving beyond our Black/White binary and making knowledge that can support workable coalitions among different racial/ethnic groups, for example. In any case, the reason I think her work fits well with an IE approach is that it is historically grounded: she’s developing an account of “what has actually happened” in the U.S. She doesn’t call it an account of ruling relations, but I will read it through that lens— or at least as a discussion that institutional ethnographers might use to understand ruling in settler colonialist nations, and especially in the United States. Glenn draws on the framework of settler colonialism—developed and elaborated by scholars of indigenous studies, and others—to examine how some now-powerful nations were founded. Glenn and others posit that settler colonialism is a distinct formation. Unlike classic colonial conquest, in which the conquerors aim to use resources in the colony to the benefit of the metropole—and to return there, eventually—settler colonists intend to stay. They bring families and they claim land and resources in order to make a new home. It’s a pattern found in several parts of the world, with broad similarities but playing out in distinct historical pathways. Citing Patrick Wolfe, Glenn notes that she sees settler colonialism “not as [just]

128 

M. L. DEVAULT

an event, but as an ongoing structure.” As she says, “The logic, tenets, and identities engendered by settler colonialism persist” (Glenn, 2015, p. 57). I will not explicate all the details of Glenn’s account, but I’ll point to how she proceeds. Drawing on historical scholarship, she outlines brief histories of what settler colonialism has meant for different subjugated groups in the U.S. She begins with the settlers’ intention to occupy the land and their consequent near-elimination of indigenous populations, through violence, enslavement, forced assimilation, and related practices. She goes on to consider the exploitation of the labor of enslaved Africans, in the system of slavery underpinning the new colony’s economic development. She also discusses two other groups—Chinese and Mexican workers—who were recruited as laborers, but restricted in various ways over time, and deported or barred from entry when not needed. She does not present a complete history, but still produces a powerful and compelling sketch. Glenn (2015) suggests that these practices are linked through “a private property regime that converted people, ideas, and things into property that could be bought, owned, and sold” (p.  69). She also argues that settlers began to develop a national identity based in masculine whiteness and a “mythologized common experience of settlement” (p. 60). Part of that mythology is an erasure of history—a denial of the violence underpinning settler lives. It is these comments on national identity that spurred me to think about settler colonialism as a foundational element in the ruling relations of my country. As I’ve thought about my ancestors as settler colonialists, for example, Glenn’s article has focused my attention on the strange version of “liberty” that White settlers held onto, and all that they had to ignore in order to justify their hard-won lives in a new country. Her account provided insight into how it could be that White male authority has become so tenaciously significant for many. I’ve thought about White resistance to racial justice projects, and also about White conservative resistance to public health measures like masking and vaccination during the pandemic—in the name of “freedom.” I’ve also noticed some Black resistance to vaccination mandates that is historically rooted—in 2021, Boston’s acting mayor, Kim Janey (a Black woman), expressed reluctance to impose a vaccine mandate, referencing concern about impacts on communities of color and a history of having to “show our papers” (McDonald, 2021). (She faced criticism from other Black leaders and quickly said she regretted having “used those analogies,” which “took away from the

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

129

important issue of ensuring that our vaccination and public health policies are implemented with fairness and equity” [McDonald & Andersen, 2021]. To speak or not to speak about historic injustice often seems a catch-22 for leaders of color.) In a more personal vein, when Paul Luken read a first draft of this chapter, he reminded me of the Westerns that constituted so much of the television diet of our childhood; that reminder called up all the hours I spent in my “cowgirl” outfit, galloping around the neighborhood on a broomstick horse, inhabiting the imaginary space of one with the authority, and duty, to demand papers in the name of protecting those like me. I have barely begun to think through the meaning and significance of the settler colonialist framework, but I feel that I can see and understand more than before about my everyday experience of these turbulent recent years—troubling even despite my privileged life in a solidly liberal part of the country. I begin to see how the cruel worldview of contemporary ultra-right activists in the U.S. may be rooted in a “settler” sense of rights to property and power, as well as the duty to protect against any usurpation of that hard-won supremacy. I can detect a gendered aspect of that worldview as well. In the personal incidents I discussed above, I was accused of being spoiled and a “crybaby”—insults that infantilize and feminize. My husband Bob reminds me that when we both stood out in 2018 to protest the Trump administration’s policy of family separation at the border, he carried a sign that read “Trump brings shame on U.S.” No one called him a crybaby, but a passing motorist—a woman—took the time to stop and yell at him, “You’re the one who should be ashamed!” Ashamed of what? I think now that she saw him as a man who refused to protect “us” against “them,” who wasn’t doing his patriotic duty. I do hope and believe that movement toward justice is possible—and yet in the struggle to achieve that, it’s clear that most White Americans are dragging along with us some very powerful ways of thinking that may get in the way of fundamental changes. For now, I continue to follow the news, engage in small forms of resistance I can see and access, and wonder what others may make of these ideas. My “IE antennae” are still active; as many practitioners discover, it’s impossible to retract them.

130 

M. L. DEVAULT

Discussion: Implications for Institutional Ethnographers In this section, I’ll outline my suggestions for institutional ethnographers: 1) First, and perhaps most obviously, I offer a reminder that there is history behind, underneath, and around our ethnographic ­investigations. When IEers focus on a ruling text that seems to control institutional practices, it is a text that has emerged from a context, the product of large developments in economic organization and often contested ideologies. It is useful to know about those developments, and to be aware of ideologies that have won out for the moment, as well as those that have been set aside (but rarely eliminated). Some institutional ethnographers have incorporated historical accounts into their analyses, and I’ll discuss a few of them briefly below in order to open some analytic possibilities. 2) I do not mean to insist that institutional ethnographers should all become historians. Instead, I am simply encouraging an awareness of how the ruling relations emerge and change. What’s most important, I think, is that we seek out accounts that are consistent with the IE ontology: accounts that include people, make clear what people have done in the past, and help us find the kinds of laws, policies, and organizations that produced ruling ideas and have carried forward discourses from the past even as things have changed. 3) I believe that it is quite important to recognize contestation as a feature of the ruling relations, and a very consequential feature at that. We have important exemplars of work that makes such ideas central. I think of Gillian Walker’s (1990) research on early feminist activism; she recounts how feminist activists in Canada (and elsewhere) began to work locally in the 1970s to put the issues of “battered women” on the civic agenda. As more experts and policymakers entered the conversation, activists fought to preserve the focus on women, as the issue was gradually translated into a problem of “family violence,” taming the gender analysis of early years. I also learned a great deal from Lauren Eastwood’s (2005) research on activist interventions at the UN forest policy negotiations; as soon as policymakers accepted “sustainability” of forests as a goal, timber interests began to wrestle with activists over what kinds of plantations would be counted as sustainable.

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

131

4) Placing concepts and discourses in historical context seems especially important for the studies of IE researchers focusing on racialized lives and experiences. Among the early generation of Smith’s students (represented in Campbell and Manicom’s 1995 volume, Knowledge, Experience, and Ruling Relations), for example, Himani Banerji (1995) and Roxana Ng (1995) offer discursive analyses of the racialized foundations of “British India” and Canadian ­“multiculturalism,” respectively. Ng locates the Canadian discourse of multiculturalism in the challenges of governing in a particular moment. Focusing on an address to the House of Commons by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1971, she demonstrates that multiculturalism is not a naturally occurring thing or fact, but rather a constructed policy drawing on the work of intellectuals and put in place by governing officials in order to address tensions of the era. The construction that Trudeau puts forward allows for the recognition not only of the historically dominant English and French “nations” of Canada, but also the other cultural groups struggling for voice and recognition. It is a policy program that will offer cultural “freedom,” but in a context of bilingualism, which sets forth the two official languages of Canada as the space of Canadian unity. Elsewhere, Ng (1993) examines the earlier period of Canada’s founding and the “nation-building” period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She discusses the role of indigenous peoples in the early conflicts between the “two nations” of English Canada and Quebec, and then (drawing on the writing of feminist historian Barbara Roberts) the ideology and practices of forced assimilation that were part of the production of the “human nation” (p. 55) And she points to the continuing significance of the ideologies of White and male supremacy that promote a form of “national unity” based in bilingualism but with limited space for indigenous cultures and those of newer immigrants. Ng emphasizes that these ideologies appear as “common sense,” but that they are actively produced as such; they are choices made in the process of ruling and tied to specific policies and the bureaucratic practices of ruling. Her accounts are of particular interest to me alongside Glenn’s sketch of the settler colonialist history of the U.S. They are accounts of nation-­building in two large, contiguous North American countries, similar in many respects but with cultural and political histories that originate and develop rather differently. Setting them side by side helps me understand some moments of

132 

M. L. DEVAULT

puzzlement I’ve felt over the years as U.S. and Canadian IEers have analyzed racialized experiences; I believe we were sometimes talking past one another, perhaps because we were speaking from within divergent histories without clearly acknowledging that. It is also instructive here to examine Paul Luken and Suzanne Vaughan’s (2006) analysis of a twentieth-century housing industry in the U.S. that shaped people’s housing histories and experiences. I don’t believe they set out to conduct an historical IE study. But they started with older women’s housing histories, interested in how they managed to shelter their families over the life course. As they heard the women’s stories, they began to see pervasive ideas about housing that shaped goals and dreams, even if those goals were not always in reach—in effect, they discovered an aspect or extension of mothering discourse. Luken and Vaughan also show how the “Standard American Home” is thoroughly rooted in a vast set of activities that were part of a burgeoning housing industry in the U.S.—and that the ideal was promulgated and disseminated through a partnership of health and child development educators with the commercial enterprises of home-building and homemaking. Their fascinating analysis tacks back and forth between women’s experiential accounts of housing their families, and the advertising and advice that shaped their efforts, while fueling new forms of consumption meant to support the production of the clean and healthful “Standard American Home.” Women whose circumstances diverged from the ideal, such as one who lived in company-provided housing tied to her father’s employment and another whose family moved between Mexico and the U.S. as their employment prospects shifted, spoke matter-of-factly about their housing experiences. However, their language made clear that they were aware of a widely shared ideal elevating the ostensibly safe and healthful owner-occupied single-family home, in contrast to cramped apartments or “old shacks” (p. 313). Such distinctions are “class and racially ordered” (p. 311), despite the absence of any explicit reference to class or race/ethnicity.

Conclusion American sociology has seen more than a century of powerful writing about race in the United States, and I especially want to acknowledge the scholarship on race, racism, and intersectionality that has arisen since the 1970s. Given the importance of that intersectional work in my own scholarly development, I can easily imagine critics of this chapter

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

133

complaining that I’ve taken a very long way around to the idea that race matters in American history, and that racism is woven pervasively through the development of the nation. Why all this talk about ruling relations? My answer is twofold: first, that it simply seems valuable to have more and varied ways of arriving at the significance of racialized social organization, and second, that I wish to open more analytic space for institutional ethnographers who pursue analyses of racialized experiences in different places and circumstances. In the Handbook of Institutional Ethnography, I sketched a history of the approach and argued for an “expansive IE” (DeVault, 2021). I see the development of IE as an unfolding of multiple ways of investigating the problematics one can find in the everyday world. One of Smith’s key insights was the significance of texts in the governance of contemporary social life, and IE analyses of textual coordination have become increasingly focused and precise. But I do not believe that Smith ever saw particular texts and documents as the only sources of coordination one might explore; Liza McCoy has underlined that idea in several of her investigations and in her more recent writing about institutional ethnography (McCoy, 1995, 2021). People’s activities may be coordinated, for example, by spatial arrangements, mutual bodily orientations and gaze, the physical know-how of craft work such as cooking or carpentry, and/or (most important for this analysis) through concepts and discourses. These conceptual sources of coordination shape our speech and writing, inhabiting more focused institutional texts without necessarily announcing their presence. They seem to me to operate as (sometimes submerged) channels running through the ruling relations, well-worn and resistant to disruption, sometimes unnoticed and at other moments bubbling up like a spring or even a geyser. Evelyn Glenn’s historical account examines the reach of settler colonialist discourses and practices through the late twentieth century. The next chapters of our story in the U.S. are being written now. It’s a time of spectacular unevenness and contestation, as Black and indigenous activists bring their communities’ histories more clearly into view, alongside a virulent and often violent reassertion of White dominance. As I conclude this writing in 2023, radical conservative activists are fighting to preserve a settler colonialist framework for the history we tell of the United States, in local school boards, universities, and in federal law and policy. I confess that I am still shocked and puzzled by their success, but I have written myself into a position of understanding a bit more, I think.

134 

M. L. DEVAULT

I conclude on that inconclusive note, hoping that others will find something useful here as we continue in the collective project of institutional ethnography. That project, as I envision it here, is to explore the reach, operation, and transformations of the ruling relations and their many consequences for people.

Appendix: Key Sources by Dorothy Smith Smith, D. E. (1985). Women, class and family. In D. E. Smith & V. Burstyn (Eds.), Women, class, family and the state (with an introduction by R. Ng., pp. 1–44). Garamond. Smith, D.  E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Northeastern University Press. Smith, D. E. (1990). Conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Northeastern University Press. Smith, D.  E. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Alta Mira. Griffith, A.  I., & Smith, D.  E. (2005). Mothering for schooling. RoutledgeFalmer. Griffith, A.  I., & Smith, D.  E. (Eds.). (2014). Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E., & Turner, S. M. (Eds.). (2014). Incorporating texts into institutional ethnographies. University of Toronto Press. Griffith, A. I., & Smith, D. E. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography: Creating a sociology for people. University of Toronto Press.

Note 1. In order not to disrupt the conversational tone of this chapter, I have not referenced every one of my characterizations of Dorothy Smith’s sociology, but only those in which I point to a particular source. My knowledge of her approach is drawn from years of reading across her various writings; I provide a list of key sources as an Appendix to this chapter. I do reference all works by others, and work that Smith co-authored with research partners.

7  REVISITING THE RULING RELATIONS 

135

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. (M. Holquist, Ed.). (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.) University of Texas Press. Bannerji, H. (1995). Beyond the ruling category to what actually happens: Notes on James Mills’ historiography in The history of British India. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience, and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 49–64). University of Toronto Press. Campbell, M., & Manicom, A. (Eds.). (1995). Knowledge, experience, and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge. University of Toronto Press. DeVault, M.  L. (2021). Elements of an expansive institutional ethnography: A conceptual history of its North American origins. In P. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  11–34). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_2 Eastwood, L.  E. (2005). The social organization of policy: An institutional ethnography of UN forest deliberations. Routledge. Glenn, E. N. (2015). Settler colonialism as structure: A framework for comparative studies of U.S. race and gender formation. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 54–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214560440 Griffith, A.  I., & Smith, D.  E. (1987). Constructing cultural knowledge: Mothering as discourse. In J. Gaskell & A. McLaren (Eds.), Women and education: A Canadian perspective (pp. 87–103). Detselig. Griffith, A. I., & Smith, D. E. (2005). Mothering for schooling. RoutledgeFalmer. Griffith, A.  I., & Smith, D.  E. (Eds.). (2014). Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. University of Toronto Press. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (2006). Standardizing childrearing through housing. Social Problems, 53(3), 299–331. McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the photographic text. In M.  Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience, and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 181–192). University of Toronto Press. McCoy, L. (2021). Materialist matters: A case for revisiting the social ontology of institutional ethnography. In P.  Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  35–46). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_3 McDonald, D. (2021). Janey says no plans for NYC-type restrictions, invoking slavery, birtherism. Boston Globe, August, 3. https://www.bostonglobe. com/2021/08/03/metro/janey-­invokes-­slavery-­talking-­about-­new-­york-­ city-­gym-­restaurant-­covid-­requirements/ McDonald, D., & Andersen, T. (2021). Janey says she regrets comparing proof-­ of-­vaccination requirement to slavery, birtherism. Boston Globe, August, 5.

136 

M. L. DEVAULT

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/05/metro/janey-­says-­she-­regrets-­ comparing-­proof-­of-­vaccination-­slavery-­birtherism/ Ng, R. (1993). Racism, sexism, and nation building in Canada. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education (pp. 50–59). Routledge. Ng, R. (1995). Multiculturalism as ideology: A textual analysis. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience, and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 35–48). University of Toronto Press. Ramanathan, L. (2017). Was the Women’s March just another display of white privilege? Some think so. The Washington Post, January, 24. https://www. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/was-­the-­womens-­march-­just-­another-­ display-­o f-­w hite-­p rivilege-­s ome-­t hink-­s o/2017/01/24/00bbdcca-­ e1a0-­11e6-­a547-­5fb9411d332c_story.html Smith, D. E. (1985). Women, class and family. In D. E. Smith & V. Burstyn (Eds.), Women, class, family and the state (with an introduction by R.  Ng.) (pp. 1–44). Garamond. Smith, D. E. (1990). Conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Northeastern University Press. Smith, D.  E. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Alta Mira. Walker, G. (1990). Family violence and the women’s movement: The conceptual politics of struggle. University of Toronto Press. Widerberg, K. (2020). In the name of the welfare state: Investigating ruling relations in a Nordic context. In R.  W. B.  Lund & A.  C. E.  Nilsen (Eds.), Institutional ethnography in the Nordic region (pp. 21–39). Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Contextualizing Institutional Ethnography Ann Christin E. Nilsen, Rebecca W. B. Lund, and May-Linda Magnussen

Institutional ethnography (IE) has attained a lot of interest in the Nordic region, particularly in Norway. This chapter addresses how IE has been received, adapted and challenged in Norway, and argues for the need to contextualize IE, both as practice and as discourse. The idea of this chapter was born approximately a decade ago. As academics raised within a Nordic sociological tradition, and who had only recently encountered and started working with IE, we were attending network meetings and international conferences to familiarize ourselves with IE and engage with the community. The following reflection note written by Nilsen1 captures some of our experience:

A. C. E. Nilsen (*) • M.-L. Magnussen University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] R. W. B. Lund University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_8

137

138 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

After having attended the IE sessions at the ISA conference in Yokohama, I was puzzled. I had become acquainted with IE through extensive reading and through attending a few meetings in the Nordic IE network. I had also attended a session at SSSP to learn more about IE. Meeting IE was like finding a “home” in sociology. Ever since I encountered IE the first time, I had felt a sense of belonging. What struck me in Yokohama, however, was the sense of being a stranger. It seemed that my understanding of IE differed from that of the majority. I felt estranged to the discourse about IE – for instance to the discussions about how IE contradicted many of the dominant discourses within sociology and how IE supposedly signified an alternative way of doing sociology. Although it took me a while to realize, I was facing a disjuncture between my everyday work as a sociologist and the discourse of IE as an alternative sociology. I have been raised in a tradition where qualitative research does not have to be justified, where positivism is largely critiqued, and where sociology – as a matter of course - is carried out with the intention of bringing about social change. Meeting international IE scholars, I was constantly thinking that there was something I had missed, that I just didn’t get it. When I met another Nordic IE scholar, Rebecca Lund, in Yokohama, I realized, however, that I was not alone in feeling this way. These discussions continued over the years, and also came to include my colleague May-Linda. We asked: what might IE look like in the Nordics? Could we identify something that could help us understand how and why we felt estranged – while at the same time feeling so profoundly at home?

The puzzle Nilsen reflects on is the experience of feeling different, not correctly attuned to a specific discourse. It sensitizes us to a latent disjuncture: Is there something to be discovered in the gap between the experience of doing institutional ethnography from a standpoint within the periphery of the Northern Hemisphere, and dominant discourses about institutional ethnography and sociology? The ideas and reflections we share in this chapter are guided by this question. As a starting point, we have to address the notion of context. Two dimensions of context come to mind: a temporal spatial dimension, denoting where we are in time and space (we could also refer to this as an ontological dimension), and an epistemological dimension, denoting the lines of thinking and knowing we relate to. In line with the materialist ontology of IE, we perceive these dimensions as overlapping. The object of exploration in this chapter is our own work knowledge as sociologists, situated at a specific place (Norway) at a specific historical moment.

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

139

You may ask: Why should we bother to contextualize IE or our own experience as IE researchers? Is not contextualization integral to the very practice of exploring the social organization of knowledge? We would claim that the answer to the last question is both yes and no. On the one hand, exploration of how local experience is hooked into trans-local and ruling relations necessarily involves paying attention to context. On the other hand, in order to extend the insights gained from this exploration, we also need to acknowledge the theoretical and historical understandings (the knowledge) that shape the society in question. If we fail to do just that, we risk, as Karin Widerberg (2019) notes, that IE studies end up as variations on a theme, reducing the potential they might have in informing theory, practice and policy. In her paper “What It Might Mean to Do a Canadian Sociology,” Dorothy Smith (1975) argues that we, as sociologists, have to take contextual characteristics into account when we develop our analyses. Unlike physics and mathematics, sociology is not a theoretical or “decontextual” enterprise. Sociology, as a craft, is located somewhere in time and space and cannot be disconnected from that site. The work we do as sociologists is always situated. Exploring the social relations that organize our work involves paying attention to context. Smith (1975) writes: Methods of locating a particular work in a given field, faction, or school locate it with respect to different sets of interpretive practices – how it will be taken to mean, the types of critical approaches which can be made, what it is seen as a “contribution” to, what are referenced by its key terms, and etc. Methods of making sense develop within a discourse out of its actual practice as an organization of social relations. (p. 366)

In other words, we have to distinguish between sociology as discourse and sociology as practice or, indeed, sociology as work. In line with the ontology of IE, we have to start in experience to understand the social organization of sociology, and, also, of institutional ethnography. We have to make our everyday work as sociologists a problematic.

140 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

Sociology as Practice/Work: A Standpoint from Norway A place from which to explicate the standpoint of a Norwegian sociologist is through the experience of writing for an international audience. Firstly, in order to take part in a wider international community of scholars, we have to use another language than our native one and translate the concepts into concepts that are contextually meaningful. This involves challenges. How should we translate to Norwegian a concept such as institutional capture or accountability circuit, when “capture” and “accountability” do not have equivalent words in Norwegian? And how can we explicate a notion such as “the state,” as it sits with most Norwegians, to an international audience? This takes us to other problems. Most influential IE research is carried out in the US or Canada— with some important exceptions. It is elegantly written and argued, in fact, to the extent where it has almost become a jargon of its own. It is both interesting and worrying to observe that even Norwegian scholars tend to cite American studies rather than Norwegian ones. An obvious reason is that these works are far more often cited in all IE literature than the ones from the periphery. It is rare to see American scholars citing IE studies from, for instance, Taiwan or Norway for other reasons than showing a case of difference. Another reason might be that publications from the periphery, when published in English language journals, have to devote a lot of space justifying why this study should interest international, aka American and English scholars, while also having to dedicate a lot of space in a short article to explication of context, for example about particularities of work-life or welfare state policies. These issues are not just a problem of the IE community, but the IE community is itself organized by the ruling relations of contemporary academic governance (see e.g., Lund, 2015; Rowlands & Ngo, 2018). Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007) unpacked what she has named the global academic divisions of labor being reproduced by these ruling relations. Academics in the global center produce the theory, methodologies and concepts, while others, often academics in the global periphery, end up applying them. The result of this is that theories, concepts and methodologies applied may not work in the interests of people in that periphery. They may obscure, rather than make visible, the problematics and social relations in specific contexts. When their work is reduced to variations on a theme (Widerberg, 2019), the marginal

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

141

position of academics in the periphery is reproduced, and their work is stripped of its epistemic and political potential.

Sociology as Discourse: A Standpoint from Norway In order to challenge this division of labor and provide a path for a specific Nordic, or indeed Norwegian, IE, we must outline the contextually specific traditions and controversies that IE is hooked into here, that is, unpack the epistemological dimensions of our context. In her text on Nordic public welfare objectification, Widerberg (2019) claims that the empirical results of our institutional ethnographies should be hooked up into theoretical debates in order to make a difference in theoretical and political discussions. Looking specifically at the Nordic welfare state and the close connection between science and politics, she reflects on why Norwegian scholars are so obedient to new reforms and procedures that have come to transform academia over the last decade. “Are we, Scandinavians, in the name of welfare, maybe more easily ruled and fooled?” she asks. The question is timely. As universities increasingly resemble factories, “producing” students and research output, the low degree of protest and opposition from Norwegian academics is striking. Even within a critical discipline like sociology, we hear few oppositional voices. It seems we are all so vested in these new factories, that it has almost become second nature—we compete to have our research funded and adapt our research designs accordingly. Knowing that numbers matter more than experience, the conditions for getting funding for IE research may not be favorable. Yet, despite the ruling relations shaping academic work across borders, there are historical and societal features that make each setting adapt these differently. The first well-known article about IE in a Norwegian sociology journal was written by Widerberg in 2007. Here, she argued that IE solved many challenges connected to qualitative research and that IE, therefore, offered new possibilities for such research. She wrote: Although methodology is generally understood as the linking of ontology, epistemology, theory and methods, this is rarely demonstrated when translated into research practice. The quality of qualitative research hereby becomes an easy target. […] Institutional Ethnography is an approach where such linking is both a starting-point and goal of research and the very means of production of knowledge. […] Institutional Ethnography is an

142 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

approach developed to explore the social in a way that confronts the very challenges within qualitative research of today [and offer an approach with which to] improve the quality of qualitative research. (Widerberg, 2007, p. 7)

It is worth noting that IE from the very start was framed as a qualitative methodology in Norway. In 2011 a Nordic network for institutional ethnographers was established. Departing from this network, a Nordic tradition of IE has gradually emerged. Important within this tradition is the dialogue with other theoretical and methodological perspectives, as is reflected in the different chapters of the anthology Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region (Lund & Nilsen, 2019) and the special issue on institutional ethnography in the leading journal of Norwegian sociology, edited by Magnussen and Nilsen (2022). Marjorie DeVault refers to Nordic IE as a “hybrid approach” (DeVault, 2021, p. 28). Focusing here on Norway in particular, we argue that this tradition can be traced both to the particularities of the Norwegian welfare state and to the legacy of sociology and social sciences in Norway. The Emergence of Norwegian Sociology Firstly, in Norway, IE may not appear as alternative as it seems to do elsewhere. As a discipline, sociology in Norway can be traced back to the nineteenth century, with theologist Eilert Sundt’s pioneering studies of the life conditions of ordinary people and marginalized groups. However, sociology did not become an established discipline in Norway until after the Second World War (WW2). Influenced by both different European and American traditions, the emergence and first development of sociology in Norway from WW2 can be divided into different phases (Mjøset, 1991), which, we argue, have had a profound influence also on the “identity” of contemporary Norwegian sociology. In the first phase, sociology in Norway was informed by ideals associated with positivism, under the influence of Austrian-American sociologist Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. Spearheaded by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss and fueled by a strong belief in progress and science characterizing the post-WW2 era, the ambition was to unite philosophical insights from logical empiricism with survey-based research. However, with the establishment and gradual consolidation of the welfare state, a different sociology emerged. Often referred to as “the golden age of sociology,” the second

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

143

phase of Norwegian sociology during the 1950–1960s was characterized by the so-called problem-oriented empiricism. In this sociology, qualitative and quantitative methods were considered equally valuable. According to Mjøset (1991), the sociologists of this phase (e.g., Vilhelm Aubert, Johan Galtung, Thomas Mathiesen and Sverre Lysgaard) were “the bad conscience” of the welfare state, addressing ambivalences and unintended consequences of the development of the welfare state, and raising concerns about social inequalities and increasing privatization. Problem-­ oriented sociology was dedicated to exploring people’s realities and topics of practical and political, as well as theoretical, relevance. The connection between this sociology and the welfare state was close. In 1960, Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning, the now leading journal of Norwegian social research, was launched. In the first issue, editor Vilhelm Aubert, a leading figure of problem-oriented empiricism, stated the ambitions of the journal—ambitions that have clear similarities with IE: “we hope to contribute to the development of a new ‘language’ – in the broadest sense – a language that makes it possible to present general, often distant or inaccessible social conditions, without losing sight of the basic human and interpersonal realities in them” (see Midtbøen & Pedersen, 2020). In the 1960s, a third phase of Norwegian sociology emerged, which shared many similarities with problem-oriented empiricism: the critique of positivism. With the thesis Objectivism and the Study of Man (1959), Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim spearheaded the critique of the sociology inspired by Næss and other positivists, arguing that social sciences should not and could not be modeled after the natural sciences. His critique was epistemological and had important methodological implications. In the same vein, Norwegian sociologist and philosopher Dag Østerberg developed an ontological rationale for the critique of positivism, finding inspiration in a broad spectrum of sociological thinkers (e.g., Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, Talcott Parsons and Jean Paul Sartre). He argued in favor of a theory of action that acknowledges the embodied and material conditions that shape people’s behavior. An even more profound critique of capitalism and capitalist societies, strongly inspired by Marx and Engels, also gained ground in this phase, epitomized in the student protests during the 1970s (Mjøset, 1991). Important in this respect is that Norwegian sociologists, unlike North American sociologists,2 embraced Marxism.3 From the 1970s and onward, women’s influence on Norwegian sociology (and other disciplines) became very visible. Harriet Holter, Kari

144 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

Wærness, Bjørg Aase Sørensen, Hildur Ve and Arnlaug Leira were among the sociologists that, together with social psychologists like Hanne Haavind and Agnes Andenæs, explored women’s everyday lives. Several of them raised concerns and proposed solutions that resemble those of Dorothy Smith (Magnussen, 2019; Solbrække & Aarseth, 2006). They stated that women, women’s experiences and the social spheres that women were most active in, were largely left unexplored (Halsaa, 2006). They also claimed that to the extent that women’s practices had been studied, this had been done from the standpoint of men, using concepts for and about the world of men. This, they argued, resulted in women becoming visible and understood mainly through their deficiencies, by what they did not do. As an alternative, they explored what women actually did and what knowledge they had, and also made visible how “social structures” shaped women’s lives. For many, this included critiquing and developing welfare state policies aiming at gender equality (Halsaa, 2006). Thus, the connection between the work of these sociologists and welfare state policy development was close. In spite of the increasing neoliberalization of Norwegian academia, the history briefly outlined above has arguably had a strong impact on contemporary Norwegian sociology. Sociology, including the early sociological women’s studies, historically informed the improvement of the social democratic welfare policies. In light of a turn toward New Public Management and New Labor-inspired policies in the 1990s, however, sociology emerged as an oppositional discipline in Norway. This is contrasted to disciplines of government which are dominated by social economy and law (Slagstad, 1998). Furthermore, in recent years, changing funding structures of gender studies have resulted in a division between what is called equality research which focuses on furthering equality and diversity within existing neoliberal structures rather than challenging such structures, on the one hand, and more theoretically informed and critical gender studies on the other (Aarseth, 2020; Mangset et al., 2022). All this means that presenting IE as a sociology in its own right appears ahistorical in a Norwegian context. In the context of Norwegian sociology, IE would instead seem to expand on an already strong program for sociological inquiry and offer solutions to the problems much of existing qualitative research faces. This fit probably partly explains why IE has become so popular in Norway, but it also produces some challenges. One challenge is that sociologists and social scientists who are not that familiar with IE tend to claim that IE “offers nothing new.” This is of course

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

145

equally problematic. We claim that it is possible to both perceive IE as offering something different and new, while at the same time recognizing that it in many ways connects to existing sociological traditions in Norway. The Welfare State Our second point when it comes to tracing the Norwegian IE tradition has to do with the role of the state. In Norway, as in the other Nordic countries, the state, a universal welfare state, is a concept with mostly positive connotations. In general, the state is perceived as an agent with good intentions, and not as a corrupt and coercive power. This is also reflected in sociology, as we have already touched upon. Despite embodying the bad consciousness of the welfare state, the influential sociologists of the golden age carried out research that in many ways was supportive of an expansive state/tax-paid public services and against increased privatization and marketization (Mjøset, 1991; Slagstad, 2020). In a similar vein, the feminist sociologists from the 1970s and onward were very active in shaping social and family policies (Halsaa, 2006). Not only sociology and social science more generally, but also civil society and social movements, such as the labor movement and women´s movement, have historically been important allies of the state in the construction of social welfare policy (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Generalized social trust is high (e.g., Larsen, 2011), as a result of relatively low degrees of social inequality, a strong public sector, tax-funded welfare and universal economic redistribution. The gradual turn toward New Public Management, marketization and neoliberalism in Nordic welfare states since the 1990s has not yet resulted in a disintegration of these high trust levels, although there are signs of gradual change. As a consequence of ambitious and expansive welfare states (Vike, 2004), many Nordic IE scholars explore the role of welfare state professionals, who can be perceived as the extended arm of the state in alleviating social problems such as poverty or inequality. Often, these studies in rather powerful ways explore and explicate the discomfort that professionals experience in the disjuncture between the standardized requirements and welfare technologies of the neoliberalized welfare state, on the one hand, and the actual care for people and professional discretion, on the other hand (Nilsen & Lund, 2019). This has implications for the approach to ruling, since ruling relations are not always or only negative, but imbued with paradoxes.

146 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

Hybrid Models Thirdly, in tracing the Norwegian IE tradition, it is worthwhile noting the tendency toward hybridizing IE with other approaches. In an evaluation carried out by the Research Council of Norway in 2018, Norwegian sociology was critiqued for being too interdisciplinary and too responsive to the interests of the state (The Research Council of Norway, 2018). This can arguably be seen as a result of the legacy of problem-oriented empiricism. On the other hand, a reasonable worry is that sociology becomes a social technology for governing at the cost of theoretical advancement. When Nordic scholars are preoccupied with how IE can be used with other theories, it can thus not only be understood as a way of trying to expand IE, but also as a result of the need to justify Norwegian sociology as a theoretical and academic enterprise.

Positioning IE in the Norwegian Context: Future Challenges and Prospects Following the outline of these particularities of Norwegian sociology, we can position IE more clearly within the Norwegian context. The legacy of problem-oriented empiricism and critique of positivism, combined with a rather strong Marxist-orientation—all of which was also part of early feminist sociology in Norway—lends association to Smith’s development of IE. As a consequence, IE probably appears less alternative in Norway than elsewhere. Yet, in light of new trends, we argue that the most radical parts of IE are even more relevant than before. A growing number of sociologists do quantitative and big data research, perhaps in response to an increasing demand for quantifiable “facts” and an increasing societal reliance on research that claims to be “evidence-based” or “fact-based.” As a consequence, qualitative research is largely being delegitimized. What we are witnessing can be seen as a backlash to positivism. Sociology, also in Norway, has increasingly become a theorized tool for governing, detached from people’s everyday realities. The same can be said for gender research, which of course includes sociology as well as other disciplines. In this new terrain, IE offers the promise of a social ontology and critical inquiry that provides an alternative to (1) sociologies that are based in decontextualized concepts, ultimately unrecognizable for the people they are meant to be about or for, and to (2) sociology that offers insights useful from a

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

147

welfare state operation perspective but offers little critique of institutional orders and the interests and the social inequality these reproduce. Looking into the Norwegian history of problem-oriented empiricism, Smith would probably warn us that what we as sociologists identify as social problems worth studying are already shaped in and by ruling relations, and not something that we can access untouched of such relations (Smith, 1993). Additionally, looking into the early Norwegian sociological research on women’s lives, she would probably warn that adding women’s experiences and problems into an already objectifying sociology is not enough to make a sociology for women—or for people (Magnussen, 2019). The problems that Smith identified in North American sociology, and which sparked her to develop IE, are becoming increasingly prominent also in Norwegian sociology, in light of changing conditions for knowledge production, global divisions of academic labor and increasing internationalization, marketization and standardization of academia. That means, in our opinion, that IE is more relevant than ever in the Norwegian context. Also in Norway, making social relations, rather than individuals, the object of study is a radical shift from most qualitative research, and exactly what Widerberg (2007) argued when she claimed that IE’s methodological potential lay in its theoretical, epistemological and methodic ability to keep social relations in focus throughout the research process, unlike many other qualitative methodologies that claim to do so, but fail. Indeed, it is often not recognized that Smith’s materialist ontology and critique of sociology can be useful for identifying problems in, and alternatives to, a broad range of contemporary qualitative and critical sociological research strategies (e.g., Smith & Griffith, 2022). With regards to sociology and the Norwegian welfare state, the close entanglement is of course problematical. We have to be aware of “welfare state objectification” (Widerberg, 2019)—the inclination to comply with the premises and intentions of the welfare state in a way that objectifies us, as scholars, providers and users of welfare services. The way we see it, Nordic scholars need to be more attentive to resistance, not least “hidden” resistance such as the bending and twisting of regulations. Knowing that resistance exists, we need to be better at rendering it visible and articulate its transformative potential and power (Sørensen et al., 2019). That being said, we believe that IE offers an important alternative to deconstructing the Nordic Welfare State as a fundamentally racist, sexist and colonial endeavor, as is being done in much contemporary Nordic gender

148 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

research. These endeavors often draw on American theoretical traditions of anti-colonial, anti-racist and intersectional theory (e.g., Keskinen et al., 2009). While this research offers important insights, it often obscures that the welfare state also is radically anti-racist and equality promoting (e.g., Midtbøen, 2021). IE, as a method of inquiry, allows us to critically engage with the ruling relations of the welfare state, not to deconstruct it or delegitimize it, but to improve it. Another important challenge for IE, the way we see it, is that we have to develop a contextual language of IE, translating and adapting the concepts to our own languages and academic discourses. Moreover, a democratization of epistemic governance structures and ruling relations must take place to challenge the academic divisions of labor and enable and encourage the development of theories, concepts and empirical studies that have contextual relevance. The growing interest in IE in Norway and the Nordics, not least sparked by the work done through the Nordic IE network, indicates that IE is indeed considered useful, that it adds something new to an already well-established culture for sociological inquiry. We believe that more dialogue on how IE is embraced, adapted and challenged in different contexts is crucial to its further development. The experience we started this chapter in—the experience as estranged Norwegian sociologists at international IE sessions yet feeling “at home” in IE—is organized within the trans-local relations that have come to inform our work as sociologists, in the intersection between an increasingly commodified university sector, a legacy and commitment to support the ideals behind the welfare state, and the diverging norms of sociology, both as a discourse and as a craft.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this reflection note was also presented at an international webinar in July 2021, organized by Morena Tartari, and subsequently at the SSSP conference in August 2021. 2. In an interview that Paul Luken conducted with Alison Griffith for the first newsletter of the ISA working group in 2011, Griffith mentions that Marxism was largely left out of American sociology in the (wake of the) McCarthy era. Her encounter with Dorothy Smith, whom she refers to as a Marxist, represented something new and different. (https://www.isa-­ sociology.org/uploads/files/tg06newsletter_nov_2011.pdf).

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

149

3. Marxism was also embraced in Swedish and Danish sociology. In Sweden, however, largely a structuralist version developed by Louis Althusser was embraced. In Denmark, the Marxism developed by the Frankfurt School became dominant.

References Aarseth, H. (2020). Kronikk: Er Kjønnsforskning i ferd med at gi opp sit prosjekt om å endre samfunnet? Vi trenger steder der det er mulig å stille spørsmål ved styringssystemene og deres idégrunnlag. [Has gender research given up the project of changing our society?] Kilden 10. december 2020. https://kjonnsforskning.no/nb/2020/12/er-­k jonnsforskningen-­i -­f erd-­ med-­a-­gi-­opp-­sitt-­prosjekt-­om-­a-­endre-­samfunnet Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Taylor & Francis. DeVault, M.  L. (2021). Elements of an expansive institutional ethnography: A conceptual history of its North American origins. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  11–34). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­5422_2 Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton University Press. Halsaa, B. (2006). Kvinneforskning. [Women’s studies]. In J.  Lorentzen & W.  Mühleisen (Eds.), Kjønnsforskning. En grunnbok. [Gender research. An introductory book]. Universitetsforlaget. Keskinen, S., Tuori, S., Irni, S., & Mulinari, D. (2009). Complying with colonialism: Gender, race and ethnicity in the Nordic region. Routledge. Larsen, C. A. (2011). Typer af velfærdssamfund, social kapital og tillid. [Types of welfare societies, social capital and trust]. In P. Hegedahl & G. L. H. Svendsen (Eds.), Tillid – Samfundets fundament. Teorier, tolkninger, cases. [Trust – The fundament of society: Theories, interpretations, cases]. Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Lund, R. (2015). Doing the ideal academic: Gender, excellence and changing academia. Aalto University. Lund, R. W. B., & Nilsen, A. C. E. (2019). Introduction: Conditions for doing institutional ethnography in the Nordics. In R.  W. Lund & A.  C. E.  Nilsen (Eds.), Institutional ethnography in the Nordic region (pp. 3–19). Routledge. Magnussen, M.-L. (2019). Making gendering visible. Institutional ethnography’s contribution to Nordic sociology of gender. In R. W. B. Lund & A. C. E. Nilsen (Eds.), Institutional ethnography in the Nordic Region (pp.  128–137). Routledge. Magnussen, M.-L., & Nilsen, A.  C. E. (2022). Innledning: Temanummer om Institusjonell etnografi. [Introduction: Special issue on institutional ethnogra-

150 

A. C. E. NILSEN ET AL.

phy]. Norsk sosiologisk tidsskrift [Journal of Norwegian Sociology], 6(1), 4–8. https://doi.org/10.18261/nost.6.1.1 Mangset, M., Midtbøen, A., & Thorbjørnsrud, K. (2022). Ytringsfrihet i en ny offentlighet: Grensene for debatt og rammerne for kunnskap. [Freedom of speech in a changing public sphere: The limits of debate and conditions of knowledge]. Universitetsforlaget. Midtbøen, A. (2021). Strukturell Rasisme i en strukturelt inkluderende velferdstat? [Structural racism in a structurally including welfare state?]. Tidsskrift for Samfunnsforskning [Journal of social sciences], 62(1), 106–115. Midtbøen, A.  H., & Pedersen, A.  W. (2020). Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning: «Problemorientert empirisme» gjennom 60 år. [Journal of Social Science: “problem-oriented empiricism” through 60 years]. Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning [Journal of social sciences], 61(1), 5–11. Mjøset, L. (1991). Kontroverser i norsk sosiologi. [Controversies in Norwegian Sociology]. Universitetsforlaget. Nilsen, A. C. E., & Lund, R. W. B. (2019). Wrapping it all up. In R. W. B. Lund & A.  C. E.  Nilsen (Eds.), Institutional ethnography in the Nordic region (pp. 214–216). Routledge. Rowlands, J., & Ngo, M.  T. (2018). The north and the south of it: Academic governance in the US, England and Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 37(7), 1501–1514. Skjervheim, H. (1959). Objectivism and the study of man. PhD dissertation,. University of Oslo. Slagstad, R. (1998). De nasjonale strateger. [The national strategists]. Pax Forlag. Slagstad, R. (2020). Om å få sosiologien på rett kjøl igjen [Getting sociology back on track]. Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning, 61(3), 298–303. Smith, D. E. (1975). What it might mean to do a Canadian sociology: The everyday world as problematic. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 1(3), 363–376. Smith, D. E. (1993). ‘Literacy’ and business: ‘Social problems’ as social organization. In J. A. Holstein & G. Miller (Eds.), Reconsidering social constructionism: Debates in social problems theory (pp. 327–346). Aldine de Gruyter. Smith, D. E., & Griffith, A. I. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography. Creating a sociology for people. University of Toronto Press. Solbrække, K.  N., & Aarseth, H. (2006). Samfunnsvitenskapens forståelser av kjønn. [Approaches to the understanding of gender in the social sciences]. In J. Lorentzen & W. Mühleisen (Eds.), Kjønnsforskning. En grunnbok. [Gender research. An introductory book]. Universitetsforlaget. Sørensen, M. J., Nilsen, A. C. E., & Lund, R. W. B. (2019). Resisting the ruling relations: Discovering everyday resistance with institutional ethnography. In R. W. B. Lund & A. C. E. Nilsen (Eds.), Institutional ethnography in the Nordic countries (pp. 203–213). Routledge.

8  CONTEXTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 

151

The Research Council of Norway. (2018). Evaluation of the social sciences in Norway. Report from panel 4  – Sociology. file:///C:/Users/maylm/ Downloads/Evaluation%20of%20the%20Social%20Sciences%20in%20 Norway%20(SAMEVAL)%20-%20Panel%204.pdf Vike, H. (2004). Velferd uten grenser: den norske velferdsstaten ved veiskillet. [Welfare without boundaries: the Norwegian welfare state at the crossroads]. Akribe. Widerberg, K. (2007). Institusjonell etnografi – en ny mulighet for kvalitativ forskning? [institutional ethnography – a new possibility for qualitative research?]. Sosiologi i dag [Sociology today], 37(2), 7–28. Widerberg, K. (2019). In the name of the welfare state: Investigating the ruling relations in a Nordic context. In R.  W. B.  Lund & A.  C. E.  Nilsen (Eds.), Institutional ethnography in the Nordic countries (pp. 21–36). Routledge.

CHAPTER 9

Institutional Ethnography as Alternative to Studying Historical Change: A Conceptual Framework and Analytical Strategies Suzanne Vaughan

In 1987 two pivotal events occurred in the lives of my co-researcher Paul Luken and me. We both moved to Phoenix, Arizona, from the eastern United States, and Dorothy Smith published The Everyday World as Problematic. To acquaint ourselves with our new desert home, we bicycled on weekends, and in the process, agreed to talk out our understanding of chapters in her book as we cycled. Our observations of what was happening to the Sonoran Desert and our excitement of what we were learning about what is now known as institutional ethnography began to come A version of this essay was presented at the International Sociological Association Meetings, World Forum, February 2021. My thanks to Liza McCoy for encouraging me to publish this essay, and to Paul Luken and Frank Ridzi for reviewing this chapter.

S. Vaughan (*) Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_9

153

154 

S. VAUGHAN

together. Over that year of bicycling the back roads of Phoenix, increasingly we saw that the desert was being paved over with cul-de-sacs, concrete foundations, utility poles, and blacktopped roads. With our newfound insight into the social via Smith’s book, we began asking ourselves how did it happen that similar suburban single family housing developments from the 1950 to 1960s from the eastern United States were being recast upon the desert southwest among saguaros, prickly pear, jumping cholla, coyotes, rattlesnakes, orange groves, and cotton fields in the 1980–1990s? Using the analytical thinking derived from reading Smith forced us to broaden our understanding of housing as an institution or regime which was produced and reproduced at different times and places in the North America. Hence, our interest began to coalesce around examining the reorganization of housing and exploring historical change using institutional ethnography, specifically how the single-family dwelling came to dominate the landscape in North America during the twentieth century. Beginning in the experience of women, we used oral housing histories and historical archival documents to trace the ruling relations organizing and standardizing housing over the last 100 years through the text-mediated discourse in a number of papers (see Luken & Vaughan, 1991, 2003, 2005, 2006; Vaughan, 2021). We are not the only institutional ethnographers to study historical events or change, albeit only a few studies exist using this mode of inquiry. One study is Gary Kinsman’s (2000) exploration of how gay men and lesbians were constructed as national security risks in Canada between 1950 and 1970. Using oral histories, he documents the way in which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police monitored the community and their resistance by tracing through texts the social relations of surveillance by the state. A second is Liz Stanley’s 2017 book, The Racialising Process, which provides a historical sociological investigation of social change and the processes of racialization in South Africa through extensive family and organizational contexts spanning several generations. Investigating letter-­ writing networks and relations, she maps in detail how Whites went about writing whiteness and changes in how they did this over time. She uses diaries and memoirs as well as family, friendship, and business letters written by people from very different backgrounds, European origins, language groups, and economic and social circumstances and living in very different parts of the country to document how exactly change happens on the ground, bit by bit, step by step, letter after letter that ultimately resulted in a regime of apartheid in South Africa. Finally, although not

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

155

directly focused on historical change, many of the chapters on changes in public sector management in Griffith and Smith’s book, Under New Public Management (2014), open the way for an empirical investigation of how this global transformation took place among those negotiating treaties and free trade agreements in various counties, those working in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and in multinational corporations in the private sector as they embedded the neoliberal discourse in their work practices and, ultimately, came to be imposed on public sector institutions. In this essay, I outline my analytical thinking about the shortcomings of other approaches to studying social change over large periods of time, how the social ontology of institutional ethnography addresses these problems, our strategies for incorporating what historians taught us about oral histories and texts, and our methods and strategies for collecting and analyzing our empirical data about the everyday experience of housing for women over the twentieth century. I contend that sociology would benefit from using the framework and insights of institutional ethnography and some analytical strategies drawn from social and cultural history studies to move the study of historical or social change forward, including sparking more scholars of institutional ethnography to investigate institutional processes over the longue duree.

Studying Social Change Beginning in graduate school, I developed an interest in social change, particularly historical change, even though my earlier experiences of studying history in school suggested that the discipline was only about the chronology of men, wars, and conquests. Since that time, I have studied and taught classes in social change, introducing students to Marx’s historical materialism and to the British sociologist, Philip Abrams (1982), who argued that a proper historical sociology for sociological analysis links the processes of personal activity or experience with the social organization continuously constructed over time. In addition, in reading the more recent work produced by social and cultural historians, I have come to understand that we as sociologists cannot understand the social world without including ordinary people and history. At the same time in 1987 when my colleague and I were reading Smith, I also was reading Richard Hamilton’s (a former professor of mine) and John Hall’s (1990) critiques of the empirical historical research being

156 

S. VAUGHAN

conducted in sociology. More than 30 years before Hamilton and Hall’s work, C. Wright Mills (1959) criticized the social sciences, particularly sociology, for its “abstracted empiricism” and “grand theory” practices without a basis in history; Hamilton (1987) argued that recent sociological approaches to history have not fully addressed these concerns. According to Hamilton, the “New History in Sociology” can be roughly divided into two camps. The first, social science history, often includes people as agents and analyzes events using primary sources and social science tools, but fails to deal with processes of institutional and social change. Some examples cited by Hamilton include Tilly’s The Vendee (1976), Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1979). The second camp, called comparative historical sociology, attempts to interpret the past by using historical primary sources to advance theories of world history, but often excludes events, people, and chronology. Among example cited by Hamilton are Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979), and Wallerstein’s The Modern World- System, I and II (1974, 1980).

An Alternative As I reread these classic social historical studies with Hamilton’s and Hall’s criticism in mind, I came to understand that the shortcomings outlined by these sociologists in the sociological study of historical social change could be addressed by the ontological assumptions of institutional ethnography that requires one to begin with active subjects, to know their local practices and activities, and then to trace the extra local institutional and organizational practices of people located elsewhere and at different times that shape their world. Thus, several assumptions, as outlined below, played a significant role in my experience of investigating the institution of housing historically. First, Smith’s notion of the social. She argues that social reality is the ongoing coordination of what people say, do, and write (Smith, 2002) and arises within people’s everyday activities. Activities include language, thoughts, concepts, and ideologies. As people discuss their activities, the language of the everyday world is grounded in relations beyond local particular settings; hence, the relation between people’s activities and generalized social relations is a property of social organization (Smith, 2005). Second, Smith’s notion of text as coordinators of action and as text in

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

157

action. Discourse in people’s everyday talk is important because it mediates between the active, creative subject and the ongoing market and productive organization of capital (Smith, 1993). Although discourse appears as objectified forms often as text, it can be analyzed as “actual social relations ongoingly organized in and by the activities of people” (Smith, 1993, p. 160); thus, institutional ethnography incorporates making text active at any local moment of its use, including its use in talk (DeVault & McCoy, 2001). Third, Smith’s notion of ideological code as a discursive schemata producing a unified understanding of the social world across diverse organizational sites and peoples’ lives. She argues that public textmediated discourses emerged in the twentieth century as a distinctive form of social organization and ruling, producing an “increasingly co-ordinated complex, forming a system or field occupying no particular place, but organizing local sites articulated to it. Since the relations of the complex are based in and mediated by texts, important functions of coordination are performed by ideologies, concepts, theories that insert their ordering capacity into specialized sites otherwise operating independently” (Smith, 1999, p. 157). Often people take up these frameworks in their talk and action. With these notions in mind, an institutional ethnographer is able to trace the extra local production and distribution practices of organizations over time to discover how people’s activities are coordinated and made accountable to themselves in local settings and at different times as they discuss, make decisions, and organize their lives in relation to the orienting frameworks of discourse or texts to which they refer.

Our Methods for Investigating Historical Changes in Housing Paul and I faced two dilemmas in carrying out an institutional ethnography of the institution of housing over the twentieth century. We needed to locate active subjects to tell us about their housing work over their lifetimes, and we needed to learn how to go about collecting historical data in order to discover the processes in which ordinary people and other agents in the housing regime such as developers, bankers, real estate agents, government officials, retailers, advertisers, among others, produced the social organization of housing in the United States over time.

158 

S. VAUGHAN

Collecting Oral Housing Histories Our first challenge was figuring out how to go about doing oral history. Fortunately, we stumbled upon a workshop offered by our local historical society focused on public history and gathering oral histories. We were introduced to a number of social and cultural historians (Bertaux, 1981; Geiger, 1986; Grele & Terkle, 1985; Thompson, 1978; Yans-McLaughlin, 1990) regularly using this method to write a history of ordinary people to counter a long disciplinary position that “scientific” history was a focus “on political and religious elites as representing the cutting edge of societal change” (Hall, 1990, p. 18) and to a number of handbooks and articles outlining the practical and methodological aspects of doing oral histories (Douglas et al., 1988; Riessman, 1993; Rosaldo, 1980). Although we were aware of the long history and use of life histories in sociology (Faraday & Plummer, 1979; Plummer, 1990) and had observed the resurgence of the method among feminist, postmodern, and cultural studies researchers in sociology since the 1980s who proposed new standards that purported to transform sociological practices (See McCall & Wittner, 1990), few, if any, focused on examining historical processes of change. Those researchers that did examine historical change often theorized linkages rather than examining them empirically. In fact, our meta-analysis of life history approaches used by contemporary sociologists revealed that the use of oral history as a transformative tool could best take place if combined with Smith’s institutional ethnography (Luken & Vaughan, 1999). Relying on guidance from social historians and Smith’s “Research Strategies for a Sociology for Women” in The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), we choose to interview older women living alone in Phoenix, Arizona, to unfold for us their experiences of housing over their lifetimes—what they actually did, with whom they interacted, what materials they used, what resources they had available, and their evaluation of their activities and circumstances. Paul interviewed the women for approximately 2 hours on at least four occasions while I transcribed each completed interview in order to see what we were learning, what we needed to be clarified, what other questions emerged as they told their story, what else we needed to learn more about, and so on. After we completed the five interviews (some 10–12 hours of transcription for each woman), it was apparent that we had captured a wide diversity of housing experiences and relations over the course of the twentieth century: residing in

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

159

company housing, living on ranches, living with others/alone, squatting, living in apartments, residing in government housing, renting/owning houses, and mobile homes. One problem that we encountered as we transitioned to the next stage of our research was that the transcripts were not temporally organized; often women’s responses jumped backward and forward in time as they remembered new details, events, or activities after they spoke with family members or looked through old documents and photographs between interviews or in response to questions we asked while reviewing each interview before going on to the next. In order for us to understand each woman’s housing experience and changes over time, we rearranged their housing stories in chronological order. From these transcripts, we sketched what we called preliminary little hero diagrams of the possible social relations and work-text-work sequences that each woman alerted us to in their housing history (See Figs.  9.1 and 9.2). For example, Fig.  9.1 depicts

OLIVE HOYT JACKSON ORGANIZATION OF MINING RAILROAD RANCHING SCHOOLING

1905 – 1923, Wyoming:

COHABITANTS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Hotel – Spring Valley Log Cabin Big House – Robertson House – Evanston, Boarder Ranch – Near Evanston, Bunkhouse

1923 – 1930:

GRANDPARENTS 1846 MORMON

1. Basement Room – Ogden, Utah 2. Room – Laramie, WY – University of Wyoming 3. Ranch – Evanston, WY 4. House – Diamondville, WY 5. Apartment – Diamondville 6. Apartment – Los Angeles 7. Railroad House – Green River, WY 8. Apartment in Private House 9. Room in Private House

Parents Siblings Lodgers Guardians Hay Men Friends Hired Men Employers Friends Spouse Child Father-in-Law

TRANSPORTATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Walk Horse Wagon Train Streetcar

Fig. 9.1  Preliminary little hero diagram of housing, Olive Jackson, Wyoming, 1905–1923 and 1923–1930

160 

S. VAUGHAN

ADVERTISING 1. Newspaper

WORK 1. 2. 3. 4.

Retire Disability Social Security Investments

INSURANCE AND INVESTMENT INDUSTRY 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

HOUSING ACTIVITIES

ECONOMY OF YOUNGSTOWN

Trusts Allowances Accountants Home to Hospital Nursing Marriage Clauses

1. Sheet and Tubes 2. Executive URSULA (1978-1992) 1. Youngstown 2. Rented Apartment in Sun City 3. House – Sun City – Paid Cash ACTIVITIES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Organized Social Life Volunteer Work Golf Bridge Men Friends Travel

MEDICAL 1. 2. 3.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Moving Selling “Fear” Three Weeks of House Hunting Finishing Room Buying Drapes Shutters Recarpeting Landscaping Patio Cover Driveway Roofing Yards Maintenance People Neighbors Accountant

BUILDERS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Finishing Street Construction Country Club Paid Cash Sun City

Al’s Illness and Death Ursula’s Illness Doctors and Hospitals

Fig. 9.2  Preliminary little hero diagram of housing, Sun City, Arizona, Ursula Roberts, 1978–1992

Olive Jackson’s early housing experience between 1905 and 1923  in Wyoming, and between 1923 and 1930 in California. In the middle of the of diagram are the various types of housing she experienced, to the right are the various people with whom she lived and interacted, and to the left are various work processes she mentioned in her housing history. Figure 9.2 sketches the housing history of Ursula Roberts from 1978 to 1992 at the time of her move from Ohio to Sun City, Arizona. Included in the diagram are the types of housing she experienced, activities she engaged in and with whom, and the specific organizational processes with which she interacted. These early diagrams helped us focus on organizational work processes, locations, and time periods, along with industries and organizational entities and other agents germane to our exploration of the housing industry, and pointed us to archival sites and data relevant to how each particular local setting was tied to the larger complex of social relations organizing the institution of housing.

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

161

Collecting Archival Data Our second challenge was how to locate textually mediated discourse. To locate historical texts, we traveled to various archives including the U.S.  National Archives and Research Administration, the Library of Congress, various library repositories, historical societies, and museums in cities where each of the women lived during their lifetime. Doing archival research is very much like a voyage of discovery or exploration with which many historians are familiar, but we were not. Our colleagues in history and literature at the university suggested we read historiography written by a number of social, cultural, and economic historians to guide our search for and evaluation of primary and secondary sources, including information about the organization of repositories, archives, and finding aids (Aron, 1958; Burke, 2001; Carre et al., 1982; Dibble, 1963; Gottschalk, 1963; Gottschalk et  al., 1945; Howell & Prevenier, 2001; Iggers, 1997; Lerner, 1958; Milligan, 1979; Wilson, 2005: Winks, 1968). Several books and articles were valuable in understanding the history of housing (Wright, 1983; U. S. Bureau of Census, 1975), history of banking and mortgage lending (Weiss, 1989), the history of household consumption (Rutherford, 2003), and the history of advertising (Marchand, 1986). Two French social historians who made some of the same ontological and epistemological assumptions made by institutional ethnographers were important to our research methods. By analyzing social relations embedded in people’s everyday activities and experiences as bakers, Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame (1981) examined how the artisanal bread industry failed to industrialize in France as happened in other countries—why France never got what they call “standardized Styrofoam white bread.” Their methods of using life histories in combination with primary sources such as company ledgers, hiring correspondence, bill of sales, rent receipts, newspapers, government documents, and so on provided us with guidelines for uncovering similar documents we might seek in relation to housing since they provide the work-text-work sequence embodied in social relations. Of course, our preliminary little hero diagrams made visible possible linkages to the extra local organizational and institutional sites present in the women’s housing histories, but they did not tell us exactly what texts to examine; that is, the exact book, poster, film, newspaper/magazine article, or discourse they referred to often was lost in memory. But we learned about locating texts from reading historiography and actually

162 

S. VAUGHAN

collecting textual documents from archival sites that potentially linked to local historical sites. Below I outline what we have learned about uncovering texts and tying texts to courses of action at the local site and texts in action. These guidelines reproduce how we found some of the specific textual documents used in some of our papers (see, e.g., Luken & Vaughan, 1991, 2003, 2005, 2006) and our analytical reasoning in tying certain texts to local sites and a particular woman’s experience.

Guide for Doing Archival Research in IE First, read a good history (or several) of the time period under investigation to acquaint yourself with various people, events, companies, and organizations. Often I tell my IE students to start with Wikipedia, look at references in entry, and then search library bases and the web for more reliable sources to read. In our own research, Olive Jackson told us that she grew up on a ranch and then in a town in Wyoming, but later lived there with her husband in housing provided by the Union Pacific Railroad since her husband was an employee. Before traveling to the archives and museums in Wyoming, we read histories of cattle and sheep ranching in the West that alerted us to how ranching was organized through cattlemen’s associations, branding laws, feedlot businesses, the railroad shipping practices, and slaughterhouses in Chicago. These histories helped us trace her family’s specific ranching practices and resources in the archives through well-maintained grange ledgers and records on specific ranches from the early 1900s. In addition, we read several organizational histories about the Union Pacific and their company towns for workers. In the archives in Wyoming, we located historical photographs of the company housing provided to Olive and her husband, along with other amenities the railroad provided their employees, including “passes” for travel that Olive told us she used to move to California. In other words, these histories were valuable in our inquires at archival sites, alerting us to what to request and what questions to ask. Second, read the histories of organizations and companies mentioned in narratives to acquaint yourself with various key players, work activities, organizational processes, and name changes over time. Often, these histories can be located on the websites of private companies, but labor, business, and economic historians have written innumerable treaties on private companies, professional organizations, and government agencies. For example, Nita Rodriquez, another participant, told us that her family

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

163

worked for a major U.S. copper mining company in southwestern United States and Mexico between 1920 and 1950, and often lived in company housing or makeshift shelters transported by the company as her family easily crossed back and forth across the southern border of the United States. By visiting the local historical museum in the mining towns where she lived with her brothers and sisters, we learned about the history of ownership of the mines and were able to identify previous company names. It just so happened that a web search of historical records of the company returned shareholders reports housed in archives at the University of Pennsylvania (1930) which included detailed company expenditures for housing, Americanization classes, company schools and libraries, and educational classes and textbooks for families of employees. Coincidently, Nita had told us about readers she studied while attending grade school and how she always wanted to have a family and home life just like the readers and the classes her siblings took at work portrayed. Although we were never able to locate the specific textbooks she discussed, we found a number of textbooks used in public schools in California and Arizona, describing school and community programs in homemaking, citizenship for Mexican immigrants, and Americanization texts used by other U.S. companies during the same time period. What was remarkable, or perhaps not so remarkable given that institutions generalize across many local settings of people’s activities, is that we found the same images, advise, and frameworks produced in each. Third, read secondary research by social and cultural historians about production and mass consumption practices during the time period of interest. These tell us about specific films, newspapers, school textbooks, advise books, and magazines that people are likely to have seen, read, thought about, and may have acted upon. Then view or read the original or primary texts mentioned by these researchers. Drawing upon historiography on how to map out these textual artifacts from points of distribution to points of consumption, our archival work allowed us to investigate what Ellen Pence (1996) calls “processing interchanges”; that is, we were able to follow trails from the extra local work sites of distant institutional processes “in which a given text is entered and from where it passes on or is incorporated into new texts or into the next site” (Smith, 2002, p. 36). Some of this historical work on popular culture and social movements was also useful for establishing consumption practices, particularly magazine and newspaper readership and literacy rates among working-class families and women. Other historians have contributed to our analytical reasoning

164 

S. VAUGHAN

through their various histories of the home economics, Americanization and immigration movements, and of the emergence of the print media and advertising during the twentieth century. In our own research on housing, the women we interviewed often referenced text, but no particular or specific one. For example, Olive Jackson talking about troubles with her young son while renting a two-room house in California, she told us, “I had read a thing: anything that’s on the child’s mind should not be on its body. And I figured that house was on his body, so I got rid of it and found a new place and did it up.” Her talk was in the context of describing courses of action she undertook to redecorate the new house so that her son would feel comfortable bringing friends home. When we asked her where she might have read this, she told us, “In a magazine or book on childcare. You know, something like that.” Our strategy for uncovering texts in these instances has been multifaceted. First, we read a number of secondary and original texts on childrearing, produced during the time she was raising her son. In reading these texts, like many cultural historians who study the child advise literature during this time period (Beekman, 1977; Macleod, 1998), we found similarities in frameworks, advise, word usage, and images from text to text that we reviewed. Reading original texts on childrearing and textbooks used in elementary schools and viewing popular films such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times produced and distributed during that time period, we found similar discursive frames in their content about the proper housing for raising children. Next, where possible, we explored production and readership/viewership rates for these texts along with literacy rates documented by social historians for the time period. Using these data, in our papers, we built an argument that some texts, or at least “ideological codes” within texts, are virtually ubiquitous at certain historical moments, making it highly likely that the women we interviewed had direct contact with them, or, if not direct contact, they were surely aware of the texts and their content through interaction with others. Fourth, talk to archivists at local repositories about their collections and what specific organizations, companies, and people you have gleaned from your reading above. Repositories are usually organized by “collection”; that is, they are organized by a person or an organization donating materials, not by topics such as housing. Archivist’s detailed knowledge of their holdings in relation to “finding aids” used to document what is in a collection allowed us to identify boxes of folders of materials to examine. In some instances in our research, we have found direct reference to text in

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

165

women’s talk about housing. Their talk unfolded for us the sequences of action they took to make the text actionable. For example, Ursula Roberts told us that she found out about Sun City, a retirement community in Arizona, through an advertisement she read in her local newspaper while living in Ohio. From the advertisement, she said she sent in the coupon to obtain brochures about it, and later, after talking to her husband, they visited the community and purchased a home there. In telling us about moving to Phoenix, she directed us to the next phase of our investigation: finding the advertisements themselves. Although the advertisement was not present in the local setting of our interview, as is often the case in organizational and professional settings, her narrative pointed us to texts that did in fact coordinate her action. We found texts she may have read at the Sun Cities Historical Society’s archives. After talking to the archivist she directed us to tear sheets and ledgers recording dates and names of publications produced by Del Webb Corporation to be reproduced in magazines and newspapers across the United States. In fact, in reviewing the ledgers, we discovered that the corporation published these advertisements in Ursula’s hometown newspaper during the time she lived there. Although we cannot conclude that these particular advertisements were absolutely the ones that Ursula Roberts read, the discursive terrain upon which she interpreted the text and explained her actions in relation to reading the text is similar; that is, her narrative tells us the sense she makes of the Sun City advertisement, justifies and organizes her courses of action. Indeed, as McCoy notes, “Text-mediated courses of action or social relations rely on individual moments of interpretation, where texts are activated within discourses by competent users through the employment of known-in-common interpretative schemas. (Texts) intend these schemas through their production and structuration” (1995, p. 182). Fifth, pay attention to production and distribution processes as your read through documents located at various archives. These documents often include who was involved, correspondence between other organizations involved in the production process, organizational directives, descriptions of work processes, who was involved in those processes, examples of texts produced by the organization, and how the organization went about distributing what they produced and to whom. Although three of the women, Thelma Hay, Edna Kepler, Ursula Roberts, eventually moved to Phoenix, Arizona, as adults, they all grew up in cities located in the northeastern part of the United States. After living in grandparents’ homes, rental houses, or apartments in the inner cities of their towns, their parents

166 

S. VAUGHAN

moved to new homes built by developers engaged in national campaigns coordinated by the federal government. Our discovery of historical documents and texts at the U.S. National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) from The Children’s Bureau (1912–1930s), The Own Your Own Campaign (1917–1919), and The Better Homes in America Movement (1922–1930) allowed us to trace the coordination of work activities to promote homeownership to working-class families by lumber companies, construction companies, lending agencies, realtors, and local municipalities though correspondence, posters, brochures, newsletters, and newspaper copy, and to identify distribution practices of textual materials produced by the departments of the federal government to specific local sites. In subsequent research, we focused on the other end of the text/reader conversation and attempted to connect the parents empirically to these texts using several different strategies. From our archival work at historical societies in the cities where the women lived as children, we learned that these campaigns operated locally and that the planned audience for these campaigns was ordinary working-class parents. In local archives we found evidence that the campaigns were widely advertised in local newspapers and on radio, notices about the campaign were posted throughout the city, and campaign materials were distributed at state and city fairs attended by a large number of working-class families. Because we had family names, street names, and sometime even addresses from the interviews, we used historical county property records and discovered that local sponsors of these homeownership movements actually built the homes purchased by the three women’s parents. Although we cannot be sure that the parents of these women actually read or discussed these textual materials, the women told us that their parents began looking for a home after hearing about new housing developments going up in the city. Where references in talk to specific texts may be oblique or absent, in historical work, textual practices at other organizational and institutional sites during the same time period often aid IE researchers in uncovering how people might have taken up the text. Sixth, pay attention to the discourse as you read through documents in a file or box of an organization. Often that discourse leads to other organizational sites where a similar discourse is articulated, allowing one to unfold how institutional sites are discursively interconnected. All five women we interviewed told us that that they liked living alone since they remained independent and never wanted to burden their children in old age. They were very active socially, volunteering in hospitals and churches,

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

167

playing golf, playing bridge, dining with friends, and even dating, but never wanting to remarry. We discovered the discourse about active living in old age through our archival and analytical work using advertisements for purchasing homes in Sun City, one of the first retirement communities established in the United States. Reading several histories of Sun City, we learned that the founder, Del Webb, had consulted with a number of social and medical scientists in planning his development. These histories turned our attention to an exploration of historical social science and medical literature about old age and retirement from the 1950 through the1960s. Surprisingly, we began to see a call for a redefinition of aging and retirement in policy papers, medical journals, and economics forecast newsletters given that this new working-class cohort of retirees already had paid off their mortgage on their home and had a large disposable income from social security and company pensions upon their retirement. The argument proposed in this literature was that rather than being dependents in a capitalist economy, retirees could be active consumers of various goods and services including housing, entertainment, medicine, and sport activities. Pursuing this argument, we discovered that the discourse of independent, active living in old age in a variety of textual documents directed to retirees in the form of advertisements in magazines, brochures, and newspapers at other organizational sites, including government agencies concerned with aging, pharmaceutical agencies, assisted living facilities, nutrition and healthcare industries, vacation industries, and sport manufacturing industries. Seventh, remain open to serendipity and possibilities for triangulation (referring to making empirical observations of the same social processes using different types of historical documents). Upon arriving at the archives in Wyoming and discussing our interests in housing with one of the archivist, she offhandedly mentioned that most of the old housing in the town came from the Montgomery Ward mail order catalog of homes, Wardway Homes. Her comment was fortuitous. Prior to completing our data collection at the archive, we inadvertently found a family history of Olive Jackson’s family in a Wyoming library. The family history written by one of Olive’s sisters told us two important things. Olive’s mother before marrying received a BA in Home Economics from the land grant college in Wyoming and her father bought everything from a Ward catalog, including a new house. Later, we found a college Home Economics text from that period which proposed that families could use sheets or blankets to create separate rooms for children and parents. These texts helped us

168 

S. VAUGHAN

connect what Olive told us about growing up first in a two-room cabin and that her mother hung sheets to separate her sons/daughters and parents for privacy. Returning to the Wyoming archives, we inquired whether there were any files pertaining to Montgomery Ward homes. The archivist provided us with boxes that included Wardway manufactured homes catalogs mailed to families at that time and literature on the where materials for the homes (lumber, steel) were obtained, how and where houses were built and assembled in Chicago, how houses and their fixtures were shipped by rail to Wyoming, instructions for transporting the load to the local site and for assembling the house. These historical documents from Montgomery Ward, the family history, and Olive’s narrative helped us tell the story about the social relations organizing the early development of manufactured housing in the United States, the work Olive’s father and his brothers did in building the house in the city, and the family’s move from the ranch cabin to a large family home in the city purchased through mail order catalog. Finally, remain open to what is missing in texts or in archives, libraries, and museums. Stoler (2010), in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, advises that archived texts should be read both with the grain and against the grain. He argues that, in some instances, materials can be taken at face value, but often seeing what is not there informed us about social relations and power of ruling. In our own work in archives, we spotted the absence of people of color, the poor, single people, same-sex couples, communal living or multigenerational households, or any concern for the environment (water, pollution) or agriculture as housing development spread further and further from cities. In several instances, we were often struck by historical research documents that reported on investigations of housing that explained away differences as anomalies in the data. For example, one text we reviewed was a report of a national housing survey conducted by the federal government in the 1920s. The researcher reported that tenant farmers picking cotton in the South were better off because their houses allowed them circulating fresh air and sunshine in spite of a lack of doors, windows, or adjoining walls, or indoor plumping or water, amenities necessary for urban living (Roberts, 1922/1974). Although texts need not always be implicated as coordinators of people’s work at the local level and at particular time, institutional ethnographers recognize texts not only as “‘occurrences’ at the moment of reading that enter into the reader’s next doings or ‘responses’, but that texts are at

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

169

work in talk or in writing/reading as organizers of local settings, referenced, aimed at, governing, the ongoing development and concerting of activities” (Smith, 2002, p.  35). Indeed, our analytical practices augmented by what we learned from social and cultural historians helped us locate historical documents and tie these documents directly to local doings and people and their courses of action.

Conclusion Few institutional ethnographers have exploited the richness of using historical archival data to explore how ruling relations have changed over time. In critiquing past sociological research on social/historical change, I have focused this essay on elaborating the ontological assumptions of institutional ethnography and analytical strategies for exploring ruling relations through textually mediated discourse which make it possible to extend institutional ethnography to include historical studies of the social. From my perspective, the key to this type of inquiry is discovering the discourse and texts referenced in people’s talk by using the ways historians analyze and situate historical documents in the practices of people in production, distribution, and consumption processes during specific time periods. Institutional ethnographic studies often focus on contemporary professional and administrative settings where controlling texts and work processes appear to be more visibly tied; however, I want to emphasize that my colleague and I embraced the notion that looseness is a feature of discursively ordered social relations, not simply a practice in some institutional settings. As Smith contends in her chapter, “Femininity as Discourse,” texts and discourse do not have an overriding power to determine peoples’ understanding or action. Rather, at the local site discourse is “continually undergoing elaboration, contradiction, reworking … among women actively participating in it” (1993, p. 205). Meanwhile back in the West, the desert continues to be paved over with suburban developments with single-family homes, backyard pools, golf courses, and artificial lakes with beachfront hotels, but this time in the Mojave Desert. Just yesterday, I read about the Disney Corporation’s collaboration with DMB Development for a planned residential community of over 2000 homes outside Rancho Mirage, California. The project named “Storyliving” hopes to create neighborhoods, according to their blog, “infused with the Company’s special brand of magic [since] … more and more fans look for new ways to make Disney a bigger part of their

170 

S. VAUGHAN

lives” (Walt Disney Company, February, 16, 2022). As I read more about this community on my phone, I wondered whether the organization of relations within the institution of housing had changed in the twenty-first century as water rights groups, conservationists, sustainable energy developers, state and federal Bureau of Land Management personnel, local and state politicians, recreational users, land developers and financiers, and rulings by the Trump administration to expand development of public desert lands collide. Institutional ethnography provides the perfect tool for such an investigation.

References Abrams, P. (1982). Historical sociology. Open Books. Aron, R. (1958). War and industrial society. Oxford University Press. Beekman, D. (1977). The mechanical baby: A popular history of the theory and practice of child rearing. Lawrence Hill & Company. Bertaux, D. (Ed.). (1981). Biography and society: The life history approach in the social sciences. Sage. Bertaux, D., & Bertaux-Wiame, I. (1981). Life stories in the baker’s trade. In D. Bertaux (Ed.), Biography and society: The life history approach in the social sciences (pp. 169–190). Sage. Burke, P. (Ed.). (2001). New perspectives on historical writing (2nd ed.). Polity Press. Carr, D., Dray, W., Geraerts, T.  F., Ouellet, F., & Watelet, H. (Eds.). (1982). Philosophy of history and contemporary historiography. The University of Ottawa Press. DeVault, M. L., & McCoy, L. (2001). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In J.  F. Gubrium & J.  A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context and method (pp.  751–776). Sage Publications. Dibble, V. K. (1963). Four types of inferences from documents to events. History and Theory, 3(2), 203–221. Disney Corporation. (February 16, 2022). Retrieved July 2, 2022, from https:// u r l d e f e n s e . c o m / v 3 / _ _ h t t p s : / / t h e w a l t d i s n e y c o m p a n y. c o m / disney-launches-new-business-to-develop-residential-communities Douglas, L., Roberts, A., & Thompson, R. (1988). Oral history: A handbook. Allen & Unwin. Faraday, A., & Plummer, K. (1979). Doing life histories. Sociological Review, 27, 773–798. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punishment: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

171

Geiger, N. G. (1986). Women’s life histories: Method and content. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11, 334–351. Gottschalk, L. (1963). Understanding history: A primer of historical method (2nd ed.). Alfred A Knopf. Gottschalk, L., Kluckhohn, C., & Angell, R. (1945). The use of personal documents in history, anthropology and sociology. Social Science Research Council. Grele, R. J., & Terkle, S. (1985). Envelopes of sound: The art of oral history (2nd ed.). Precedent Books. Griffith, A., & Smith, D.  E. (Eds.). (2014). Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. University of Toronto Press. Hall, J. R. (1990). Social interaction, culture, and historical studies. In H. S. Becker & M. M. McCall (Eds.), Symbolic interaction and cultural studies (pp. 16–45). University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, G.  G. (1987). The “new history” in sociology. Politics, Culture and Society, 1, 89–114. Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From reliable sources: An introduction to historical methods. Cornell University Press. Iggers, G. G. (1997). Historiography in the twentieth century: From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge. Wesleyan University Press. Kinsman, G. (2000). Constructing gay men and lesbians as security risks, 1950-70. In G.  Kinsman, D.  Buse, & M.  Steedman (Eds.), Whose national security; Canadian state surveillance and the creation of enemies (pp. 143–153). Between the Lines Press. Lerner, D. (Ed.). (1958). Evidence and inference: The Hayden Colloquium on scientific concept and method. The Free Press. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (1991). Elderly women living alone: Theoretical and methodological considerations from a feminist perspective. Housing and Society, 18(2), 37–48. Luken, P.  C., & Vaughan, S. (1999). Life history and the critique of American sociological practice. Sociological Inquiry, 69, 404–425. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (2003). “Active living”: Transforming the organization of retirement and housing in the U.  S. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 30, 145–169. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (2005). “… be a genuine homemaker in your own home”: Gender and familial relations in state housing practices, 1917-1922. Social Forces, 83, 1603–1625. Luken, P. C., & Vaughan, S. (2006). Standardizing childrearing through housing. Social Problems, 53, 299–331. Macleod, D.  J. (1998). The age of the child: Children in America 1890-1920. Twayne Publishers.

172 

S. VAUGHAN

Marchand, R. (1986). Advertising the American dream: Making way for modernity, 1920-1940. University of California Press. McCall, M.  M., & Wittner, J. (1990). The good news about life history. In H. S. Becker & M. M. McCall (Eds.), Symbolic interaction and cultural studies (pp. 46–89). University of Chicago Press. McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the photographic text. In M.  Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 181–192). University of Toronto Press. Milligan, J. D. (1979). The treatment of an historical source. History and Theory, 18(2), 177–196. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Grove Press. Moore, B. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Beacon Press. Pence, E. (1996). Safety for battered women in a textually mediated legal system. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto. Plummer, K. (1990). Herbert Blumer and the life history tradition. Symbolic Interaction, 13(2), 125–144. Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative analysis. Sage Publications. Roberts, L. (1922). The nutrition and care of children in a mountain county in Kentucky. U. S. Department of Labor. Children’s Bureau. Bureau Publication No. 110. Reprinted in Children and youth: Social problems and social policy (1974). Arno Press. Rosaldo, R. (1980). Doing oral history. Social Analysis, 4, 89–99. Rutherford, J. W. (2003). Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the rise of household efficiency. University of Georgia Press. Skocpol, T. (1979). States and revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge University Press. Smith, D.  E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Northeastern University Press. Smith, D. E. (1993). Texts, facts and femininity: Exploring the relations of ruling. Routledge. Smith, D.  E. (1999). Writing the social; Critique, theory, and investigations. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D.  E. (2002). Institutional ethnography. In T.  May (Ed.), Qualitative research in action (pp. 17–52). Sage Publications. Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. AltaMira Press. Stanley, L. (2017). The racialising process: Whites writing whiteness in letters, South Africa, 1770s-1970s. X Press. Stoler, A. L. (2010). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1978). The voice of the past: Oral history. Oxford University Press. Tilly, C. (1976). The vendee. Harvard University Press.

9  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS ALTERNATIVE TO STUDYING… 

173

U. S. Bureau of the Census. (1975). Historical census of the United States, colonial times to 1970. U.S. Government Printing Office. University of Pennsylvania. (1930). Magma Copper Company annual report. Lippincott Library of the Wharton School Corporate Annual Reports Collection. Retrieved April 15, 2004, from http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/ etext/lipppincott/magma Vaughan, S. (2021). And then there was copyright. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_9 Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. University of California Press. Wallerstein, I. (1980). The modern world-system II: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750. University of California Press. Weiss, M. A. (1989). Marketing and financing home ownership: Mortgage lending and public policy in the United Sates, 1918-1989. Business and Economic History, 18, 109–118. Wilson, N.  J. (2005). History in crisis? Recent directions in historiography (2nd ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall. Winks, R. W. (Ed.). (1968). The historian as detective. Harper & Row. Wright, G. (1983). Building the American dream: A social history of housing in America. The MIT Press. Yans-McLaughlin, V. (Ed.). (1990). Immigration reconsidered: History, sociology and politics. Oxford University Press.

PART IV

Critical Commentary on Settler Ruling Relations

CHAPTER 10

Going in Circles: The Hidden Work of Hospital Staff Trying to Meet the Healthcare Needs of First Nations People Through “Patient-Centered Care” Sophie Hickey

The Australian healthcare system is not working for First Nations people; wide health and well-being disparities persist compared to other Australians (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2015). While Australia’s First Nations people are very diverse—representing some 500 nations, 200 language groups, with many ages, genders, geographies, and cultures—they collectively experience the ongoing impact of invasion and colonization in their everyday lives. White colonial-settlers reconstruct institutions such as healthcare to serve their own needs following their own ideals when they come to “settle” lands as they “do not envision a return home” (Glenn, 2015, p. 55). Many First Nations people in Australia endure racism and distrust Australian institutions that do not meet their needs (Davis, 2006). First Nations people are more likely to present to a hospital later and be

S. Hickey (*) Independent Scholar, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_10

177

178 

S. HICKEY

sicker than non-Indigenous Australians (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2015) and report poor and unacceptable experiences with healthcare staff (Kelaher et al., 2014). These can be due to (a) intentional and unintentional staff attitudes and behaviors, or (b) unintended systematic failures that disproportionately disadvantage First Nations people. Both restrict access to good care. Who decides what is “good care”? There is an inherent tension between how end users experience care and how institutional discourses represent this care. Work is required to navigate this gap. Māori scholar Irihapeti Ramsden (2002) argued that “cultural safety” in clinical care can only be determined by the end user, explicitly taking into consideration cultural, racial, and colonial power imbalances between clinicians and patients. Yet, in Australia, hospitals are regulated by the  Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare (2022) which advocates “patient-centered care”:1 “care that is respectful of, and responsive to, the preferences, needs and values of the individual patient” (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, 2017, p. 74). Patient-centered care is considered agnostic to the cultural background of staff or patients as it is located within an egalitarian discourse that “all people are diverse and worthy of care,” and therefore all care should be individualized. Some have found patient-­centered care helpful in advocacy work for meeting the needs of First Nations people (Gibson et  al., 2021), while others have questioned its appropriateness in Westernized approaches (McMillan et  al., 2010), in a context where First Nations people continue to have their collective rights to self-determination obscured (United Nations, 2007). Improving healthcare for First Nations people is a stated national priority (Australian Government Department of Health, n.d.; Commonwealth of Australia, 2020). The Commission’s National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards, or the “Standards,” outline what actions are required by hospitals to receive accreditation. The current Standards have added specific actions intended to improve care for First Nations people (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, 2017), such as having strategies to provide a “welcoming environment,” improved cultural competency of the workforce, and First Nations participation and governance within hospitals. Implementing this represents significant change for some hospitals. It is not yet known how the Standards will influence the everyday work of hospital staff and how they might be activated to affect change.

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

179

The Research Problematic This study begins from the standpoint of a small group of hospital staff who I met as they were trying to meet the needs of First Nations people in their everyday work at a large Australian hospital. One member of this group, Leanne, felt much of the work she did at the hospital to ensure First Nations patients and their families were welcomed, understood, and their wishes respected was not being recognized. In her everyday work, she encountered conflicting policies that would restrict her ability to fulfill the wishes of First Nations people. When Leanne and her colleagues offered suggestions to other staff and managers about how to systematically improve care for First Nations people, these suggestions were dismissed. Leanne joined a new working group, believing this would be an avenue to advocate for improved hospital care for First Nations people. The working group was created by the hospital’s clinical governance team with the aim to improve healthcare for First Nations people by planning and implementing organizational changes needed to meet the new First Nationsspecific actions in the Standards to pass upcoming accreditation. Working group members were corralled from across the organization; some members had experience working with First Nations people, some did not. As a researcher on another First Nations focussed project, I was invited to attend monthly meetings, from the group’s inception over a two-year period. I am a White, settler woman who works in applied health services research on projects aiming to improve healthcare with and for First Nations people. Over time, I noticed Leanne and her peers become increasingly disengaged in meetings. Talking with them outside the meetings, I learned that some felt the working group was “just a box ticking exercise,” “nothing changes,” and “I don’t even bother any more. They don’t listen.” In these meetings, Leanne found herself entangled in the same dynamics as before: her intimate, experiential work knowledge of caring for First Nations people was dismissed, her suggestions and complaints unactioned. She became withdrawn, upset, and depleted, exhausted from this work. She shared with me: “I’m thinking of leaving––that’s very confidential––because I’m probably frustrated now. I can see I’m not going to make any more gains here.” Over two years, this working group did not develop or change any strategies, policies, procedures, or training. No changes to budgets, staffing, or patient pathways were made, despite recognizing the importance of reorienting the organization to the needs of First Nations people. There

180 

S. HICKEY

was little evidence that the working group impacted the healthcare experience of patients in any way. Given the toll on Leanne and her peers, and the urgency of improving healthcare for First Nations people, I became intrigued and frustrated about how this came to be so, and wondered then, “what were people spending their time and effort doing, and who was this work serving?”

Using IE to Explore the Work of Staff My head was swimming with these exact thoughts the day I serendipitously joined an institutional ethnography (IE) session at an international sociology conference. It felt as though Dorothy Smith (2005) had invented a whole other way of seeing the social just so I could make sense of what was going on at the hospital. IE taught me to explore the disjuncture between how Leanne and her peers subjectively and reflexively knew their work to better care for First Nations people versus how institutional forces objectified, mis/represented, and dis/organized this work. IE explores the “relations that, though we participate in them, impose their objectified modes upon us” (Smith & Griffith, 2022, p. 7). These ruling relations, as they are known in IE, coordinate the everyday work of people to reproduce existing power structures through dominant institutionalized ways of knowing and working. IE provided a lens to explore the disjuncture felt by some members of the working group, by problematizing the broader institutional complex within which this work occurred, rather than problematizing the people and the organization itself (D. Smith, 2005). IE’s generous definition of work includes what “people do that takes some effort and time, that they mean to do, that relies on definite resources, and is organized to coordinate in some way with the work of others similarly defined” (D. Smith, 2002, p. 46). This was not restricted to paid work and can involve activities that are documented, or not, in existing institutional processes. My intention was not to criticize the work or intentions of staff, rather to explicate the tensions they navigate––not as idiosyncrasies or anomalies but as happenings inherent to the healthcare system. From my observations at the hospital, I devised a few questions to guide my inquiry: What did staff spend their time and effort doing when they were working to “meet the needs of First Nations people”? What happened when they shared their knowledge about this work with others to make improvements at a larger scale? How was this knowledge received

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

181

and how did it not lead to change? What was shaping these interactions? Ultimately, who benefited from this? After obtaining relevant ethical approvals and research authorizations, I began interviewing hospital staff known to me. I asked interviewees for suggestions for whom else to interview, both with experiences similar to and different from their own. I interviewed 30 hospital staff across one large hospital complex, including four First Nations staff. Interviews were mostly conducted one-on-one, though on three occasions there were two informants in the same interview. A First Nations research student assisted me during data collection and attended one of these interviews. The people I interviewed worked as community workers, project officers, managers, and executive directors, and in clinical and non-clinical areas. Talking with staff with different perspectives and experiences was important to understand how institutional forces were reproduced and maintained by different people across the organization. I also undertook a document review and participant observation to trace how people’s experiences were connected into the broader institutional context. The IE concept of ideological circles (see Fig. 10.1) proved analytically useful for “making visible the institutional or discursive frames organizing Band-aid work subsumed under patient-centered care therefore ‘no change needed’ First Nations peoples needs not being met by routine clinical care

“First Nations peoples have distinct needs and rights” (UNDRIP)

Objectified knowing ‘Patient-centred care’ means all care should be respectful and meet the needs of each individual patient

Work needed by staff to meet these needs

Experiential knowing

“No special treatment” (Resisters)

Some band-aid work being done by minority of staff, unrecognized and unresourced

Competing ideologies “Improve care for all consumers (and First Nations peoples)” (ACSQHS)

“All people should be treated the same” (Convincers and resisters)

“We need change” (Convincers)

“All people are diverse with unique needs” (IFPCC)

Fig. 10.1  Ideological circle of the hidden work required for meeting needs of First Nations people through “patient-centered care”

182 

S. HICKEY

how actualities are selectively interpreted” (Smith & Griffith, 2022, p. 91; see also Deveau, 2014). I explored how people’s actual happenings became distorted into ideologically driven objectified representations that “appear as though they exist in their own right, and as such, their active production from the actualities of people’s intellectual work is concealed” (Nichols, 2019, p. 14). I worked to ensure I was not also institutionally captured within these same ideological discourses by having regular and generous discussions with First Nations people, critical scholars, and institutional ethnographers outside healthcare settings. I have included quotations from transcribed audio-recorded informant interviews, edited for readability and maintaining confidentiality. All staff have been allocated pseudonyms.

What Staff Trying to Improve Care for First Nations People Spent Their Time and Effort Doing To understand how Leanne came to feel that her hard work was not being recognized by the hospital and how her suggestions on how to improve care for First Nations people became easily dismissed in working group meetings, I observed what  Leanne and her peers spent their time and effort doing in their everyday work at the hospital outside these working group meetings. Band-Aid Work Leanne and her peers interacted with First Nations people and their families face-to-face at the hospital daily. Much of their time was spent on doing what I will refer to as band-aid2 work. Band-aid work is shorthand for the reactive work undertaken by staff to make up for the disjuncture between the reality of the work required to meet the needs of First Nations patients versus the institution’s conception of it. Rachelle described this work as necessary to patch-up the gaps in a “broken health system not designed for or by First Nations people.” Rachelle sighed, “Sometimes I feel like I’m just here sticking on band-aids, ambulance at the bottom of the hill stuff, while our people just get sicker and sicker, and nothing here [at the hospital] changes.” Rachelle explained how routine “mainstream” clinical care was oriented to meet a patient’s presenting medical condition by following formal

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

183

standardized guidelines and procedures written elsewhere, often designed without First Nations people and not addressing their diverse needs. Leanne, Rachelle, and their peers performed band-aid work reacting and responding to individual patients and families’ emerging needs, aiming to make hospital care safer and more accessible for First Nations people. For example, hospital policies talked of the importance of “effective communication” between staff and patients. Yet, Jaime explained how clinical staff did not always communicate to First Nations patients in a way they could understand. This was not only about avoiding medical jargon. Jaime described a woman being “medevacked,” evacuated via helicopter for a medical emergency, from a remote First Nations community with English as a third, fourth, or fifth language. The hospital’s interpreter policy stated staff should engage interpreters via the telephone hotline, yet interpreters were not always available in many First Nations languages, “it’s not like you can just pick up a phone like for [remote community].” Tracey described how staff did not always take the time to explain what was happening to First Nations patients, and this impacted the patient’s hospital experience: I’ve got a [First Nations] lady from [up North]. So I went in to see her yesterday. Um. [pause] She’s really angry. She’s very, very sick. But she was really angry. She’s like “They made me get up and have a shower. I had a temperature. Now I’m back in the bed” – so I let her vent. And then took that information back to them [the attending staff] and said to [a nurse], “So look what happened?”

Why the staff had not taken the time to discuss what was going on with this woman was not clear. Tracey explained to me that the lady had assumed it was because of racism: “they speak to me like I’m dumb.” Another example of band-aid work was staff responding to First Nations patients’ and families’ requests based on cultural reasons: having female staff only in the birthing room, taking the placenta home to be buried, allowing more than two visitors at once, or seeing friends and family outside visiting hours (particularly important at births or when loved ones passed away). These examples were culturally significant to many First Nations people but were contrary to standard hospital procedures. To meet these needs,  Leanne and her colleagues were required to “make

184 

S. HICKEY

exceptions,” that is, to manage the expectations of staff, patients, and family and/or friends as to whether or how this could happen and coordinate the work of other staff to “let” this happen. Male midwives and obstetricians were employed at the birthing unit, and female staff were not always available for a particular task (e.g., performing emergency caesarean), regardless of patients’ wishes to maintain cultural protocol around “women’s business.” Staff handling of biological specimens was controlled by pathology standards and “safe disposable of waste” procedures. Multigenerational families wanted to visit an unwell newborn in intensive care nursery together to welcome the baby to the family as well as perform a healing ceremony, but they were denied access. As a staff member on shift, Leanne navigated tension between what was considered a “reasonable” request and what was “not allowed.” This distinction was highly variable, dependent on who else was rostered on. Band-aid work extended to First Nations staff managing situations at work where they were expected to educate other staff about First Nations cultural knowledge and/or the lived experience of racism and colonization. Mickie, a First Nations person working at the hospital, was mopping floors on the surgical ward one day when they were stopped by a White staff member asking how to deal with a complaint from a First Nations patient. Taylah was called away from rebooking a patient’s specialist appointment to act as an intermediary to bridge conflict or misunderstandings between a First Nations family and non-Indigenous staff. Robbie had to explain the impact on the government’s forcible removals of First Nations children from their families as part of the Stolen Generations3 at their staff Christmas party. They told me how White staff oftentimes assumed that all First Nations people had identical values, beliefs, and practices, and that the work of First Nations staff extended beyond their discrete roles to educating others about “all things Indigenous” at any given moment. This work interrupted other tasks, was upsetting, emotionally draining, and could be traumatizing. First Nations staff often felt obligated to take on this additional work, concerned that if they did not, no-one else would––even when they were not qualified, comfortable, or paid to do so. This occurred within the context of no First Nations specific training or support made available to staff, and most people living in Australia have very limited firsthand knowledge about First Nations people. Band-aid work also included staff removing barriers to accessing care or attending to what happened after hospital care, such as ensuring First Nations patients and their families had accommodation and transport. Drew, a patient support worker, explained:

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

185

[Gary] from [the emergency department] is saying this [First Nations] person is sitting in the waiting room because they’ve got nowhere else to go. Then [Marie phones me and says] I need to go [assist on her ward]. [I need to know] Who’s going to be discharged? Do they have transport to get home? Do I need to organize that?

Once patients had finished seeing the doctors, Drew’s work to assist patients in leaving the hospital was not considered clinically relevant and was not entered into the patient’s notes. Yet, without Drew’s work, the patient would continue to stay at the hospital (using resources), and the patient’s needs would not be met.4 When asked how much of their everyday work caring for First Nations patients was documented, non-clinical staff Kyle replied, It’s something that I have struggled with because I think there is a lot of lead given to all the clinicians here. I wouldn’t even say a half, a third written sort of procedure for [us], that is trying to identify what we need to do throughout the day.

While flexibility was important for staff to meet the dynamic needs of patients, their work did not make its way into the organization’s official texts. This is particularly significant given the extent to which work is textually mediated in hospitals (Rankin & Campbell, 2006). Clinicians entered information into the electronic patient health record database, yet only those in clinical roles were granted access. Staff engaging in band-aid work were not all in clinical roles, and therefore could not institutionally record this work, even if they wanted to. Much band-aid work did not “fit” in the bio-medically focused patient health record, such as Mickie’s advising work while he mopped the floors, and thus would not have been entered even if access was granted. This perpetuated the absence of this work from institutional texts. For example, the hospital’s database contained some 2000+ policies, procedures, and brochures. Searching the terms “Aboriginal,” “Indigenous,” or “First Nations,” resulted in only one entry coming up, and it was a brochure about a patient support service. With the help of the First Nations research student, we downloaded all 2000+ documents and re-ran the searches using text-identification software. By doing  this,  I found the hospital’s Clinical Services Plan, a key organizing text for clinical priorities and allocating budgets, cited First Nations people as one of the “vulnerable populations”; yet, there were no documents that outlined

186 

S. HICKEY

the organization’s plan to meet the needs of First Nations people specifically. Trish said, “So if you look at the Clinical Services Plan, [First Nations] people are mentioned in there in terms of the demographics […] But then it doesn’t say anything more about, well, what would we do about that?” Band-aid work took time, energy, and expert work knowledge. When staff spent time advocating for patients because their needs were not built into routine care, this was time spent away from patients themselves. It was work that was unsupported, undocumented, and often unrecognized by other staff. Band-aid work was not written down in policies, procedures, or training materials. Rather, Leanne and her peers knew this work was important to do either because the First Nations patient themselves requested it, or from their own lived experience or cultural knowledge that this had value. Band-aid work required staff to respond to broader inequities: language and health literacy, othering of First Nations cultural practices, financial and housing security—things that are mostly taken for granted by privileged White middle-class people in Australia who design hospital care. While effective when it happened, band-aid work was only a temporary fix to reoccurring issues. Band-aid work was not efficient: Leanne and her peers doing this work were small in number, and the wheel had to be reinvented each time. Convincing Work Leanne and her peers spent considerable time and effort attempting to convince other hospital staff that a systematic and longer-term approach, rather than individualized temporary band-aid work, was needed to make care more inclusive and of greater service to First Nations people. For example, with no clear budget streams available for this work, staff had to petition various sources for funding on a case-by-case basis using their own know-how and connections. Tania said: Oh! [Money!] How many fights and arguments I had with [senior leader], you know, cranky, about getting patients the TV […] And we were constantly struggling to find money for somebody for the TV to keep them in the ward. […] For somebody who isn’t from [here] and comes from out of town? That’s all they’ve got  – you know what I mean? […] [Otherwise] they’re gonna Discharge Against Medical Advice5 [leave]. […] You wanna go home to your family. [Emphasis by informant]

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

187

Having access to a TV was not considered as an entitlement or benefit for patients. Rather, Tania saw it as a way to keep patients engaged in healthcare. Not having access to free TV was seen as the last straw for some First Nations patients who, already feeling isolated, uncomfortable, and perhaps disrespected, might decide to leave and discontinue care. Leanne, Tania and their peers engaged in convincing work as an attempt to get band-aid work incorporated into routine practice and rectify policies that conflicted with patient needs. Yet, making this happen proved difficult. Convincing work took time and effort, and doing it again and again with limited results took a toll, leading to frustration and exasperation: [Sometimes] there’s this sense of helplessness. I’m the only one who is really actively trying to do [this work]. I think that kind of wears your soul down a little bit as well. So self-care, I hate to say it, might be having to pull back, which is really not what [you want when] there is such a targeted group of people that you want to try and offer support to.

What Happened When Staff Shared Their Knowledge About This Work with Others to Make Change? How Was This Knowledge Received? How Did This Not Lead to Change? One-on-one convincing work was not working, so Leanne and her peers banded together onto the working group. Armed with their experiential knowledge of how the hospital was not consistently meeting the needs of First Nations people, Leanne and Tania  thought the working group provided a “forum for legitimate recourse” (Diamond, 1992, p. 194). Yet, this was not the case.

Resisting work Staff interviewed described seeing colleagues undertake—or undertaking themselves—another type of work that was seldom acknowledged or made explicit: resisting work. This was when a staff member took time and effort to oppose proposals for First Nations-specific equity measures, policies, or activities at the organization and/or enabled the persistent absence of

188 

S. HICKEY

action. Sometimes directly, often indirectly, I observed individuals engage in work not unlike filibustering––that is, individuals prolonging the debate, which ultimately delayed or prevented a decision. This was a to-­ and-­fro dance of convincing talk by Leanne’s peers, and resisting talk by managers and other hospital staff, and ultimately ended when the convincer ran out of steam, and that line of conversation fizzled out. Whether or not these debates were initiated with intent or awareness, they derailed meetings, shifting the focus from deciding how and actioning change to happen, to discussions about whether change was even needed. For example, when Leanne addressed at a meeting the issue of multiple visitors in neonatal nursery, I witnessed managers and co-workers dismissing Leanne’s concerns citing clinical safety (e.g., fear of infection6). One staff member on the team, Lauren, followed this up with, “We can’t just start changing the rules for one group. Patient-centered care means doing it for everyone.” This common line of reasoning from resisters spoke to standardizing care rather than individualizing it. This ideological reasoning obscured how existing rules were clearly not working for everybody, and that First Nations people were not consistently receiving “patient-­ centered care,” as their cultural values and beliefs had limited consideration in practice within this predominantly White Australian hospital. The working group reflected the way concerns of residents in American nursing homes were dismissed in the residents’ council, “The rules themselves were not open to question… these were subjects that could be brought up, but only to be grumbled about, then clarified in terms of the rules, which were not seriously challenged” (Diamond, 1992, p. 194). Leanne and her peers encountered many hospital staff who felt it was not necessary to do work differently or specifically for First Nations people, as they felt that routine care should already be, or was, meeting these needs sufficiently. For example, Charlie, another staff member, explained: [When I asked why we weren’t doing anything for First Nations people] the response that I got was we don’t need to do anything differently because if we just follow the [organization’s] values then that should be okay for everybody.

Any “additional” time spent by Charlie with First Nations people was interpreted by some staff as taking away from other people’s opportunities or other institutional priorities. For example, one staff member wrote to

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

189

me, “WHY are the Aboriginals [sic] given extra assistance in everything?” A White middle-aged manager, Trent, did not support First Nations’ specific hiring policies at the hospital, because “Why should it specifically be an Aboriginal person. It could also be a […] different religion, gay, um, black person. No offense because most of my friends are very diverse. So fair enough, right?”7 Charlie’s colleague, Jocelyn, was told, “who cares, that’s not your job to worry about that, it’s your job to meet your KPIs8 [key performance indicators].” This deflective thinking led to a further problem in which First Nations people became reframed as “the problem,” rather than the original issue of care not consistently meeting their needs. Jordan remarked, “I think sometimes [First Nations patients] might get put into the [pause] too hard basket, […] [as if] ‘That’s just how they are.’” Analyzing this talk, I noticed there was a difference in how staff engaging in convincing work versus resisting work interpreted the phrase, “all people should be treated the same.” For resisters, this was seen as equality; for convincers, this was seen as equity. Tara explained: If you two both come in with the same needs, we should be all getting the same treatment for the same thing [that’s equality]. But, if your [gestures] needs are more than your [gestures] needs, I’m gonna give you more [the former] [that’s equity]. But, we should all still be treated as human people who need help. Meaning that you’re homeless, you’ve got somewhere to go, so I’m going to have to give a bit more time to get you somewhere to go whether you’re white or black. This person has got somewhere to go, might need a bus fare to go home, but we still need to be, yeah. That’s when I say we all should be, you know, “treated the same.”

Thus, all patients were deserving of respectful, safe, and quality care, but this might look different to different people, depending on their needs. Leanne and her peers engaged in convincing work to generate understanding that a blanket approach to healthcare provision would not necessarily meet these diverse needs of First Nations people. Scott intuited resisters’ thought, “you’ve got a level playing field when you actually don’t.” As Sam indicated, We bundle all our multicultural and our diversity […] into one […] I actually feel quite strongly that that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, really, you know, they were here before we were, like it’s their home first. We need to make sure that they feel part of the community and welcome in our

190 

S. HICKEY

um very white hospitals… they have unique needs in their health needs… I think healthcare does this a lot, where we treat everyone as generic … and it’s not working, is the point.

Some staff on the working group had seen the new Standards as an opportunity to leverage the pressure of accreditation to get material change. However, with accreditation looming, and no policies or training being developed or changed, it started to become clear to Leanne and her peers that neither the working group nor the Standards were likely to achieve what they hoped. In one discursive swoop, manager Lauren subsumed Leanne’s band-aid work under patient-centered care by concluding, “Well it sounds like you’re doing that work already”; thus, no additional resources or changes were deemed institutionally necessary.

What Was Shaping These Interactions? Who Benefited from This? The work I observed being done by hospital staff—band-aid, convincing work, and resisting work—was not inscribed into institutional accounts. One had to be present in a meeting to see how it was that band-aid work got dismissed, that convincing work got activated, that resisting work happened so that change did not happen. There were only light textual traces of these encounters: unactioned items carried forward to subsequent meetings in meeting minutes, or “gap analysis” reports compiled for accreditation purposes that contained minimal context or explanations. Failure to make material change by the working group can be traced to two competing ideas that were at odds with each other in both talk and texts. The Virtual Reality of Patient-Centered Care Staff doing convincing and resisting work were drawing from the same two competing ideologies textually embedded within the Standards. The first was that all people are diverse and worthy of safe and quality care, expressed through the adoption of patient-centered care, with definitions traced back to the United States’ Institute for Patient- and Family Centered Care (n.d.). The second was First Nations people have distinct rights to access healthcare and self-determination which was traceable to the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People (2007), cited in the

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

191

Standards First Nations-specific User Guide (2017).9 The Standards as a whole (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, 2017) employed the generalizing language of patient-centered care, emphasizing the needs of all “consumers.” The six First Nations-specific actions in the Standards were a postscript to this greater context that was already standardizing care. Without a definition for what it meant to experience safe and quality care, interpretations of what was considered safe and quality care were left to the reader. For example, one action step, “The health service organization demonstrates a welcoming environment that recognizes the importance of cultural beliefs and practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” (Action 1.33), was interpreted as planning to include more First Nations artwork in the foyer or “soft furnishings.” Rearranging the art on the walls did not alone make the hospital culturally safe; this was about ensuring your family could meet your sick newborn; burying the placenta in the home country to continue a multimillennial tradition of your ancestors; having staff explain to you why they were stripping the sheets off your bed when you were exhausted and unwell. The Standards did not give guidance on what to do when “cultural beliefs and practices” conflicted with hospital policies designed to conform to other items in the Standards (e.g., “antimicrobial stewardship”). These policies disregarded First Nations interests and cultural practices before they were even voiced. Band-aid work became obfuscated under “patient-­ centered care”—an ideological catch-all using a color-blind discourse that all patients should be treated with respect, know what’s going on, and have a say in how their care is provided. The reality was this was not happening systematically for First Nations people—let alone having their distinct needs and rights as Indigenous peoples acknowledged (United Nations, 2007). Like someone saying “all lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter,” patient-centered care—alongside other “egalitarian” ideologies—was activated in a way that de-railed conversation from the specific needs and injustices experienced by First Nations people and— whether intentional or not—shut down dialogue. Whilst technically true, the statement, “all people are diverse,” does not ideologically nor practically assist staff who do not know what to do for a patient; however, it did serve to allow them to choose to resist or remain ignorant to what it is they need to do. The need for any change to policies, procedures, and brochures become obscured as they were already “patient-­ centered.” Yet, this did little to inform or instruct staff what it meant to ensure that the needs of this-specific-person-in-front-of-you-who-is-First-

192 

S. HICKEY

Nations were met.10 Nurse Jamie B. Smith and others (2022) note that in a practical sense, “centring our care around one person is impossible and not reality, as nurses mostly navigate the care of multiple patients at once” (p. 5). It became seen as organizationally impractical for staff to provide individualized care even though this was at the heart of what patient-­ centered care promised to do. Resisting work perpetuated the virtual reality where patient-centered care was considered possible, while ruling relations of race and culture were made institutionally invisible. If we trace where this talk was happening, the dominant interpretation of patient-centered care was being activated by largely White hospital staff making decisions about and without First Nations people. These people became the arbiters of what it meant to be “safe and quality” care, universalizing their own interpretations through institutionally authorized texts. They did not have firsthand knowledge about the material realities, priorities, and aspirations of First Nations people, nor of First Nations ways of knowing, doing, and being. These people came to know First Nations people through these obfuscated representations that positioned First Nations people as passive recipients of healthcare, problematized as having “complex needs” and “causing extra work” for staff, rather than privileging First Nations people as knowers of their own experience and solution holders for an improved health system. First Nations staff and non-­Indigenous staff taking an advocacy role got caught up in  similiar ruling relations that discredited their own work knowledge. Following this schema, First Nations people, and Leanne and her peers, became objectified—not as knowers of the problem but as the problem itself, redirecting our attention away from the institutional ruling regime as the problem. While neoliberal new public management regimes were shaping the context in which this talk was happening—bureaucratic working group, hospital accreditation, standardizing healthcare (Griffith & Smith, 2014; Rankin & Campbell, 2006)—this alone could not account for the content of the talk happening in the working group. This was being ruled by White approaches to diversity becoming institutionalized in the decision-making procedures at this Australian hospital. As a White settler-colonial institution, it continued to maintain the status quo by perpetuating this virtual reality. This is the privilege of the dominant group to be in a position where people’s lived experience of everyday harm and oppression can be ignored and shape the way in which they are talked about (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Nichols, 2019).

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

193

This ideological circle ultimately preserved the existing material conditions of First Nations people and White settler-colonial ruling relations in the institution. White people were able to claim the hidden labor of others to their advantage (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) to pass accreditation and not change. First Nations people remained largely excluded from active decision-making and monitoring processes, and resisting work was actively contributing to keeping them out. When tracing the institutional processes to whom this obfuscation process was ultimately serving, we can see it was serving White people to maintain power and their version of “reality.”

Conclusion I was originally attracted to IE by the possibility of generating new knowledge not immediately available to hospital staff from their disparate vantage points but that could help them identify new ways for social change (Hussey, 2012; G. Smith, 1990). IE’s generous definition of work and its critique of ideological discourse helped me understand how alternate activations of patient-centered care was the problem for standpoint informants in this study and that respectful care that meets the needs of First Nations patients should not rely on the efforts of a few motivated individuals. Peeling back the layers of what was happening inside and outside the working group gave me the analytic tools to understand and articulate how these processes became so harmful and were not resulting in change. Looking at the everyday work of staff trying to improve the care of First Nations people showed the band-aid work Leanne and her peers would do to make a fragmented system more responsive to individualized patient needs. Fed up with and worn down by having to do this over and over, these same staff in the working group would engage in educating and convincing work to manage what they perceived was the cause of why they needed to do this work—people’s racist attitudes and/or lack of knowledge about First Nations people and colonization. However, this work also did not result in large-scale change because the root cause lay beyond the individuals in this local setting. This work was coordinated by ruling relations beyond the hospital that standardized work through a discourse of “patient-centered care” that promised individualized care for “all” patients. This discourse provided little support by the way of material or emotional assistance for staff doing this work on the ground and served to reinforce and universalize White ways of knowing and doing, where the

194 

S. HICKEY

colonial impacts of racism and structural inequities bearing down on the everyday lives and material conditions of First Nations people continued to be ignored and no one directly made accountable for. Hooking into this discourse became incompatible with recognizing First Nations people and staff’s work knowledge as knowers and solution holders and maintained their exclusion from genuine decision-making practices. It is the “invisibility of ruling relations [that] allows hegemony to continue, unchallenged” (Livesey, 2017, p. 74), and hence more ethnographic work to explicate this disjuncture is needed. Further research from the standpoint of First Nations people themselves would extend our knowledge of relations that rule work/don’t work for First Nations people to collectively transform the system (G. Smith, 1990). Acknowledgments  Cathrinea McNulty Burrows, Kirsten Small, Nerida Spina, Birri O’Dea, Cheryl Zurawski, and the 3G-IE Network including Karianne Stray and Tanya Osborne.

Notes 1. The Commission notes the interchangeable use of these terms: patient-­ centered care, person-centered care, and consumer-centered care (ACSQHC, 2017, p. 74). While there are theoretical nuances in the literature about each of these terms, and more recent texts by the Commission use “person-centered care,” I have chosen to retain the term “patient-­ centered care” as I believe it best fits the usage intended by informants. 2. Band-aid work pays homage to an important report concerning the health of First Nations people in Australia, “Beyond Bandaids” (Anderson et al., 2004). In colloquial use, band-aids are adhesive “plasters,” “bandages,” or “patches” stuck on top of small wounds to allow them to heal after an injury has been cause. They do not prevent the injury from happening. 3. The Stolen Generations refer to previous Australian governments and religious missionaries forcibly removing First Nations children from their families to implement its assimilation policy, not dissimilar to Canada’s Sixties Scoop and Residential School system. 4. The need for Drew’s work did not start when the patient entered

or left hospital doors. Over representation of First Nations people without accommodation or transport resulted from happenings outside the hospital, and impacted the work that happened inside the hospital to enable access to care. Like Laura being concerned for what will happen to her elderly mother who lives alone after her

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

195

hospital stay in Rankin (2015), here the inequities of being without a home or without a car or money for a taxi or public transport or a hotel disappeared from institutional accounts.

5. Discharge Against Medical Advice (DAMA) is an institutional term used for when a patient discontinues their interaction with the health service on their own accord, to the contrary of a clinician’s instructed course of action. Informants described First Nations patients sometimes leaving early because they had been waiting unattended for extended periods of time without being advised on what was happening to them and why they needed to stay. At the time of data collection, DAMA rates for First Nations people were not being systematically monitored at this hospital, despite being a common measurement of “hospital cultural responsiveness” in many other hospitals in Australia. 6. This was governed by another Standard in the NSQHS: “Anti-microbial stewardship.” 7. As a contextual note, both “why should they get special treatment?” and “I’m not racist because I know a black person” are considered offensive and racist to many First Nations people. 8. KPIs for Jocelyn were “how quickly we can patients in and out” (“length of stay”) and “hand-washing” (“antimicrobial stewardship”). 9. Interestingly, the term “patient-centered care” (nor its derivatives) was not included in the First Nations User Guide that accompanied the Standards (SAHMRI, 2017). The Commission’s original “patient-centered care” report that accompanied the previous version of the Standards included a page that outlined how different “patient-centered care” might look for First Nations people (ACSQHC, 2011, p. 35). 10. The diversity and heterogeneity of First Nations people was also hooked in ideologically to reinforce this.

References Anderson, I., Baum, F., & Bentley, M. (2004). Beyond bandaids: Exploring the underlying social determinants of aboriginal health. Papers from the Social Determinants of Aboriginal Health Workshop, Adelaide, July 2004. Cooperative Research Center for Aboriginal Health. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. (2011). Patient-­ centered care: Improving quality and safety through partnerships with patients and consumers. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare (Ed.). (2017). National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (2nd ed.). Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare.

196 

S. HICKEY

Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare. (2022). https:// www.safetyandquality.gov.au/ Australian Government Department of Health. (n.d.). National aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health plan 2013-2023. http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/natsih-­plan Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2015). The health and welfare of Australia’s aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples 2015.Cat. no. IHW 147. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Commonwealth of Australia. (2020). Closing the gap-prime minister’s report 2020. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Davis, M. (2006). A culture of disrespect: Indigenous peoples and Australian public institutions. University of Technology Sydney Law Review, 8, 137–154. Deveau, J. (2014). Using institutional ethnography’s ideological circle to portray how textually mediated disability discourse paralysed a Supreme Court of Canada ruling. Culture and Organization, 22(4), 311–329. Diamond, T. (1992). Making gray gold: Narratives of nursing home care. The University of Chicago Press. Gibson, C., Chatfeild, K., O’Neill-Baker, B., Newman, T., & Steele, A. (2021). Gulburra (to understand): Aboriginal ability Linker’s person-centered care approach. Disability and rehabilitation, 43(19), 2713–2719. Glenn, E. N. (2015). Settler colonialism as structure: A framework for comparative studies of US race and gender formation. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 52–72. Griffith, A., & Smith, D. (2014). Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. University of Toronto Press. Hussey, I. (2012). “Political activist as ethnographer,” revisited. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 37(1), 1–24. Institute for Patient and Family-Centered Care. (n.d.). www.ipfcc.org Kelaher, M., Ferdinand, A., & Paradies, Y. (2014). Experiencing racism in healthcare: The mental health impacts for Victorian aboriginal communities. The Medical Journal of Australia, 201(1), 44–47. Livesey, B. (2017). Planning to develop land returned under treaty settlement in Waikato, Aotearoa, New Zealand: An institutional ethnography. PhD Dissertation, Massey University, New Zealand. McMillan, F., Kampers, D., Traynor, V., & Dewing, J. (2010). Person-centered care as caring for country: An indigenous Australian experience. Dementia, 9(2), 163–167. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press.

10  GOING IN CIRCLES: THE HIDDEN WORK OF HOSPITAL STAFF TRYING… 

197

Nichols, N. (2019). Youth, school and community: Participatory institutional ethnographies. University of Toronto Press. Ramsden, I. (2002). Cultural safety and nursing education in Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu. PhD Dissertation. Victoria University of Wellington. Rankin, J. (2015). The rhetoric of patient and family centered care: an institutional ethnography into what actually happens. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 71(3), 526–534. Rankin, J. M., & Campbell, M. L. (2006). Managing to nurse: Inside Canada’s health care reform. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. (2002). Institutional ethnography. In T. May (Ed.), Qualitative research in action (pp. 17–52). Sage. Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Rowman Altamira. Smith, D., & Griffith, A. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography: Creating a sociology for people. University of Toronto Press. Smith, G. (1990). Political activist as ethnographer. Social Problems, 37(4), 629–648. Smith, J. B., Willis, E., & Hopkins-Walsh, J. (2022). What does person-centred care mean, if you weren’t considered a person anyway: An engagement with person-centred care and Black, queer, feminist, and posthuman approaches. Nursing Philosophy, 23(3), e12401. https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12401 United Nations. (2007). United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. United Nations. Wardliparingga Aboriginal Research Unit of the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, The (SAHMRI). (2017). National safety and quality health service standards user guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.

CHAPTER 11

Institutional Ethnography and Decolonization in Planning: Exploring Potential and Limits Magdalena Ugarte

The Origins of This Chapter: Planning’s Complicity with Colonial Dispossession The reflections in the following pages build on a presentation I delivered at the 2021 Conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), where Dr. Cheryl Zurawski organized a session titled IE in Support of Decolonization. The panel’s purpose was to draw attention to Institutional Ethnography (IE) as a method of inquiry that might support decolonization work, as well as to explore what that might look like where different understandings of decolonization are at play. Acknowledging that such a project is “messy, dynamic, contested, and unsettling,” the underlying theme was to “underscore how IE is and can be used to change the order and organization of the everyday world,”

M. Ugarte (*) Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_11

199

200 

M. UGARTE

change that “is necessary to make decolonization happen” (SSSP, 2021, p. 15). Here I take this session as a point of departure to explore the potential and limits of a decolonizing agenda in IE research, particularly in spatial disciplines like planning, which have been crucial in enabling processes of Indigenous territorial dispossession in contexts with a settler colonial history (Harris, 2004; Jojola, 2008; Matunga, 2013; Porter, 2010; Sandercock, 2004). Building on my doctoral research—where I used elements of IE in order to explore the ruling relations shaping Chile’s planning system in relation to Indigenous peoples historically and today—I ask what it might mean to use IE to further work that seeks to embody decolonial practices. More deeply, I critically examine what IE can offer to decolonizing work in a discipline like planning, given the realities of internal colonization (González Casanova, 1965), the absence of land restitution, and IE’s epistemological foundations. The reflections I offer in the following pages draw both on recent IE scholarship that openly seeks to advance decolonization work and on the trajectory of my work since I first engaged with IE. While this chapter builds directly on the conversation that took place at the SSSP conference, its deeper origins are long-standing. For the past decade, most of my work—both community-based and scholarly—has revolved around a key concern: examining planning’s complicity with settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession (Ugarte, 2016; Ugarte et al., 2017) while exploring ways to change such trajectory. I have paid particular attention to the role played by legal systems in the creation, legitimation, and perpetuation of such structural injustices (Ugarte, 2019). The turning point that led me to this work was working in government settings in Chile and Canada. While none of the jobs touched directly on Indigenous rights or policy,1 these experiences changed my perspective in significant ways. Working in poverty reduction in particular made visible a big tension: many of the “problems” our initiatives were trying to address had been created by government initiatives in the first place. This tension was most clear when I was asked to analyze and evaluate policies, programs, and services taking place in Labrador, which largely targeted First Nations and Inuit communities. Essentially, we were designing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of the solutions we were proposing to problems we were deeply implicated in. Problems that were grounded in Indigenous dispossession made possible precisely through policies, programs, and services such as the ones I had to assess.

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

201

Building on this experience, my doctoral research was an attempt to better understand the mechanics of Indigenous dispossession in Chile today, starting from the premise that while colonial times might have formally ended with the declaration of independence of settler colonial states, the infrastructures that reproduce colonial dynamics continue to exist (Quijano, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2000). Specifically, I examined how Chile implemented the duty to consult with Indigenous peoples and used this process as an entry point to explore how state planning and Indigenous policy happen (Smith, 2001). My interest in unpacking the institutional bases of Indigenous dispossession is shaped by the work of Indigenous and critical scholars, especially those who examine the structural intertwinement of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and other forms of institutionalized oppression against Indigenous peoples (Antileo, 2013; Coulthard, 2014; Dorries et al., 2019; Simpson, 2014a; Simpson, 2016; Toledo, 2005). My concern for decolonization as a social practice is also shaped by Indigenous colleagues and thinkers who make it clear that decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012), and that any such discussion is inseparable from the restitution of Indigenous territories and engagement with Indigenous legal orders (Black, 2011; Hunt, 2014; Melin et al., 2016; Simpson, 2014b). The reflections in this chapter are thus an effort to take their call seriously when thinking about what decolonization work might mean for IE. Building on my research findings, I more broadly explore the following questions: What are the main takeaways from a methodological standpoint? What did IE contribute to this inquiry that other methodological approaches might not have offered? And more importantly, is there anything emerging from this research that could support decolonizing agendas in planning scholarship and practice, and in IE research more broadly? In the remainder of the chapter, I first discuss my decision to use elements of IE to examine planning practice in Chile. I then outline what IE allowed me to do, leading to my main research findings. I emphasize how IE allowed me to make visible colonial ruling relations that still shape planning in Chile today, including the colonial rationalities underlying consultation legislation and Indigenous policy more broadly. I pay particular attention to the role Western law plays in enabling ongoing Indigenous dispossession. In light of this experience, the rest of the chapter critically discusses what IE can and cannot offer to a decolonizing project in planning. My main argument revolves around the fact that the question about what contributions IE can make toward decolonization work requires examining how decolonization is socially organized as a

202 

M. UGARTE

social problem. I conclude the chapter with a reflection about how IE might not in itself enable land restitution and the restoration of Indigenous intelligence systems (Simpson, 2016), but might help pave the ground for more emancipatory planning practices that help rebuild Indigenous territories, if research processes and outcomes are led by Indigenous peoples, following Indigenous protocols and planning priorities.

Unpacking the Colonial Cultures of Planning Through IE Planning’s historical role in colonial Indigenous dispossession—what Leonie Sandercock (2004) has called “the burden of colonialism” and Libby Porter (2010) “the colonial cultures of planning”—has received increased attention over the last two decades and is by now well documented and theorized. The fact that this complicity is not just a matter of the past, but that “colonial violences” (Antileo et al., 2015) continue to be reproduced through planning and policy today, is generally a matter of agreement too (Dorries et al., 2019). My doctoral research started from these premises. It was grounded in a practical concern with the contemporary reality of Indigenous-state relations in Chile and with the role of planning in enabling these tensions. It seemed clear to me that in order to better understand the reproduction of Indigenous dispossession today, it was necessary to observe planning practice closely. In practical terms, I looked at the creation of a governing text (Smith, 2005), a regulation known as the Framework on Indigenous Consultation or Supreme Decree 66 (hereafter DS66). DS66 was the result of a set of consecutive planning processes led by the ministry responsible for Indigenous affairs (Ministry of Social Development) between 2011 and 2014. The process brought together the national government and Indigenous representatives in a large-scale participatory planning process in order to implement the duty to consult, following international law commitments made by the Chilean state.2 The practice of consultation has become a key site where the interaction between the government and Indigenous peoples happens. Examining the creation of this governing text offered a relevant entry point to see how local institutional practices related to Indigenous policy are linked to broader coordinative forces— what Smith (2005) calls ruling relations. At the end of the process, the government enacted DS66, a regulatory text that outlines how consultations need to be conducted every time a legislative or administrative

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

203

measure might affect Indigenous peoples directly (Government of Chile, 2014). Although IE has not been widely used in planning scholarship in general and to explore the relation of state planning with Indigenous peoples in particular,3 adopting an IE lens seemed a suitable approach due to its emphasis in understanding and explaining how embodied everyday experiences come to be as a result of those coordinative processes, as well as its interest in how texts allow and/or exclude certain courses of action based on how they are constructed. To map out the institutional relations involved in the process, I conducted in-depth interviews with people who participated actively in the regulation-making process (Indigenous and government), who withdrew along the way, or who refused to participate outright. Unlike conventional forms of interview—which are aimed at accessing the “informants’ inner experience” (DeVault & McCoy, 2006, p.  15) in order to make generalizations—in this case the conversations paid particular attention to the forces shaping the writing of DS66  in order to “discover and explore these everyday activities and their positioning within extended sequences of action” (DeVault & McCoy, 2006, p. 18), as well as the kinds of interactions that took place between government and Indigenous representatives. The process of legal meaning making and the tensions emerging in that process were a central concern. I also did archival research and document analysis, especially historical texts and documents about the consultation process under examination, such as government minutes, reports, and regulation drafts. I did not examine these texts in isolation, however, but as the catalysts of institutional action. I was looking at how they shaped the creation of a governing text that ultimately regulates, authorizes, and codifies the “actual activities of actual people” (Smith, 2005) through consultation processes, defining what can and cannot be done in a particular institutional context. Importantly, this research assumed that regulation making is a space of struggle, contestation, and power. The idea of texts in action (Smith, 2001)—the ways in which texts “enter into actual courses of action” and “reproduce particular patterns of activity” across settings “in which [they are] read, seen, and interpreted” (pp. 174–175) by people—captured well the emphasis on individual agency and performativity that informed my doctoral research. The notion of intertextuality, in turn, resonated well with the ways in which texts link to and regulate other texts, managing activities extra locally. This was central to my analysis of how the international Indigenous rights discourse—particularly as expressed in Convention

204 

M. UGARTE

169 (C169) of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)—was being taken up (Ahmed, 2007) in Chile, and how/if Chilean planning frameworks were shifting in this context. Adopting an institutional ethnographic approach seemed suitable to capture the textually mediated nature of the process of regulating the duty to consult with Indigenous peoples, how the specific actions of individual people were coordinated and shaped the process, and the broader discursive context provided by C169 and UNDRIP. More broadly, by developing a detailed account of how this key governing text regulating Indigenous consultation in Chile was brought into being (Smith, 2006) and the ways in which it constructs consultation as an institutional practice, I believed IE offered the potential to shed light on the role played by planning in the dynamics of internal colonization4 and the reproduction of colonial rationalities in Chile today, as I elaborate in the next section.

Mapping Fear, Economic Interests, and Western Legal Supremacy: What IE Allowed Me to See The institutional ethnographic exploration of state planning in Chile offered deep insights into the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples, and more specifically into the practice of Indigenous consultation, making visible colonial ruling relations that still shape planning practice in Chile today whenever we talk about Indigenous rights. Eastwood (2006) argues that what is different about studying the process of policy-making using IE is that it involves producing new documents and texts, as opposed to activating specific forms or documents that are already embedded in particular work processes. In Smith and Turner’s words, my analysis “[broke] open the work concealed behind [this] governing or boss text… making visible the skills and contentions of negotiating the language that will come into play in the representations of actualities [it] will govern” (2014, p. 11). This research shed light on how the duty to consult reaffirms and imposes the supremacy of Western understandings of planning, law, and territory over Indigenous peoples, reproducing systems of internal colonization rather than opening spaces for Indigenous self-determination as protected by UNDRIP. Importantly, given my interest in individual agency, the study showed how the day-today operations of planners working at different levels of government contribute to these dynamics and by which specific mechanisms, rather than

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

205

taking such complicity for granted. The study also showed the numerous ways in which Indigenous leaders were engaged in the process, decided not to participate, or contested the creation of DS66 during and after the regulation-making process. Overall, the research revealed that consultation policy serves to proceduralize5 and restrict the scope of Indigenous rights—including territorial rights—and the exercise of self-determination under the veils of reasonableness and compatibility with Chilean legal frameworks (for full details, see Ugarte, 2021). The study provided evidence that the writing of DS66 was deeply informed by fear—fear of halting economic development, fear of paralyzing the state, and, in the words of government planners I interviewed, fear of “consulting everything.” And those fears translated into the government trying to proceduralize consultation in different ways. One way was by resorting to what I call selective intertextual relations. In other words, the scope of the duty to consult was constrained by limited interpretations of which governing texts should define its regulation. Important international law instruments like UNDRIP were left aside due to their non-binding nature compared to C169, for instance, despite Chile having voted in favor. And the Chilean Constitution was presented as an unmovable force, despite the fact that countries that endorse C169 are expected to adapt their legal frameworks to their international law commitments. Importantly, although perhaps not surprisingly, all of this process of regulating the duty to consult was codified in the language of Chilean law, and more specifically, through the creation of legal categories, legal definitions that restrict the duty to consult, and in turn, standardize it through discrete practices. For instance, by defining that only discretional administrative measures that might affect Indigenous peoples directly must be consulted, other important government measures that do affect Indigenous peoples and their territories but do not fall under this category—such as mining exploration permits—are left aside. Similarly, by defining that the impacts of a government measure must be “significant and specific” to Indigenous peoples for the duty to consult to get triggered, DS66 further restricts the kinds of measures to be consulted based on how the government perceives the intensity and scope of the impact. Importantly, the study shed light on how the government decided to create a separate consultation mechanism for investment projects with environmental impacts, which are often at the base of territorial conflicts with Indigenous communities. Under this parallel mechanism, the duty to consult gets triggered late in the process,

206 

M. UGARTE

once prospective activities for investment projects on Indigenous territories are underway, sidelining Indigenous land concerns. In this process, the broad aspiration of Indigenous self-determination that underlies discussions about Indigenous peoples’ right to be consulted was subjugated. In the end, DS66 reaffirms the supremacy of Chilean state powers, including the protection of economic interests, which have been crucial drivers behind the territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples. But as I mentioned in the introduction, besides the concrete research findings, what are the main takeaways from a methodological standpoint? What did IE contribute to my inquiry that other methodological approaches might not have offered? And, more importantly, given the questions guiding this chapter, is there anything emerging from this research—in terms of process or outcomes—that could support decolonizing agendas in planning scholarship and practice, and in IE research more broadly? The findings of this research give granular depth and provide thick empirical substance to something Indigenous peoples and advocates have long denounced—namely that Chile is a settler colonial state (Nahuelpan et  al., 2021) where the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples is marked by “domination by imposition of Chilean law” (Burgos et al., 2006, translation mine). This diagnosis is important in helping substantiate claims for Indigenous justice, but the question remains…

What Can IE Do to Support Decolonization? In order to map institutional relations, institutional ethnographers engage in an examination of the actual textually mediated work of people in institutional settings. In exposing those interactions, it is possible to understand the complex mechanics of social processes and illuminate the potential for change. In line with IE’s materialist ontology, in the case of my research, the assumption is that having a better understanding of how legal infrastructures like DS66 are negotiated, and the sequences of action they activate or prevent, is a crucial step in challenging existing planning practices that perpetuate Indigenous dispossession through a colonial logic. There is also the implicit assumption that increased understanding of how the institutional complexes are socially organized might open the door to more emancipatory practices, which might in turn offer some decolonizing potential. However, the question about what IE can offer to support decolonization agendas in planning is ultimately shaped by how

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

207

colonization—and consequently decolonization—are socially organized as social problems—how they “happen.” Here, I briefly outline some of the ways in which decolonization has been explored in the planning and IE literatures, which inform my argument. Decolonization in Planning Given the violence of Indigenous-state relations in settler contexts today, several planning scholars and practitioners that acknowledge the complicity of planning with colonialism have called for decolonizing approaches to planning (Sandercock, 2004; Porter, 2010; Ugarte, 2014) and indigenization (Dorries, 2012; Erfan & Hemphill, 2013; Harjo, 2019). While all scholars start from the premise that planning’s tools and instruments are intimately connected to Indigenous dispossession, how they understand what decolonization entails varies greatly. Some works focus on planning processes and procedures that are more participatory, suggesting that increased involvement of Indigenous peoples in mainstream planning systems might transform such practices, and in doing so, contribute to decolonizing planning (Hibbard et al., 2008). Critics of such analyses argue that under the veils of inclusivity, these practices stay at a procedural level that leaves planning’s colonial structures intact, overlooking the fact that Indigenous peoples are not just another player but rather the holders of rights that pre-date state formation (Porter, 2010; Sandercock, 2004). Coming from urban design, other authors center Indigenous spatial practices and knowledge in shaping the built environment (Nejad et al., 2020), understanding a potential decolonization of the discipline through the role that Indigenous spatial knowledge plays in city building. Other scholars focus on the differentiated practices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous planners (Erfan & Hemphill, 2013), framing decolonization in terms of centering Indigenous knowledges and decentering Western dominance in planning, respectively. Along this line, there is also an emphasis on individual unlearning and consciousness raising . Diving deeper into theorizations of Indigenous knowledge, a growing body of scholarship examines Indigenous planning (Jojola, 2008; Matunga, 2013), understood as planning by and for Indigenous peoples, which is grounded in Indigenous worldviews and frameworks. Questioning the possibility of undoing planning’s colonial roots, these scholars shift attention away from changing dominant planning systems and rather foreground the practices

208 

M. UGARTE

emerging from Indigenous priorities on a particular territory. Here, decolonization involves strengthening Indigenous ways of planning their own communities. Closely connected, other planning scholars center Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty (Dorries, 2012; Harjo, 2019), which resonate with recent discussions about Indigenous resurgence that have grown in Indigenous studies (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2014a; Simpson, 2014b). These works also center Indigenous legal orders (Black, 2011) and legal pluralism (Ugarte, 2019) in planning, suggesting that a potential decolonization of the discipline involves rethinking the sources that give it authority and legitimacy. Decolonization Discussions in IE At the time of writing this chapter, there is not a wide scholarship that explicitly centers decolonization debates in IE. However, several scholars have adopted an institutional ethnographic approach to examine Indigenous policy or dive into the experiences of Indigenous peoples in their interactions with the state on multiple fronts. There is an important body of research emerging from social work, education, and the health sciences, which examines from diverse perspectives the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the context of the welfare and criminal justice systems (Turner & Bomberry, 2021; Peet, 2014; West, 2014; Wilson & Pence, 2006), approaches to and engagements with health care networks and knowledge (MacDonald et  al., 2022; Oelke, 2010; Redvers et  al., 2015; Salmon, 2007), and Indigenous experiences in post-secondary education (Restoule et al., 2013). Other scholars have used IE to examine the complex ruling relations involved in intergovernmental environmental policy (Eastwood, 2006), as well as alternative engagements with ideas of development emerging from Indigenous knowledges (MacNeill, 2014). Regarding planning specifically, scholars like Gruner (2012), Barry and Porter (2012), Livesey (2017), and Colgrove (2019) have adopted an institutional ethnographic approach to the examination of land use planning and land management across different settler colonial contexts. In doing so, they both shed light on the colonial ruling relations that guide mainstream planning systems, and center Indigenous planning knowledge, practices, and law. IE discussions that do talk about decolonization more explicitly are recent and generally focus on the need to decolonize knowledge production—in other words, they frame IE as a potentially decolonizing research

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

209

methodology. Two key contributions in this regard are the 2020 article, “A Decolonizing Method of Inquiry: Using Institutional Ethnography to Facilitate Community-Based Research and Knowledge Translation,” co-­ authored by Melody Morton-Ninomiya, Natasha Hurley, and Jack Penashue, and Lana Ray’s 2021 article, “Decolonizing Action Research Through Two-Eyed Seeing.” Through a public health research lens, Morton-Ninomiya and colleagues argue that “IE can be used as a decolonizing method of inquiry,” in the sense of “shifting whose knowledge is privileged – from those with power (often researchers) to those who are being researched (those subject to the effects of colonization)” (2020, p.  220). They suggest that institutional ethnographic research is “well positioned” both to enable decolonizing research approaches and to support knowledge translation in health research with Indigenous communities. Specifically, the authors highlight IE’s emphasis on and valuing of lived experiences as a source of knowledge, its contributions to unveiling institutional and colonial practices, and how it provides clear empirical evidence that can lead to recommendations that are beneficial to Indigenous communities. Along similar lines, Ray (2021) advocates for an integration of Indigenous participatory action research (IPAR) and IE as a way of “challenging and disrupting colonialism” (p. 100). According to the author, while IPAR centers and privileges Indigenous knowledge systems, IE’s “ability to interrogate social relations at a local level… provides space for local voice and agency,” at the same time that it allows “identifying and addressing how colonialism becomes normalized through ‘work’” (p. 103). These critical works at the intersection of IE and Indigenous experiences suggest institutional ethnographers see a potential to advance decolonization work, whether explicitly or implicitly. Not surprisingly, given IE’s emergence as an approach to social inquiry, most institutional ethnographers generally approach decolonization in terms of knowledge production. They do so by shedding light on the mechanics of epistemological colonialism (Nahuelpan, 2016), by generating knowledge through Indigenous paradigms, and by arguing that, therefore, IE can challenge epistemological dominance. Rather than seeing these diverse works as mutually exclusive or partial, I believe they mirror the complexity of what decolonization as a social problem looks like. They reflect the myriad levels at which colonial violence and dispossessive practices have operated and continue to operate, which leads to practices that counteract such pervasiveness in distinct, yet

210 

M. UGARTE

interrelated, ways. It is therefore not surprising to find works that examine decolonizing practices mostly in epistemological terms—which, in turn, connects to methodological discussions—while others emphasize individual and interpersonal processes of unlearning, while still others explore decolonization in terms of other emancipatory practices. Sometimes these practices emanate from Indigenous worldviews and others happen within the confines of existing colonial structures, but against them. In planning research specifically, there is an evident growth in decolonization-focused work. What remains to be seen is how those critical engagements help transform (or not) actual planning practices and systems, such as the ones my research explored. Decolonization as Indigenous Resurgence and Land Restitution In their seminal article, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012), Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang crafted a robust critique of what they saw as a widespread superficial engagement with ideas about decolonization in education and the social sciences. The authors sought to distinguish decolonization agendas from other civil rights or social justice-oriented projects, pointing out that “decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks” (p. 3). The reason is that, at least in settler colonial settings, decolonization “must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted” (p.  7). Their work resonates with Wildcat et al. (2014) who, a couple of years later, argued that “if colonization is fundamentally about dispossessing Indigenous peoples from land, decolonization must involve forms of education that reconnect Indigenous peoples to land and the social relations, knowledges and languages that arise from the land” (p. I). These discussions show the interconnections between territorial restitution and the ways of life that emerge from particular relations to a territory. Key to these ways of existence are the systems of social and political organization humans develop among themselves and with other forms of existence in the environments we inhabit. Indigenous legal orders articulate these relationships, which sometimes means entering into direct confrontation with state planning. In the words of Mapuche scholars Melin et al. (2016), “for [Indigenous] people, land recuperation is nothing

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

211

but the mechanism to materialize their right to self-determination… to the extent that a Mapuche cannot be a person nor can Mapuche society [as a whole] exist apart from [their] territory, apart from their own ways of life and organizations… Thus, what according to Mapuche [law] is [a] valid [action], according to [state] law is a crime” (p. 113, translation mine). As Michelle Daigle and Margaret M. Ramírez (2019) have pointed out, calls for Indigenous resurgence require “a comprehensive transformation of the settler colonial present guided by Indigenous political and legal orders” (p. 80). This, of course, involves a transformation of existing planning systems, but most of all it requires a strengthening of Indigenous ways of planning. While for analytical purposes there might be value in distinguishing between what decolonization might entail at an epistemological, methodological, institutional, personal, and interpersonal levels, colonial impulses and the mechanics that have made them possible—which are intimately related to planning tools and instruments like zoning, private property regimes, place renaming, town building, and environmental management—are at the core about dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands (Harris, 2004), and thus  about disrupting the forms of existence emerging from such connections to territory. In all their diversity, the works discussed above re-center decolonization around the practices that enable the restitution of those territories. In Tuck and Yang’s words (2012), “land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” (p. 5). It is precisely through laws and policies such as the ones that my institutional ethnographic research examined that Indigenous peoples’ deeper land concerns are often sidelined and subdued, along with Indigenous legal orders and forms of political organization. In the face of these understandings, what can IE contribute to decolonizing agendas, if anything? If, as Tuck and Yang (2012) argue, it is not possible “tacking on a gesture towards Indigenous people without addressing Indigenous sovereignty or rights, or forwarding a thesis on decolonization without regard to unsettling/deoccupying land” (p. 19), can IE offer something to the repatriation of Indigenous land and life? Is there anything in the institutional ethnographer’s toolkit that can help fight the “aggressive recolonization of indigenous territories”? (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010, p.  100). Can a better understanding of the social

212 

M. UGARTE

organization of Indigenous dispossession help advance the “uncomfortable political implications involved, including land restitution and socio-­ political transformation of settler colonial hegemony”? (Daigle, 2018, p. 202) And given its foundations, can IE support the “radical politics of resistance, reclamation and resurgence that emanates from the longstanding and multiple political and legal orders across diverse Indigenous landscapes,” as Daigle (2018, p. 202) asks?

The (Im)Possibilities of IE in Support of Decolonization What follows from the discussions above is that if colonization is essentially a process of land invasion, appropriation, and dispossession, then decolonization necessarily requires a process of land restitution and recuperation. And along with it, a process of reconstruction of the ways of life associated to Indigenous existence on that territory. Although decolonization work might involve different practices in different contexts and depending on the distinct standpoints of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples—for instance, decentering Western knowledge production or individual changes in consciousness—I firmly believe that all these practices emerge from the foundational injustice of Indigenous land dispossession, which has been the primary motive of settler colonialism in Canada (where I currently live) and Chile (where I was born and lived most of my life). Even more, I argue that especially for people in spatial disciplines like planning, the restitution of Indigenous lands and ways of life should be the primary lens through which to engage in decolonization work. The implications of understanding decolonization in these terms are significant, both for institutional ethnographers in general and for scholars in the spatial disciplines that engage with IE in particular. At its core, the question is what contributions IE can make to the restitution of Indigenous territories and ways of life. I believe despite its materialist ontology and its emancipatory vision, IE’s epistemological foundations, its intertwinement with what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014b) has called the “academic industrial complex,” and the scope of transformations it might enable and the kind of knowledge it can produce might not in themselves lead to the type of transformation required to repatriate land and restore the life systems that have been disrupted by settler colonial regimes— although it can certainly offer evidence that points the way and supports activism (Smith, 1990). Talking about the difficulties of defining what

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

213

decolonial geographic work might look like and entail, Daigle and Ramírez argue that “part of this impossibility lies in the incompatibility of decolonial geographies with colonial knowledge projects” (2019, p. 78). Perhaps something similar could be said of what I call the (im)possibilities of IE supporting decolonization work, particularly in planning. Regarding IE’s epistemological foundations, the influence of Marxist materialism and standpoint feminism provide fertile ground for examining the institutional bases of Indigenous dispossession. By centering everyday experience as a point of departure for the study of social realities, IE thus unpacks colonialism at work, as Morton-Ninomiya et al. (2020) and Ray (2021) have argued, and my research has confirmed. My concern does not have to do with this undeniably key contribution. Rather, I am concerned about the central role given to the state, Western institutions, and legal knowledge in the exploration of ruling relations, which are central to IE—in other words, some of IE’s assumptions about power and authority. While not denying the factual existence of such institutional infrastructures, and the crucial role they have played and continue to play in Indigenous dispossession, the emphasis on hegemonic forms of power gives a central role to Western knowledge and governance systems, which leaves less room for engaging with and theorizing the existence of other forms of political organization (Simpson, 2014a), human-environment relations, and legal consciousness (Hunt, 2014; Melin et  al., 2016). In taking for granted the state, its claims to authority are naturalized in IE, making it difficult to situate Indigenous authority on an equal foot. Similarly, there has not been a wide interrogation of how IE might directly or indirectly contribute to settler colonialism, and “what responsibility means in such contexts when one is occupying stolen Indigenous lands or is connected to such dispossession through the uneven power geometries of global colonial-capitalist development,” as Daigle (2018, p. 201) eloquently puts it. Closely connected, IE is located on interesting grounds in terms of its intertwinement with the academic industrial complex. On the one hand, IE’s origins are connected to the possibilities of research emerging from academia, which are inseparable from the generally extractive approach that has characterized Western higher education institutions and their contributions to epistemological colonialism (Quijano, 2000), as Smith herself has pointed out (1999). This raises the question about the extent to which IE might be able to meaningfully help “decolonize knowledge production, academic praxes, structures and institutions” (Daigle, 2018

214 

M. UGARTE

p. 201). On the other hand, as an approach to inquiry that departs from everyday experiences, IE has an emancipatory vision connected to activist agendas (Smith, 1990), which could involve Indigenous communities taking up IE as a relevant tool and adapting it to local forms of knowledge production (Morton-Ninomiya et  al., 2020; Ray, 2021; Turner & Bomberry, 2021). While in this sense there is potential to unsettle knowledge production hierarchies in the social sciences (Nahuelpan, 2016) and to advance Indigenous rights activism beyond scholarly circles, as an approach to the examination of the social, IE seems to be still largely used by academics (Malachowski et al., 2017) rather than by Indigenous communities. More importantly, in Daigle’s words (2018), a decolonization lens like the one discussed here urges institutional ethnographers “to think of how their work and everyday practices  – scholarly and otherwise  – actively dismantle colonial structures and relations of power, while building (re)newed ones that are accountable to the Indigenous political and legal authorities of the lands” (p.  201) scholars occupy. Such colonial structures necessarily involve the ones that perpetuate land occupation and dispossession, but also the structures of Western education and training that have dominated theoretical development and social inquiry, particularly in the Global North. Finally, regarding the scope of transformations it might enable and the kinds of knowledge it can produce, IE’s main analytical goal is to increase understanding of social realities, rather than directly making change, as approaches like action research (Fals Borda & Mora-Osejo, 2003) might. IE largely revolves around explanation—mapping and discovering how things are put together in Smith’s words (2005). This connects closely to my earlier point about IE’s epistemological foundations, since the mapping that takes place generally revolves around the existence of trans-local ruling relations that largely have to do with a capitalist social order, which is inherently connected to the racialized occupation and exploitation of Indigenous territories (Dorries et al., 2019). However, there is an assumption that an increased consciousness and awareness of how local practices are managed extra-locally can improve practice, and thus a potential orientation to action. As Fischer (2009) puts it, “the greater the extent to which a planner… can better understand the dominant power structure, including the discursive nature of its ideological politics, the greater are the chances of developing effective strategies for challenging rather than merely reproducing it” (p.  64). Although I believe in this theory of change—which explains why I decided to use IE—here I would like to

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

215

highlight two main risks, which are intimately connected. One has to do with the extent to which IE can actually lead to such decolonizing praxes by virtue of increasing awareness of colonial ruling relations at play, such as the ones uncovered by my research in Chile’s planning context. If decolonization is about the restitution of Indigenous lands and ways of life, improving practice—particularly planning practice—would mean actively advancing concrete actions that enable those processes. The distance between critical awareness and actual action should not be understated when what is at stake is as radical as land restitution, which unsettles the very foundation of settler nation-states and the land-based planning systems that have made them possible. Going back to Tuck and Yang’s critique, the second risk has to do with merging decolonization into settler social justice frameworks, of “hybridiz[ing] decolonial thought with Western critical traditions [thus] metaphorizing decolonization” (2012, p. 16). I hold the position that while IE might not in and of itself lead to returning land to Indigenous peoples, it can still make contributions that help pave the ground for such radical practices. Since Linda Tuhiwai Smith first published Decolonizing Methodologies in 1999, the literature on Indigenous approaches to inquiry has grown significantly (Kovach, 2009; Wilson, 2008). Her book crystalized the notion that different worldviews and ontologies provide the foundation for equally distinctive forms of knowledge production, a discussion that echoes the debates about Indigenous planning introduced earlier. Although IE’s epistemological foundations might set limits to what is possible within that framework, Smith and other Indigenous scholars acknowledge the place that non-Indigenous scholars and academia more broadly can play in “resisting, refusing and resurging against settler colonial violence,” something that “should never be framed as the sole responsibility of Indigenous peoples” (Daigle, 2018, p. 202). However, following Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, for the academy to “become a decolonizing force” it needs to join Indigenous peoples “in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of [their] knowledge – Indigenous land” (2014b, p. 22). This requires scholars to recognize the place they occupy in settler colonial contexts when thinking about what decolonization might mean, not only in terms of the power relations in which IE is embedded, but also in terms of what specific contributions institutional ethnographers might be able make to enable the radical project of Indigenous resurgence and land repatriation that this chapter embraces.

216 

M. UGARTE

As I have suggested, as an approach to the examination of the social, IE might not in and of itself advance decolonization in the sense of helping return land to Indigenous peoples or actively restoring Indigenous legal orders. Below I outline three main contributions IE can make in this regard, with a particular emphasis on spatial disciplines like planning, which have been instrumental to the territorial dispossession that is at the base of settler colonialism. A key contribution IE can make is to shed light and make visible colonial ruling relations in planning practice today. Examining everyday planning processes and their textually mediated nature allows to reveal underlying assumptions guiding Indigenous policy and legislation, particularly their emphasis on protecting economic activities related to the extraction of natural resources on Indigenous territories, as the Chilean case illustrates. Following Quechua sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), these activities are the engine of Chile’s political-economic system, and inseparable from translational capital flows and investments often framed through a developmentalist lens (Escobar, 1992). All of this, in turn, requires a logic of containment of Indigenous peoples and mechanisms to facilitate the occupation of Indigenous lands. While in the past, planning and other spatial disciplines openly supported settler colonial agendas through policies like the reservation system and town building, today practices might seem subtler—as is the case of the duty to consult— but nonetheless perpetuate land dispossession and occupation by validating state sovereignty claims and legal supremacy. In helping make visible these practices, IE offers potential to not only see colonial ruling relations in general, but more specifically, to unveil the contemporary mechanics of settler colonial violence, which is land-based. A related contribution IE can make involves showing how specific planning practices find ground in trans-local forces that are articulated through legal means, thus foregrounding the interconnected infrastructures of settler colonialism and their intertwinement with Western law. Using the Chilean case as an example again, IE allowed me to explore how the production of a consultation mechanism like DS66 was far away from an isolated policy development. Rather, it legitimated transnational assumptions about Indigenous peoples’ limited sovereignty and authority, which are validated by international law. In the case of the duty consult as expressed in C169, the fact that the ultimate decision-making power rests in the hands of the state, particularly when Indigenous peoples express opposition to what is being consulted, proves this point. Along similar

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

217

lines, the analysis showed how the writing of the regulation resorted to selective intertextual relations, which reinforce the supremacy of state power and authority. The deliberate exclusion of UNDRIP—an instrument that does strengthen Indigenous self-determination, although it is not binding and still places nation-states as the rightful signatories—and the constant references to the Chilean Constitution reinforced the imposition of institutional structures and Chilean sovereignty claims upon selfdetermining Indigenous peoples. The case also dived into how law is used in concrete terms and how it negates Indigenous claims for selfdetermination. The creation of legal categories and definitions regarding what measures should be consulted and what it means to affect Indigenous peoples directly constrains possible courses of action in ways that have concrete material implications for Indigenous peoples. Closely connected, the analysis showed how DS66 standardizes Indigenous rights, embedding the duty to consult within existing government workflows to avoid paralyzing state operations and threatening investment projects that are key to Chile’s economic growth. By unpacking those connections, IE goes beyond taking settler colonial violence for granted. Instead, it provides empirical substance to the ways in which Indigenous dispossession is reproduced and validated today, and how Indigenous sovereignty and legal orders are sidelined. It also helps reveal the transnational consensuses that support settler colonialism. Importantly, IE also offers a methodological entry point to situate contemporary planning practices within a historical continuum, to see them as an extension of a history of governing texts that have defined the relation between Indigenous peoples and the state. In doing so, IE can provide grounded evidence that settler colonial dispossession is not a matter of the past but is actually reproduced through seemingly neutral practices today. This grounded knowledge, in turn, might feed into activist efforts that support Indigenous rights and justice—whether led by Indigenous communities or non-Indigenous allies. These contributions emerging from planning add to those identified by other scholars who have examined IE’s potential to support decolonization work, in particular the possibility of producing knowledge that emerges from Indigenous frameworks and experiences (Morton-Ninomiya et al., 2020; Ray, 2021). While important in challenging epistemological colonialism and deepening understanding of settler colonialism, however, none of these contributions gets close to the vision of decolonization being about the repatriation of Indigenous land and the forms of life

218 

M. UGARTE

emerging from connections to such territories (Simpson, 2014b; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wildcat et  al., 2014). What might a more decolonizing approach to planning research and activism look like? And how can IE inspire or take inquiry into those directions? What can IE offer in this regard? I argue that by shedding light on the mechanics of Indigenous dispossession and by centering local, embodied knowledge, as other institutional ethnographers have shown, IE can lead to agendas grounded in a decolonizing logic. More specifically in the context of the spatial disciplines, I hold the position that institutional ethnographic research can pave the ground for more emancipatory planning practices grounded in more decolonized forms of land-based knowledge production that can help rebuild Indigenous territories, as long as research processes and outcomes are led by Indigenous peoples, following Indigenous protocols and planning priorities. Importantly, these agendas might happen totally outside of an IE framework, as I elaborate in the concluding section. I do not talk about “decolonizing planning” or “decolonizing IE,” because I agree with those scholars and practitioners who are skeptical about the possibility of undoing the colonial foundations of planning as a discipline and of higher education institutions as platforms for knowledge production. Going back to Tuck and Yang’s (2012) call to move away from metaphorizing decolonization, it is essential to honestly assess what an approach to inquiry like IE can and cannot do.

Concluding Thoughts: From Mapping State Planning to Strengthening Indigenous Planning Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) argues that, “there can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice” (p. 100). From the perspective discussed here, decolonizing practices are those that contribute to or enable the restitution of Indigenous territories, the restoration of Indigenous ways of life and sociopolitical organization on such territories, and attachment to the principles of Indigenous legal orders emerging from such interrelations—in other words, practices that also confront the ongoing “usurpation of land, speculation, and import-export trade… the exploitation of materials, primarily, under the control of foreign capital and long-distance internal markets” (p.  100). The critical reflections presented here are in no way meant to provide a pessimistic take on IE or to suggest that there are no spaces for radical

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

219

praxis. Rather, my goal has been to recenter discussions about the decolonizing potential of IE in light of understandings that highlight the land-­ based nature of colonial dispossession, in order to rethink what IE might offer in this regard, even if that means acknowledging the bounds of IE as an approach to social inquiry. I would like to end this chapter with a short reflection about how IE has led me into new research directions, which while not involving IE as such, have been directly informed by my IE research—both by the substantive insights emerging from that work and from the methodological limitations I encountered while completing my doctoral research. Although not generalizable, this particular experience illustrates one possible path that IE might lead into, that seeks to embody a decolonizing logic. Perhaps one of the biggest contributions of IE to a decolonial project might lie in leading researchers into other directions that more directly address the land repatriation question, rather than getting attached to a particular approach to social inquiry or trying to push its boundaries. Mapping colonial ruling relations and making visible the mechanics of Indigenous dispossession are certainly crucial work. In this way, IE contributes to awareness raising and offers much needed empirical evidence that can support action and activism for Indigenous justice. For people in the spatial disciplines, however, Tuck and Yang (2012) remind us that, “the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change… [because] until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism” (p. 19). IE might not enable truly decolonizing planning practices in the absence of land restitution. However, it can open the door to supporting Indigenous-­ led initiatives that advance this praxis. After completing the doctoral research discussed here, I wondered where my research findings left me. Why was it relevant to have a better and deeper understanding of settler colonial violence through Indigenous policy in Chile? What could I do with the abundant details about how Western law continues to validate the state’s sovereignty claims and legal supremacy, reaffirm land dispossession, and ignore Indigenous legal orders? Was there something IE could do to get closer to land restitution? Would another institutional ethnographic investigation help? The conclusion was that the path was elsewhere, that IE had served me well in the search for empirically supported critical awareness, but it was time to find

220 

M. UGARTE

other avenues if the goal was to use academic research and its spin-off forms of activism to support the reclamation and restoration of Indigenous territories and the forms of life that there unfold. It was necessary to move from mapping state planning to supporting Indigenous planning. In collaboration with Indigenous colleagues, I am currently engaged in a multi-year project that seeks to gather and center grounded planning knowledge held by Mapuche communities in what is now Southern Chile, following local approaches to inquiry in a context that has historically been dominated by non-Indigenous ways of planning. Adopting an approach that resembles Indigenous participatory action research (IPAR) (Peltier, 2018; Sinclair, 2007), but specifically focused on spatial planning knowledge, we are working with elders and other community members to rebuild their ancestral territory according to the limits and spatial planning practices that are still alive in the collective memory. We are using conversations, walks on the territory, and participatory mapping sessions, which have allowed us to reaffirm the historical presence of Mapuche people in the area, which is importantly materialized in the existence of Mapuche place names (toponyms) that subsist until this day. In re-collecting and systematizing this knowledge, the research openly asserts the existence and validity of pre-existing Indigenous forms of planning, questioning state sovereignty and authority claims. The ultimate goal is to advance Mapuche planning priorities and territorial reconstruction efforts by contributing to rebuilding planning approaches at the base of Indigenous presence on their traditional territories, which have been disrupted by settler colonial frameworks. This has required transitioning from mostly textual approaches that allowed tracing and making sense of dominant ruling relations, to land-­ based and oral methodologies able to gather place-based Indigenous knowledge. Because as Simpson (2014b) puts it, Indigenous peoples cannot lead the kind of decolonization discussed in this chapter if they “don’t create a generation of land based, community based intellectuals and cultural producers who are accountable to [their] nations and whose life work is concerned with the regeneration of these systems” (p. 13). This idea of decolonization goes beyond the important work of “rethinking/ retheorizing from alterity and multiplicity in knowledge production” discussed by Naylor (2018, p.  200), and re-centers practices that advance territorial reconstruction and land restitution. It is not just about “deeply consider[ing] privilege over knowledge and where it ‘sits’” (p. 200), but also about how examining spatial knowledge production happening in the

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

221

specificity of Indigenous territories, in ways that challenge Eurocentric spatial norms and center Indigenous epistemologies, might help regenerate connections to land and of the processes such connections enable, within a paradigm of Indigenous resurgence (Simpson, 2016). Despite our decolonizing vision and direct engagement with territorial questions, however, similar to IE, this approach to inquiry still does not ensure what lies at the center of real decolonization—namely the actual praxis of Mapuche land restitution and control. Perhaps the ultimate answer is that academic institutions and their infrastructures—with their colonial genealogy meant to support nation-building—might never be the springboard of such radical praxis. Although some of these practices can certainly happen within the confines of state parameters—for instance through formal land claims or in the context of constitutional processes like the one that started in Chile in 2021,6 where Indigenous representatives played a key role—they often happen at the margins of the state, even in direct confrontation to it. Perhaps direct action at the frontlines, de facto occupation and recuperation of lands like the ones numerous Mapuche communities are leading, and Indigenous resurgence efforts happening outside existing institutions (Melin et al., 2016, 2019) are the only real avenues for the repatriation of Indigenous land and life (Tuck & Yang, 2012). It is my hope, however, that those institutional ethnographers and other scholars in the spatial disciplines who are committed to Indigenous justice will continue pushing for approaches to social inquiry that help advance that vision, and most importantly, putting their work at the service of Indigenous priorities.

Notes 1. I worked as a designer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile in 2007–2009 and as a Policy, Planning and Research Analyst with the Poverty Reduction Strategy of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada in 2010–2011. 2. At the time I conducted my research, Chile had recently voted in favor of UNDRIP in 2007 and endorsed C169 in 2008. For a deeper examination of the case, see Ugarte 2021. 3. Important exceptions include Barry and Porter (2012), Gruner (2012), and Livesey (2017). 4. Initially theorized by Pablo González Casanova (1965) in the Latin American context, in the words of James Tully, the term refers to the “his-

222 

M. UGARTE

torical processes by which structures of domination have been set in place… over the indigenous peoples and their territories without their consent and in response to their resistance against and within these structures” (2000, p. 37), but also to the evolving techniques used by colonial states to govern Indigenous peoples. Importantly for my argument here, what defines internal colonization “is not the appropriation of labour… or even the appropriation of self-government… [but] the appropriation of the land, resources and jurisdiction of the indigenous peoples, not only for the sake of resettlement and exploitation… but for the territorial foundation of the dominant society” (2000, p. 39). 5. The neologism “proceduralize” emerged in my interviews with participants. It highlights how the duty to consult works to break down Indigenous rights into legal practices that reduce their scope, move away from the spirit of those rights, and turn them into something amenable to state operations. 6. After strong social mobilizations in 2019, in October 2020, Chileans voted in favor of establishing a Constitutional Convention to replace the Constitution of 1980, undemocratically enacted during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The constitutional process ran from 2021 to 2022 and Indigenous peoples played an important role, including the election of 17 Indigenous representatives (out of the Convention’s 155 members) through reserved spots. In addition, the inaugural president of the Convention was a prominent Mapuche leader, Elisa Loncon. Indigenous advocacy and activism over the years, in addition to their leadership during the process, contributed to placing crucial discussions in the constitutional debate, including recognizing Chile as a plurinational state, protecting the rights of nature, creating Indigenous territorial autonomies, recognizing Indigenous legal systems, and creating provisions for land restitution, among others (Government of Chile, 2022a). All of these measures certainly align with the decolonizing vision explored in this chapter. However, perhaps because of its bold vision and challenges to the status quo, the new Constitution draft was overwhelmingly rejected by 61.86% of voters during the plebiscite held on September 4, 2022 (Government of Chile, 2022b), which points to the risks of seeking Indigenous justice through institutional mechanisms only.

References Ahmed, S. (2007). “You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing:” Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(4), 590–609. Antileo, E. (2013). Políticas indígenas, multiculturalismo y el enfoque estatal indígena urbano. Revista de Historia Social y de las Mentalidades, 17(1), 133–159.

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

223

Antileo, E., Cárcamo-Huechante, L., Calfío Montalva, M., & Huinca-Piutrin, H. (Eds.). (2015). Awükan ka kuxankan zugu Wajmapu mew. Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu. Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche. Barry, J., & Porter, L. (2012). Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: Understanding textual mediation in the contact zone. Planning Theory, 11(2), 170–187. Black, C. F. (2011). The land is the source of the law: A dialogic encounter with an indigenous jurisprudence. Routledge. Burgos, P., Cabellos, F., & Luna, P. (Eds.). (2006). Historia mapuche durante la conquista y la colonia, la conquista, apropiación y reparto territorial del Pikun Mapu. http://interculturalidadysalud.blogspot.ca/2006/12/ Colgrove, S. (2019). Laws of the land: indigenous and state jurisdictions on the Central Coast. (Doctoral dissertation). http://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/11399/Colgrove_GS_LLM_2019.pdf?sequence=3 &isAllowed=y Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press. Daigle, M. (2018). Embodying relations of accountability in settler colonial contexts. Political Geography, 66, 201–203. Daigle, M., & Ramírez, M. M. (2019). Decolonial geographies. In A. E. Collective (Ed.), Keywords in radical geography: Antipode at 50 (pp.  78–84). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch1 DeVault, M., & McCoy, L. (2006). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In D. E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 15–44). Rowman & Littlefield. Dorries, H. (2012). Rejecting the “false choice”: Foregrounding Indigenous sovereignty in planning theory and practice (Doctoral dissertation). https:// tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/65468 Dorries, H., Hugill, D., & Tomiak, J. (2019). Racial capitalism and the production of settler colonial cities. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2019.07.016 Eastwood, L. (2006). Making the institution ethnographically accessible: UN document production and the transformation of experience. In D.  E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp.  181–197). Rowman & Littlefield. Erfan, A., & Hemphill, J. (2013). Indigenizing and decolonizing: An alliance story. Plan Canada, 53(2), 18–21. http://cip-­icu.ca/Resources/Plan-­Canada Escobar, A. (1992). Planning. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power (pp. 132–145). Zed Books. Fals Borda, O., & Mora-Osejo, L. E. (2003). Context and diffusion of knowledge: A critique of eurocentrism. Action Research, 1(1), 29–37. https://doi. org/10.1177/14767503030011003

224 

M. UGARTE

Fischer, F. (2009). Democracy and expertise: reorienting policy inquiry. Oxford University Press. González Casanova, P. (1965). Internal colonialism and national development. Studies in Comparative International Development, 1(4), 27–37. Government of Chile. (2014). Decreto Supremo N° 66 del Ministerio del Ministerio de Desarrollo Social. Aprueba reglamento que regula el procedimiento de consulta indígena en virtud del Artículo 6 n° 1 Letra a) y n° 2 del Convenio n° 169 de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo y deroga normativa que indica. http:// bcn.cl/1w1ac Government of Chile. (2022a). Proposal: Political constitution of the Republic of Chile. https://www.chileconvencion.cl/wp-­content/uploads/2022/08/ Texto-­CPR-­2022-­entregado-­al-­Pdte-­y-­publicado-­en-­la-­web-­el-­4-­de-­julio.pdf Government of Chile. (2022b). Library of the National Congress: Histórica participación en el Plebiscito Constitucional 2022: votó el 85,7% del pardon. https://www.bcn.cl/procesoconstituyente/detalle_cronograma?id=f_ c o p y 1 9 _ o f _ chilenas-­y -­c hilenos-­e ligieron-­a -­l os-­1 55-­r epresentantes-­d e-­l a-­n ueva-­ convencion-­constitucional Grosfoguel, R. (2000). Developmentalism, modernity, and dependency theory in Latin America, Nepantla. Views from South, 1(2), 347–374. Gruner, S. (2012). Learning land and life: An institutional ethnography of land-­ use planning and development in a Northern Ontario First Nation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto. Harjo, L. (2019). Spiral to the stars: Mvskoke tools of futurity. The University of Arizona Press. Harris, C. (2004). How did colonialism dispossess? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(1), 165–182. Hibbard, M., Lane, M.  B., & Rasmussen, K. (2008). The split personality of planning: Indigenous peoples and planning for land and resource management. Journal of Planning Literature, 23(2), 136–151. Hunt, S. (2014). Witnessing the colonialscape: Lighting the intimate fires of Indigenous legal pluralism (Doctoral dissertation). http://summit.sfu.ca/ item/14145%23310 Jojola, T. (2008). Indigenous planning: An emerging context. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 17(1, Supplement), 37–47. https://cjur.uwinnipeg.ca/ index.php/cjur Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. University of Toronto Press. Livesey, B. (2017). Planning to develop land returned under treaty settlement in Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand: An institutional ethnography (Doctoral dissertation). https://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/11215

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

225

MacDonald, S. E., Paragg, J., Foster-Boucher, C., Waters, N., Shea-Budgell, M., McNeil, D., Kunyk, D., Bedingfield, N., Dubé, E., Kenzie, L., Svenson, L. W., Littlechild, R., & Nelson, G. (2022). One child, one appointment: how institutional discourses organize the work of parents and nurses in the provision of childhood vaccination for First Nations children. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 18(5), 2048558. https://doi.org/10.1080/2164551 5.2022.2048558 MacNeill, T. (2014). Culturally sustainable development: Maya culture, indigenous institutions, and alternative development in Guatemala. Cultural Dynamics, 26(3), 299–325. Malachowski, C., Skorobohacz, C., & Stasiulis, E. (2017). Institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry: A scoping review. Qualitative Sociology Review, 13(4), 84–121. Matunga, H. (2013). Theorizing Indigenous planning. In R. Walker, T. Jojola, & D.  Natcher (Eds.), Reclaiming indigenous planning (pp.  3–32). McGill-­ Queen’s University Press. Melin, M., Coliqueo, P., Curihuinca, E., & Royo, M. (2016). AzMapu: Una aproximación al sistema normativo mapuche desde el rakizuam y el derecho propio. S/N. Melin, M., Mansilla, P., & Royo, M. (2019). Cartografía cultural en Wallmapu: Elementos para descolonizar el mapa en territorio mapuche . Morton Ninomiya, M.  E., Hurley, N., & Penashue, J. (2020). A decolonizing method of inquiry: using institutional ethnography to facilitate community-­ based research and knowledge translation. Critical Public Health, 30(2), 220–231. Nahuelpan, H. (2016). The place of the “indio” in social research. ALTER NATIVE, 12(1), 3–17. Nahuelpán, H., Martínez, E., Hofflinger, A., & Millalén, P. (2021). In Wallmapu, colonialism and capitalism realign. NACLA Report on the Americas, 53(3), 296–303. Naylor, L. (2018). Interventions: Bringing the decolonial to political geography. Political Geography, 66, 199–201. Nejad, S., Walker, R., & Newhouse, D. (2020). Indigenous placemaking and the built environment: Toward transformative urban design. Journal of Urban Design, 25(4), 433–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019. 1641072 Oelke, N. D. (2010). A participatory case study of primary healthcare for aboriginal peoples in an urban setting. Unpublished doctoral thesis,. University of Calgary. Peet, J. (2014). Institutional ethnography of Aboriginal Australian child separation histories: implications of social organising practices in accounting for the past. (Doctoral dissertation). https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/16457/ Peet2014.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=2

226 

M. UGARTE

Peltier, C. (2018). An application of two-eyed seeing: Indigenous research methods with participatory action research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17, 1–12. Porter, L. (2010). Unlearning the colonial cultures of planning. Ashgate Press. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and social classification. In M. Moraña, E. Dussel, & C. A. Jáuregui (Eds.), Coloniality at large: Latin America and the postcolonial debate (pp. 181–224). CLACSO. Ray, L. (2021). Decolonizing action research through two-eyed Seeing: The Indigenous quality assurance project. Canadian Journal of Action Research, 21(3), 95–114. Redvers, J., Bjerregaard, P., Eriksen, H., Fanian, S., Healey, G., Hiratsuka, V., Jong, M., Larsen, C. V. L., Linton, J., Pollock, N., Silviken, A., Stoor, P., & Chatwood, S. (2015). A scoping review of Indigenous suicide prevention in circumpolar regions. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 74, 27509. Restoule, J. P., Mashford-Pringle, A., Chacaby, M., Smillie, C., Brunette, C., & Russel, G. (2013). Supporting successful transitions to post-secondary education for Indigenous students: Lessons from an institutional ethnography in Ontario, Canada. International Indigenous Policy Journal, 4(4). Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2010). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Tinta Limón. Salmon, A. (2007). Adaptation and decolonization: Unpacking the role of “culturally appropriate” knowledge in the prevention of fetal alcohol syndrome. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 30(2), 257–274. Sandercock, L. (2004). Commentary: Indigenous planning and the burden of colonialism. Planning Theory & Practice, 5(1), 118–124. https://doi. org/10.1080/1464935042000204240 Simpson, A. (2014a). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press. Simpson, L. B. (2014b). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 3(3), 1–25. Simpson, L. B. (2016). Indigenous resurgence and co-resistance. Critical Ethnic Studies, 2(2), 19–34. Sinclair, R. (2007). Participatory action research and Aboriginal epistemology. Teaching & Learning, 4(2), 26–28. Smith, D. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. (2001). Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7(2), 159–198. https://doi. org/10.1080/10245280108523557 Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. AltaMira Press. Smith, D. (2006). Institutional ethnography as practice. Rowman & Littlefield.

11  INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION IN PLANNING… 

227

Smith, D., & Turner, S.  M. (2014). Incorporating texts into institutional ethnography. University of Toronto Press. Smith, G. W. 1990. Political activist as ethnographer. Social Problems, 37, 401–421. SSSP. (2021). Revolutionary sociology: Truth, healing, reparations and restructuring final program. https://www.sssp1.org/file/2021AM/Final_ Program_Schedule.pdf Toledo, V. (2005). Políticas indígenas y derechos territoriales en América Latina: 1990-2004. In P.  Dávalos (Ed.), Pueblos indígenas, Estado y democracia (pp. 67–102). CLACSO. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Zed. Tully, J. (2000). The struggles of Indigenous peoples for and of freedom. In D.  Ivison, P.  Patton, & W.  Sanders (Eds.), Political theory And The rights of Indigenous peoples (pp. 36–59). Cambridge University Press. Turner, S. M., & Bomberry, J. (2021). Building change on and off reserve: Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. In P.  Luken & S.  Vaughan (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  283–308). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_16 Ugarte, M. (2014). Ethics, discourse, or rights? A discussion about a decolonizing project in planning. Journal of Planning Literature, 29(4), 403–414. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0885412214549421 Ugarte, M. (2016). Before the city: Reflections About territorial and urban planning as an instrument of Indigenous dispossession. In A. Orellana, F. Link, & J. Noyola (Eds.), Urbanización planetaria y la (re)construcción de la ciudad (pp. 465–489). RiL. Ugarte, M. (2019). Normative worlds clashing: State planning, Indigenous self-­ determination, and the possibilities of legal pluralism in Chile. (Doctoral dissertation). https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/ items/1.0377642 Ugarte, M. (2021). Regulating the duty to consult: Exploring the textually-­ mediated nature of Indigenous dispossession in Chile. In P. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp. 213–235). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­54222-­1_13 Ugarte, M., Fontana, M., & Caulkins, M. (2017). Urbanisation and Indigenous dispossession: Rethinking the spatio-legal imaginary in Chile vis-à-vis the Mapuche nation. Settler Colonial Studies, 9(2), 187–206. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/2201473X.2017.1409397 West, J. (2014). The role of social work in contemporary colonial and structurally violent processes: Speaking to Aboriginal social workers who had child welfare and/

228 

M. UGARTE

or criminal justice involvement as youth. University of Manitoba. http:// mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/23854 Wildcat, M., McDonald, M., Irlbacher-Fox, S., & Coulthard, G. (2014). Learning from the land: Indigenous land-based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), I–XV. https://jps. library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22248/18062 Wilson, A., & Pence, E. (2006). U.S. legal interventions in the lives of battered women: An indigenous assessment. In D. E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 199–225). Rowman & Littlefield. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.

PART V

Commentary on Social Relations Beyond Texts

CHAPTER 12

Writing the Social Web: Toward an Institutional Ethnography for the Internet Tanya Osborne

In this chapter, I will present a case for the suitability of institutional ethnography (IE) as a mode of inquiry in digital settings and I will present transferable ideas from digital methodologies that could be of benefit to IE research. These ideas are in early development, as part of a PhD thesis. In my PhD research, I work with the community questions and answers platform, Stack Overflow. This is a large forum-like website that people use to exchange knowledge and information about computer coding and programming. Stack Overflow is a digital platform that people use regularly in their day-to-day lives to solve issues that arise when they are stuck in their daily work or to seek support as they learn more about computer coding. With 7.8 million daily pageviews (Stack Exchange Traffic, 2022), and a global audience, Stack Overflow dominates Internet search results for computer coding questions. However, only 7% of the platform users identify as female, meaning that women are underrepresented on the platform when compared to the ratio of women who work professionally as

T. Osborne (*) Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3_12

231

232 

T. OSBORNE

programmers (Nivala et al., 2020). In my research, I have begun to explore how does it happen that women are underrepresented given their professional involvement My initial observational and interview data suggest a preliminary problematic: How does the implementation of language policies on digital platforms affect gender participation? This essay explores my preliminary conceptual thinking about investigating Stack Overflow, rather than specific research questions about gender participation. While I am using IE as a mode of inquiry to help answer questions about researching within Stack Overflow, I believe that my considerations could be applied to many different types of digital platforms as an alternative way of approaching digital ethnography.

Virtual, Digital, Online Ethnography Digital ethnography is an evolving field encompassing a diverse and sometimes incompatible array of approaches to integrating ideas about the internet and digital tools with ideas about ethnography (Beaulieu, 2004; Caliandro, 2018). For some thinkers, the internet represents an ontologically distinct sociological phenomenon, a brave new world where the rules of the social are rewritten anew. Others see the internet as an extension of the already knowable everyday world. For some, digital ethnography exists wholly online, and pertains to the activities of groups and individuals who interact on social media sites and forums (Kozinets, 2002). For others, digital ethnography requires attention to the interactions between the internet, communities on the internet, and activities in the real world (Postill & Pink, 2012). In my own research, I approach the internet as an extension of the world, and not as some other space with its own rules. Some forms of digital ethnographic methodologies, such as netnography, tend to privilege or even focus solely on observational information gathered from reading online content (Kozinets, 2002). In these contexts, ethnographic data might be comprised mostly of posts from forums or social media, and observational work might mean gathering up the content of forum exchanges. In contrast, my own ethnographic practice is highly pluralist in terms of methods, incorporating observations, quantitative data generation from platforms, trace data, interviews, and video conferencing-­facilitated informant observation. In my ethnographic practice, spending time on the digital platform involves exploring the platform to understand its features and politics. This time might also be spent observing the flow of posts in real time. This can be combined with

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

233

informant observation, which in this case means looking directly at how informants interact with the site; in recent work, our research team observed informants interacting with a few select web pages over Zoom. Some popular variations on digital ethnography take the form of short but intense engagements in the field (Pink & Morgan, 2013). In my own practice, I instead take the idea from IE that the site is something one should return to by iterating between analysis and observation (Murray, 2020).

What Is a Digital Platform? Digital platforms comprise a wide variety of web-based entities that have computational features, and importantly that present opportunities for people to “communicate, interact, or sell” (Gillespie, 2010). In technical definitions, a digital platform is an online space that is programmable (Helmond, 2015). For a space to be programmable, it requires that users are able to customize the way that the space operates, and to create and customize their own content. For example, Facebook is a commonly used platform where users can customize their feeds by “following” different people, can interact with the content by “liking” posts, can share their own content, can exchange private messages, and so on. In technical terms, being programmable also means that the site has an application programming interface (API)—a backend interface that allows the platform to communicate with other web services, and that allows data from the platform to be transferred between different web services. For example, popular payment entities such as PayPal use API to transfer bank and address information between different web services. Many entities can be considered to be platforms, including some phone applications (“apps”) and even some games. The core feature that makes an app, game, or a website become a platform is the presence of an API. In a very literal sense, the data flow from an API coordinates, organizes, and provides a standard language for the activities of different related services. For example, travel aggregator websites like Skyscanner use API information from multiple airlines to provide up-to-date flight availability from many different sources. To share information in this way, these airline APIs need to be similar enough in format and structure. The type of information shared in the API shapes which discourses an aggregator service can present to a user. In the case of travel aggregator websites, the main categories presented to users tend to construct a choice between cheaper

234 

T. OSBORNE

flights, or shorter travel times. In this construction, other consumer choices and discourses are not rendered visible, such as environmental impact. In my work, I consider digital platforms to be settings in which one can explore ruling relations institutionally. Platforms coordinate their users via textual means. In IE, institutions can be understood as complexes embedded in ruling relations that coordinate the activities of people through textually mediated discourse, often via text (Smith, 1999, p. 196). Smith explicitly describes computer texts as one of the forms of texts that mediate ruling relations (Smith, 1999, p. 33). The kind of coordination that occurs in platforms happens through many different text-mediated methods and in many different contexts and can be applicable both locally and translocally. Institutions can also be understood as containing discourses and coordinating by means of discourse (Smith, 2005, p.  225). Many platforms coordinate and categorize their users within a discursive frame, by explicitly giving scores, rankings, or titles to users, or by use of algorithmic sorting. For example, Massanari describes Reddit—a large, forum-like social media platform—as facilitating hateful content creation through its hands-off approach to moderation, combined with its use of a points-­ based system to rank content and users (Massanari, 2017). In this sort of coordination, shared posts and articles that have a high score are promoted to all users regardless of their potential harms, favoring popularity and potential advertising revenue over safety or veracity. This in turn motivates users to create such content to gain more points for themselves. Platforms are not one unified institution, nor are all platforms necessarily institutionally organized. A historical eye on the platform is often important for determining how or if it functions as an institutionally organized setting, and for understanding what ruling relations are in play. I consider Stack Overflow as an institutionally organized setting. Stack Overflow is a questions and answers forum that is a part of a network of similar forums called Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange is owned by a company that is also named Stack Overflow after the original forum. As an entity, it has strong observable ties to the Creative Commons movement through its explicit use of Creative Commons copyright licensing for its content. It also has implicit ties to the free/libre open-source software movement. This alone places Stack Overflow in quite a distinct discursive relationship with libertarian ideals, due to the ideological link between the open source software movement and libertarianism (Reagle, 2013). Using Institutional Ethnography to explore these relationships allows me to raise questions

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

235

about the nature of these ideologies that I would not easily get to by following other methods. One other way to start understanding the ruling relations in play on a platform setting is to explore the financial model underpinning that platform. As above, a sensitivity to the history of the site can be informative. The popular web-based game Wordle might prove a deceptively complex illustration of how such elements coordinate. Wordle is a simple game wherein one has six tries to guess a five-letter word, with the letters changing color after each guess to indicate if they are present in the word. Wordle was originally created by one person, with the intended audience of just one other person. Wordle does not have a public facing API, instead it has all of its answers hard coded into the web page, meaning that if you inspect the html code for the page, it is possible to see all of the future answers for Wordle questions. When Wordle was originally released, it was free to play and was not supported by adverts. After gaining popularity, Wordle was sold to the New York Times (NYT) to be part of its suite of games. After the sale of Wordle, NYT made several notable changes both to the financial model for Wordle and to the game element of Wordle, which reveal the different relations of ruling effecting the app after changing its institutional context. One such revealing change was that NYT removed a number of words from the word list, such as “whore” and “lynch,” which were previously allowed as guesses (Diaz, 2022). Notably, NYT even changed the solution of Wordle on one occasion, as the pre-programmed solution was “fetus,” and this coincided with the controversial overturn of Roe v. Wade in the United States (Touma, 2022). NYT’s frequently asked questions clarify that they are removing “obscure words… as well as insensitive or offensive words” (NYT Word Games and Logic Puzzles, n.d.). While the clarification seems benign, it would appear that these changes are set to distance Wordle from controversial topics that may invite partisan opinions. Guesses are no longer just used to solve the puzzle; guesses must also fit within the NYT discourse. NYT does not directly monetize Wordle, but does advertise its other paid games on the Wordle page, and does have a subscribers-only WordleBot that allows users to access data-driven insights into their Wordle performance and compare their performance to other Wordle players. The journey of Wordle shows a metamorphosis from a simple game that is not an institution on its own (but that perhaps fits in with open-source discourses), to a game that is firmly part of a larger

236 

T. OSBORNE

institutional ecosystem that contains quite specific discourses and values. This change happened as a result of moving to the NYT Games platform. In my work, I am currently thinking about how coordination occurs as describable by two key dimensions: the extent to which a user’s doings are coordinated by the technical limitations of the platform; and the extent to which a user’s activities are organized based on the rules, regulations, and moderation policies of the environment. Consider again Facebook as a setting. There are some factors in using Facebook that apply to every community who uses Facebook: they are limited by the kinds of actions that are possible to do within the platform environment, and they are limited by a bigger set of terms and conditions that in theory they agree to by making a Facebook account. For example, one might consider restricting the range of emoticons—pictorial images symbolic of emotional reactions—that a person can use to interact with their friends’ Facebook posts as one explorable way in which technical limitations restrict and coordinate behaviors trans-locally. But within a smaller setting, for example a Facebook group set up by a specific community, there may be additional social rules that are enforced, often by people who work as “moderators” for that setting. Such social rules may be agreed within just that local context. In my own work, I look at digital platforms that are focused on user interactions. However, digital platforms are diverse, and not all include direct social interaction. Examples of other types of digital platforms might include digital human resources databases, appointment booking systems, web store fronts, virtual learning environments, employee intranets, and even internet search engines. There is a myriad of different kinds of digital platforms that are a part of our day-to-day lives, many of which are taken for granted or rendered invisible.

IE and Digital Ethnography My particular approach to feminist digital ethnography uses a hybrid of ethnography for the internet (Hine, 2015) and institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005). This hybrid approach is designed to facilitate combining contemporary methods for researching the internet with alternative sociological concepts about power, discourse, and gender in institutional settings. My methodological approach attempts to find a way to hold institution in view while investigating the platform, Stack Overflow, while thinking about the ruling relations in play at an interactional level.

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

237

From Hine, I take the notion that the internet is “Embedded, embodied, everyday” (Hine, 2015). This means that the internet is embedded in our daily material doings (Hine, 2015, p.  32), that being online is an extension of being embodied (Hine, 2015, p. 41), and that the internet functions as an infrastructure in our everyday activities (Hine, 2015, p. 46). From Smith, I take the notion that ethnography should describe the everyday/everynight lives of people and should focus on how their activity is coordinated across different locations. I also take the notion that ethnography should be conducted with a standpoint, that is, from the perspective of a particular set of embodied knowledges doing something. To do this, I use work as an orienting concept. In IE, work is understood in a broad sense and is considered to be “anything done by people that takes time and effort, that they mean to do, that is done under definite conditions and with whatever means and tools, and that they may have to think about” (Smith, 2005, p. 151). This broad definition serves to capture all forms of work, particularly unpaid work, that people undertake. Due to these broad understandings about institutions and about work, IE offers a pragmatic alternative to researching in digital spaces with platforms. Stack Overflow is a platform that many readers will use to find answers to problems they are trying to solve at work, for example, when trying to troubleshoot a particular piece of computer code. For this reason, it is a setting that lends itself well to conventional work studies. However, the IE notion of work is also applicable here, and will be applicable in the case of most platforms. To participate in many platforms, and to be successful on a platform, requires a conscious effort to do specific actions such as building an audience, curating people to follow, maintaining networks through liking and sharing posts, and so on. In some cases, people may even adopt specific strategies in order to be successful. For example, in my research on Stack Overflow, I interviewed some of the most successful contributors on the platform, and many of them talked about looking for simple questions to answer or looking for questions that relate to newer programming languages as a strategy for building reputation on the platform. Overall, these successful contributors agree that answering questions is a more valuable activity than asking questions. The effort to perform these actions often takes a substantial amount of time in daily life. When I asked these highly successful contributors about when they actually do this work of participating on the platform, many said that this was during “dead time” in their workdays;

238 

T. OSBORNE

the time in which they were stuck waiting on phone calls or waiting for code to compile. When approaching digital fieldwork, I have taken inspiration from IE. Fieldwork in IE is often done in two distinct stages, one stage being an interview or participant observation stage where the researcher develops an understanding of the site under study and the texts important in that site, and the other being a stage where the researcher works with texts and connects texts to actions (McCoy, 2006). Generally, the researcher moves between these two stages, and as they develop their understanding of the types of work that occur in the site, to develop an institutional level understanding of the way those texts organize people’s activities (Murray, 2020). In my own research process, I have relied much on iterating between these two stages, developing my understanding of texts, and then applying that knowledge within observational and interview-based settings. This worked very well from my perspective, as each interview gave me clues about features of the platform that people were actually using and about how they were using it. I could go back to the field, think about it, and follow it up. For example, when I interviewed people about their work on Stack Overflow, the chat service came up as a way of coordinating the work of moderating content on the platform. During my initial visits to the platform, the presence of a chat functionality had not been very apparent. After speaking to Stack Overflow moderators, I went and looked for the chat and found a whole other side of the platform of which I had not been aware and that is frequently overlooked in other research. In my own research, I have followed the loop out and back several times to find different things each time, and have found that contextualizing and recontextualizing my findings have been vital to analysis of the ethnographic data. Textual analysis, and recognizing the ways in which texts coordinate activities, are central approaches within IE.  In particular within IE, the researcher looks for those texts that are replicated and that may be interpreted and activated in many ways and in different contexts (Murray, 2020). Rather than setting texts apart from everyday life, texts are understood in a material way, and are considered an active part of coordinating activities (Smith, 2005, p. 101). Sometimes in IE, observation is used less than interview and textual analysis (Balcom et al., 2021). However, in my own practice, I use observation to a high degree. In part, this is because observational access to the internet as a field site is generally low-cost and straightforward in terms of time needs, as for the most part there are few geographical restrictions and

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

239

no need to travel. However, this is also because the nature of an internet-­ based field site means that the line between textual analysis and observation becomes quite blurred. In a way, the internet embodies the purest form of text-mediated relations. Almost everything is in some way mediated by text. The interpretation of those texts is often contextualized within a local ordering. While there are some clear distinctions between institutional texts, like rules and codes of conduct, that have a definite intention to coordinate the activities of people across sites, there are many other types of text that have a coordinating role that is not at first apparent. For example, what might appear to be an ordinary post or blog entry might hold an important place in the mind of the community of a platform and may be canonized as part of the way in which actions are coordinated. In my own research, I have found that blog posts of well-known users can particularly affect the way that others interpret the rules of the platform, and influence strategies that users take for engaging with platform mechanics. An example of this from my work is the way in which editors enforce language policy. The rules of Stack Overflow specify “Saying ‘thanks’ is appreciated, but it doesn’t answer the question.” This statement does not explicitly ban saying “thank you,” but editors on the site often enforce a ban on such statements. By applying an IE mindset, we can follow the chain of texts to find that there are several blog posts and discussions that canonize the idea that mentions of thanks are against the site rules. Through observation, we can see that this rule to remove thanks is not universally applied, so it depends on the text-reader conversation (Smith, 2005, p. 104)—the different ways in which people activate the texts and how they act upon them. By focusing on how the same guiding texts are activated in different ways, we can start to locate oppositions and tensions that are of interest to IE scholars. Hine’s ethnography makes use of the idea of multi-sitedness. Multi-­ sited ethnography follows phenomena under study between different locations, in order to help identify commonalities and larger relations of ruling. Multi-sited ethnography allows for exploration of a complex subject which may not have a well-defined “field” (Hine, 2007). In order to follow phenomena and talk in digital situations, it is necessary to stray to other platforms and field sites, due to the extent to which the internet is networked and connected. In digital spaces, the lines between what can be considered “fieldwork” and the boundaries of the field can be hard to define (Fay, 2007). In my practice, I think about how phenomena can be

240 

T. OSBORNE

located on the platform that I am studying, in other kinds of platforms that my informants might use, and in a work environment. I combine that with an explicit idea about seeking out coordinating texts and seeking out trans-­local relations of ruling. That means not just figuring out where else people are talking about happenings on the site (for example, tracing phenomena out to news sources and blogs) but also looking at what the platform says about its rules and how it enforces those. This way of working is not dissimilar to other forms of Institutional Ethnography that trace courses of action across many organizational or institutional settings (Vaughan, 2021). The idea of multi-sitedness is well suited to blending digital ethnography with other ethnographic approaches because it is then possible to build and conceive the online space as one field site among other possible field sites. For Hine, being online is considered an extension of worldly embodiment (Hine, 2015, p. 14), and we see this in her mantra of the internet as embedded, embodied, and everyday. This way of thinking opens up a space to consider the materiality of the digital. We bring our own embodiedness to the study of internet, and with that our own standpoint. Hine’s views about embodiment in this textually mediated environment work well with Dorothy Smith’s views about text as active. Texts are active in that they have an organizing effect, and that the relations contained in the text must be activated by a reader (Smith, 1990a, Chap. 5). These relations are not always known by us as a researcher, since they are always viewed through our own embodied standpoint, and our own knowledge of interpretive schema. With that, one recognizes that all who are accessing and activating texts on the internet are doing so with their own different embodied experiences (Hine, 2015, p.  45). Interpreting texts on the internet requires an appreciation for how embodied experiences affect textual activation, and whose embodied experiences form the institutionalized interpretive schema. The internet, and by extension platforms, are intertwined and embedded with daily life, and what happens in online settings affects what happens in offline settings (Fay, 2007). Hine talks about the internet as an infrastructure that is active in “invisibly shaping” the actions of those who use it (Hine, 2015, p. 49). While I still need to develop in my own research an understanding of the difference or commonality between infrastructures and institutions, I think there is a clear similarity in Hine’s focus on the “shaping” of activities, and Smith’s focus on the “coordination” of activities.

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

241

With these ideas in mind, we can look at a platforms like Stack Overflow, Facebook, or even NYT Games, and approach it as an institutional setting that coordinates the activities of its users through discourse and texts, and we can analyze the work of users in maintaining and contributing to this institution.

Considerations in Digital Fieldwork In my ethnographic fieldwork, I have found two core considerations that have made helpful anchoring points in doing observation on the internet. These considerations are temporalities and programmability. A big inspiration to the way I work with internet texts is Dorothy Smith’s idea about timelining, or “the temporal order of the text” (Smith, 1990a, Chap. 3), and “public textual discourse” (Smith, 1990a, Chap. 5). When dealing with interactions and texts, sometimes simply putting things in a temporal order is revealing as Eastwood (2006) observes in her work on negotiating United Nations protocols and examining draft differences. On the internet, time is often unclear and diffuse. Texts and interactions may be sorted with algorithmic logic, such as how many other users have interacted with a text, or if the platform predicts that you might interact with a text. Interactions can often also be edited outside of the sequence of responses. Texts in web pages can be edited without an obvious trace of when and how they are edited. If we are present on a platform as if it was a field site, what we encounter is often not presented in a chronological order, for example, comparing an original post with an edited post, and fitting that into a timeline; being aware that top voted comments are often placed first when they may come later in a temporal ordering. Access to this information is often available through timestamps and trace data, regardless of whether one was present at the time. In my own research, I observed that people had placed a degree of importance on creating and making timelines for community histories. Time becomes important to people precisely because of how difficult it is to keep track of temporalities in modern digital settings. People may create timelines in order to make an account of events bracketed by the authority of time, discursively producing cause and effect by constructing a narrative formula (Smith, 1990a, p. 106). When particular types of comments are more visible, and their story can be contested by locating the primary narrative, the ideological schemas in play become evident (Smith, 1990b).

242 

T. OSBORNE

Another thing to pay attention to is how programmability is used by the users, and to what extent the platform allows use of programmability. Some platforms might be quite restrictive in terms of allowing access to their data from API or in terms of allowing data from the platform to be transparent to users. Paying attention to how a platform treats the politics of its data can be revealing about how the institution of the platform operates. The platform that I research, Stack Overflow, is highly programmable. In my analysis of the ruling relations, I identify this approach to programmability as related to freedom of speech discourses. Such freedom of speech discourses are common in open source software movements (Reagle, 2013), and have roots in right-wing libertarianism. By recognizing this, I can start to draw links between the ideology of the platform and the ways in which social life on the platform are ideologically ordered. The way that platform users harness the programmability of a platform also has the potential to be instructive for spotting tensions between users and institutional authority. In particular, people can build “work arounds” for certain policies by applying their own technical knowledge. Stack Overflow offers a sub-site where users can share the scripts, apps, and extensions that they write to be used on the website; while the technical parameters of what differentiates a script and an app are not relevant to this discussion, the important differentiation is that they are unofficial extensions of what the platform can do, which have been created for and by users. These kinds of scripts can be used to solve particular problems. For example, on Stack Overflow, questions appear and are ordered by the number of times they have been voted up or voted down. Newer users and users with lower standing on the site can only see the combined number of points that a question has, but higher reputation users can see exactly how many upvotes or downvotes have been given to a question. In response to this, the community made a script that acts as a work-around, allowing anyone to see the breakdown of upvotes and downvotes, regardless of their reputation. This script must be frequently updated because Stack Overflow as an institution adjusts their own backend processes to try and prevent users from accessing this information before they have earned it. Seeing what kinds of things matter enough to be worked on in that way helps one as a researcher to attune to these things as important in that environment. In other platform environments, scripts, user-made apps, and add-ons may well exist but not be easily visible. This itself can be a rich and complex landscape, filled with multiple intersecting platforms, aggregators,

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

243

and discourses. Commonly used scripts that many people may have contact with include advert blockers, which are designed to hide or automatically skip adverts embedded in web pages. Searching for extensions for websites can reveal a wealth of information about tensions and problems within that setting. On the whole, these features are under-explored in research.

Conclusion In this essay, I have reflected on the commonalities and complementary concepts between Hine’s Ethnography for the internet and Smith’s Institutional Ethnography. While my own research approach is still developing, along with my thoughts, opinions, and interpretations, I present here early steps toward using IE as a digital mode of inquiry. The strength of IE as a digital mode of inquiry is that it already has methods and theory for working in environments that are mediated by text and technology. IE also is no stranger to the idea of moving between local and extra local contexts. IE can thrive as a mode of inquiry for the internet and digital tools precisely because it already uses these concepts in the analysis of the social. By augmenting IE with ideas about the role of the platform as institutionally organized, a clear object of focus in a digital IE can emerge. My own purpose in using IE as a mode of inquiry is in part to normalize thinking about digital contexts alongside day-to-day work contexts, and in part to use an ethnographic method that seeks to highlight inequalities in power structures. I hope in the future to do more ethnographic work where digital platforms are an important part of the fieldwork, on the same level as the other aspects of the field sites. I invite IE scholars to consider how they incorporate and problematize digital platforms in their fieldwork.

Suggested Questions for Digital IE Research As a supplement to this chapter, I present some questions that might help IE researchers when exploring digital platform contexts in their field sites: Relationship Between Social Settings and Platforms –– What platforms do informants use to communicate with each other? Are these different in work contexts and personal contexts?

244 

T. OSBORNE

–– What platforms does the community under study use to disseminate information or coordinate activities? Are there conflicts in how informants access these platforms? –– When and how do informants use / access these platforms? –– Do standpoint informants and extralocal informants use these platforms differently? –– What limitations are introduced through using these platforms? The Social Within the Platform –– What is the role of this platform in the work of the community / informant? –– How many communities does this platform service? Is the platform locally relevant or trans-locally relevant? –– What features of the platform are programmable, editable, or customizable? Do informants use these features? Platform Rules –– Does the platform have a code of conduct? How is it enforced? –– Does the community under study have a different code of conduct to the platform? How is it enforced? –– Are there tensions between the platform rules and the community rules?

References Balcom, S., Doucet, S., & Dubé, A. (2021). Observation and institutional ethnography: Helping us to see better. Qualitative Health Research, 31(8), 1534–1541. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323211015966 Beaulieu, A. (2004). Mediating ethnography: Objectivity and the making of ethnographies of the internet. Social Epistemology, 18(2–3), 139–163. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0269172042000249264 Caliandro, A. (2018). Digital methods for ethnography: Analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 47(5), 551–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241617702960 Diaz, A. (2022, February 11). Wordle blocks certain offensive words, now that it’s owned by NYT. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/22929386/wordle-­ banned-­words-­offensive-­nyt

12  WRITING THE SOCIAL WEB: TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL… 

245

Eastwood, L. (2006). Making the institution ethnographically accessible: UN document production and the transformation of experience. In D.  E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp.  181–197). Rowman & Littlefield. Fay, M. (2007). Mobile subjects, mobile methods: Doing virtual ethnography in a feminist online network. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(3) http:// search.proquest.com/docview/869239921/fulltext/B64733F08BFD4596P Q/1?accountid=11162 Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of “platforms.”. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 Helmond, A. (2015). The platformization of the web: Making web data platform ready. Social Media + Society, 1(2), 2056305115603080. https://doi. org/10.1177/2056305115603080 Hine, C. (2007). Multi-sited ethnography as a middle range methodology for contemporary STS. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 32(6), 652–671. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243907303598 Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the internet: Embedded, embodied and everyday. Taylor & Francis Group. Kozinets, R.  V. (2002). The field behind the screen: Using netnography for marketing research in online communities. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.39.1.61.18935 Massanari, A. (2017). #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society, 19(3), 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807 McCoy, L. (2006). Keeping the institution in view: Working with interview accounts of everyday experience. In D. E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 109–125). Rowman & Littlefield. Murray, Ó. M. (2020). Text, process, discourse: Doing feminist text analysis in institutional ethnography. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 25(1), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1839162 Nivala, M., Seredko, A., Osborne, T., & Hillman, T. (2020). Stack overflow  – Informal learning and the global expansion of professional development and opportunities in programming? 2020 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 402–408. https://doi.org/10.1109/ EDUCON45650.2020.9125165 NYT Word Games and Logic Puzzles. (n.d.). Help. Retrieved October 31, 2022, from https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-­us/articles/360029050872-­Word-­ Games-­and-­Logic-­Puzzles Pink, S., & Morgan, J. (2013). Short-term ethnography: Intense routes to knowing. Symbolic Interaction, 36(3), 351–361. https://doi. org/10.1002/symb.66

246 

T. OSBORNE

Postill, J., & Pink, S. (2012). Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web. Media International Australia, 145(1), 123–134. https://doi. org/10.1177/1329878X1214500114 Reagle, J. (2013). “Free as in sexist?” Free culture and the gender gap. First Monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v18i1.4291 Smith, D. E. (1990a). Texts, facts, and femininity: Exploring the relations of ruling. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203425022 Smith, D.  E. (1990b). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Smith, D.  E. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442683747 Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Stack Exchange Traffic. (2022, May 31). Stack exchange. https://stackexchange. com/sites?view=list#traffic Touma, R. (2022, May 9). New York Times drops ‘fetus’ as an answer to Wordle – but not for all players. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ media/2022/may/09/new-­york-­times-­drops-­fetus-­as-­an-­answer-­to-­wordle Vaughan, S. (2021). And then there was copyright. In P. C. Luken & S. Vaughan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp.  141–155). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3­030-­54222-­1_9

Index1

A Aboriginal, 185, 189, 191 Abrams, Philip, 155 Academic governance, 140 Accountability regimes, 96 Accreditation standards, 179, 190 Active living, 167 Activist scholarship, 97, 111 Administrative state, 37, 39, 42 Aggregator service, 233 Airports, 13–22, 24 Algorithmic, 241 Allyship (ally, allies), 53–64 Analytical strategies, 153–170 Analytical thinking, 154, 155 Anti-decolonial theory, 148 Antiracism praxis, 92 Anti-racist theory, 148 Application programming interface (API), 233, 235, 242

Applied sociology, 55 Archival documents, 154 Archival research (archival work), 161–169 Archivists, 164, 165, 167 Australian healthcare system, 177 Authoritative accounts, 122 Authorized knowledge, 29, 34 B Band-aid work, 182–187, 190, 191, 193, 194n2 Banerji, Himani, 131 Bertaux, D., 161 Bertaux-Wiame, I., 161 Black, 55–60, 62, 63 Black Equity and Excellence Fund, 57 Blog, 239, 240 Boss text, 204

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.), Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33402-3

247

248 

INDEX

C Campbell, Marie, 32, 36–38, 49n7, 49n9, 95, 96, 98–101, 109 Canada, 200, 212, 221n1 Capitalism/capitalist societies, 143 Changes in public sector management, 155 Charitable foundations, 59 Charitable funds, 53 Chat functionality, 238 Chile, 200–202, 204–206, 212, 215–217, 219–221, 221n2, 222n6 Collaborative project, 1 Colonial ruling relations, 201, 204, 208, 215, 216, 219 Color blind, 55 Common sense, 131 Community audit, 95 Community building, 59 Community change, 54, 60, 63 Concepts, 120, 131, 133 Conceptual shells, 121 Conflictual terrain, 28 Context, 138–141, 144, 146–148 Convention 169 (C169), 203–204 Convincing work, 186–187, 189, 190, 193 Coordination, 133 Courses of action, 162, 164, 165, 169 Creative commons, 234 Critical commentary, 2, 3 Critiques of the empirical historical research, 155 D Daigle, M., 211–215 Dead hand of the donor/dead hand control of charitable assets, 59 Decolonization, 199–221

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), 64 De Montigny, Gerald, 21, 29, 30, 32–35, 38, 45, 46, 48n4, 49n6 Detection practices, 13 Detection work, 16, 17, 22 DeVault, Marjorie, 16, 17, 22, 31, 33, 34, 37, 94, 98, 100, 103 Diagnostic shells, 125 Diamond, Tim, 94 Digital/digital tools/platforms/ settings/ community(ities), 231–243 Digital ethnography, 232, 233, 236–241 Discourse(s), 98, 100, 101, 104, 106, 120–122, 125, 126, 130–133, 154, 157, 161, 165–167, 169 Discovery, 2, 3 Discursive frames, 164 Disjuncture, 59, 63, 138, 145 Disney Corporation, 169 DMB Development, 169 Documentary construction of reality, 122 Doll, Agnieszka, 79 Dual consciousness, 36–39, 43 Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, 96 E Eastwood, L., 96, 204, 208, 241 Economic inequality, 58 Embodiment, 240 Epistemology, 92, 93, 95, 105, 112 Ethnomethodology, 95 Everyday life, 95, 98, 101, 103, 104, 111 Evidence-based, 146 Experiential learning, 106, 107, 109–110

 INDEX 

F Facebook, 233, 236, 241 Fact-based, 146 Fault line, 17 Femininity, 101, 102 Feminist digital ethnography, 236 Feminist social movement, 111 Financial models, 235 Finding aids, 161, 164 First Nations people(s), 177–194 Fishberg, Rachel, 75, 77 Forum exchanges, 232 Foucault, M., 100 Frontline workers, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22 Functional complex(es), 69–82, 84–86 G Games, 233, 235, 236, 241 Gender equality, 144 Gender research, 146–148 Giving up power, 62 Glenn, Evelyn, 127, 128, 131, 133 Global North, 214 Governing text, 202–205, 217 Graduate methodologies courses, 100 Gregor, Frances, 96, 98–100, 109 Griffin, Alison, 94 Griffith, Allison, 19–20 Guide for doing archival research in IE, 162–169 H Hall, John, 155, 156, 158 Hamilton, Richard, 155, 156 Hine, C., 236, 237, 239, 240, 243 Historical archival data, 169 Historical change, 153–170 Historical processes of change, 158 Historical societies (historical museums), 158, 161, 163, 166

249

Histories of organizations and companies, 162 Historiography, 161, 163 History of ordinary people, 155, 158 Homeland Security, 14, 15, 18–21 Homeownership, 166 Hospital, 177–194 Housing as an institution or regime, 154 Human service organization, 31–36, 43, 47 Human service professional, 27–48 human service work, 28, 31, 32, 38, 47 Hurley, Natasha, 209 Hybrid approach, 142 I Ideological circles, 181, 193 Ideological code(s), 121, 126 Ideologically ordered, 242 Ideological stance, 30 IE sensibility, 120, 122 IE’s worldview, 37 Indigenous, 184, 185, 191, 192 Indigenous dispossession, 200–202, 206, 207, 212, 213, 217–219 Indigenous participatory action research (IPAR), 209, 220 Indigenous resurgence, 208, 210–212, 215, 221 Insider position, 108 Institutional authority, 18 Institutional change, 62, 63 Institutional ethnography (IE), 91–112, 180–181, 193 Institutional ethnography sensibility, 13 Institutional power, 34, 35, 42, 45, 48n4 Institutional standpoint, 42, 44

250 

INDEX

Interdisciplinary, 146 Internal colonization, 200, 204, 222n4 Internal dialogue, 13, 15, 19 Internationalization, 147 International Sociological Association (ISA), 96, 97, 101 Internet, 231–244 Interpretive schema, 240 Intersectional theory, 148 J Jackson, Nancy, 36, 37 Just trying, 11–24 K Kinsman, Gary, 154 Knowing, 29, 34, 40, 49n9 L Labrador, 200, 221n1 Land restitution, 200, 202, 210–212, 215, 219–221, 222n6 Language, 122, 131, 132 Legal systems, 200, 222n6 Letter-writing networks and relations, 154 Libertarian, 234 Libertarianism, 234, 242 Library of Congress, 161 Library repositories, 161 Life histories is sociology, 158 Literacy rates, 163, 164 Little hero diagrams, 3, 159–161 Longue duree, 155 Luken, Paul, 12, 23, 78, 79, 97, 129, 132, 153, 154, 158, 162

M Managing society, 27, 28 Mappings (map/mapping processes), 54, 56, 60–62, 64, 98, 99, 103, 109, 110 Mapuche, 210, 211, 220, 221, 222n6 Marketization, 145, 147 Marxism, 95, 143, 148n2, 149n3 Marx’s historical materialism, 155 Materialist ontology, 138, 147 McCoy, Liza, 2, 3 Medico-legal borderland, 79, 83 Mentorship, 94, 106, 110, 111 Methodology, 92, 110, 112 Mills, C. Wright, 156 Missing in texts or in archives, libraries, and museums, 168 Moderators, 236, 238 Morton-Ninomiya, Melody, 209, 213, 214, 217 Mothering discourse, 126, 132 Multi-sited ethnography, 239 N Namaste, Viviane, 74, 75, 77 Narrative formula, 241 National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (Standards), 178 Nation-building, 131 Neoliberal discourse, 155 Neoliberalism, 145 Netnography, 232 New Public Management, 144, 145 Newswork, 73 New York Times (NYT), 235, 236, 241 Ng, Roxana, 131 Nichols, Naomi, 79 Nordic tradition of IE, 142 Nuisance noise, 84

 INDEX 

Nurse, 28, 30, 36–44, 48n3, 49n7, 49n8, 49n9, 50n14 thinking like a nurse, 28, 29, 36 O Observation, 232, 233, 238, 239, 241 Ontological assumptions of institutional ethnography, 156 Ontology, 121, 130 Open source software, 234, 242 Oppositional discipline, 144 Oral history, 154, 155, 158 Oral housing histories, 154, 158–160 Original and primary texts, 163 P The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography, 2–3 Patient-centered care, 177–194 Pedagogical praxis, 91–112 Penashue, Jack, 209 Pence, Ellen, 95, 96, 163 Periphery, 138, 140, 141 Phenomenology, 95 Philanthropy/philanthropic, 53, 56–63 Planners, 204, 205, 207, 214 Planning, 199–221 Platform, 231–244 Point of departure, 63 Positivism, 138, 142, 146 critique of positivism, 143, 146 Posts, 232–234, 236, 237, 239, 241 Power, 28, 30, 32–35, 37, 41, 43–45, 47, 48n3, 49n10, 49–50n12 professional power, 32, 34 Praxis, 93–95, 97, 101–105, 111, 112 Praxis International, 96 Primary and secondary sources, 161

251

Primary narratives, 122 Problematic, 27, 45, 46, 54–57, 60–61, 63, 98, 102, 109, 139, 140, 145, 147 Problem-oriented empiricism, 143, 146, 147 Processing interchanges, 163 Production and distribution processes, 165 Production and mass consumption practices, 163 Production and readership/viewership rates, 164 Professional practice, 54 Programmable, 233, 242, 244 Q Qualitative approaches, 92 Qualitative methodology, 92 Qualitative research, 138, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147 Quandaries, 27–48 Quantitative methods, 143 R Racial capitalism, 201 Racially minoritized participants, 108 Racial wealth disparities, 58 Racist, 147, 148 Rankin, Janet, 32, 36–38, 49n7 Ray, Lana, 209, 213, 214, 217 Reading through, 122, 124 Recontextualization, 82 Reflection, 93–100, 106–111 Reid, Jim, 20 Relational turn, 83–85 Relations of ruling/ruling relations, 91, 98–101, 109–111 Repositories, 161, 164 Resistance, 147

252 

INDEX

Resisting work, 187–190, 192, 193 Retirement, 165, 167 Rivera Cusicanqui, S., 211, 216, 218 Ruling apparatus, 121 Ruling relations, 69, 70, 72–76, 78–81, 85, 86, 119–134 ruling practice, 31, 33, 36, 41, 42, 44, 50n12, 50n15 ruling regime, 27, 28, 45–46 S Secondary research, 163 Security guard, 13–15, 17–23 Serendipity, 167 Settler colonialism, 127, 128, 200, 201, 212, 213, 215–217, 219 Settler colonialist discourses, 133 Settler colonialist history of the U. S., 131 Sexist, 147 Single institution, 69, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85 Single institution tendency, 69–86 Skull, 12 Small hero, 19–20, 23 Smith, D. E., 54, 60 Smith, Dorothy, 1–5, 7, 12, 16, 17, 19–21, 23, 27, 28, 34, 35, 37, 38, 42–47, 49n10, 49n11, 49–50n12, 50n15, 153–158, 163, 169, 180, 182, 192, 193 Smith, George, 27, 28, 45–47, 71, 81 Smith’s notion of ideological code, 157 Smith’s notion of text, 156 Smith’s notion of the social, 156 The social, 91–99, 101, 103–106, 108–110 Social construction, 102 Social economy and law, 144

Social inequality/inequalities, 143, 145, 147 Social ontological, 2 Social ontology, 155 Social organization, 28, 30, 32–35, 37–39, 41–45, 47, 48n4 Social relations, 11, 13, 15, 139, 140, 147 Social relations of surveillance by the state, 154 Social relations organizing the institution of housing, 160 Social trust, 145 Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), 94, 96, 97, 101, 199, 200 Society of Social Problems (SSSP), 20 Sociology as discourse, 139, 141–146 Sociology as practice, 139–141 Sociology as work, 139–141 Stack Exchange, 234 Stack Overflow, 231, 232, 234, 236–239, 241, 242 Stages, 238 Standard American Home, 132 Standardization, 147 Standard North American Family, 126 Standpoint, 27–48, 101, 106–108, 138, 140–146 Stanley, Liz, 154 State, the, 140–148 Storyliving, 169 Suburban single family housing developments, 154 Supreme Decree 66, 202 Systemic racism, 106 T Taking action, 54, 61–63 Temporal order, 241 Text mediated relations/Textmediated relations, 234, 239

 INDEX 

Text-reader conversation, 239 Texts, 95–100, 106, 109, 121, 130, 133, 154–157, 161–169 Textual analysis, 238, 239 Textual coordination, 133 Textually mediated regulations, 15 Time and place, 2, 3 Torres Strait Islander people, 189, 191 Trace data, 232, 241 Traditional ethnographies, 101 Trans-local ruling relations, 139 Transnational IE, 75 Triangulation, 167 Tuck, Eve, 201, 210, 211, 215, 218, 219, 221 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 215 U Ugarte, Magdalena, 79 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), 204 Unsettling/deoccupying land, 211 U.S. National Archives and Research Administration (NARA), 161, 166 V Vaughan, Suzanne, 78, 79, 97, 132, 154, 158, 162 Vermont, 21 Virtual reality, 122, 124 Vulnerable populations, 185

253

W Web page, 233, 235, 241, 243 Welfare objectification, 141 Welfare state, 140–145, 147, 148 Welfare state professionals, 145 Western law, 201, 216, 219 What actually happened, 122, 124, 127 Where one “stands,” 32 White institution, 58, 59 Whiteness critical whiteness, 105, 106 discourse of whiteness, 106 White settler-colonial institution, 192 White supremacy, 106, 108 Wildcat, M., 210, 218 Wines, Frederick Howard, 53 Women’s movement, 145 Women’s studies, 144 Wordle, 235 Words as practices, 12 Work, 91–106, 108–111, 231–234, 236–241, 243, 244 work processes, 103 Work knowledge, 138 Work-text-work sequence, 159, 161 Y Yang, Wane, 201, 210, 211, 215, 218, 219, 221 You are here, 2 Z Zoom, 233