Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People

Review
"Simply Institutional Ethnography is an inviting, practical introduction to the project of institutional ethnography. Readers new to IE will find clear explanations and inspiring examples of research strategies." -- Liza McCoy, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary
"This book is a most welcome contribution to the field of institutional ethnography, in that it explicates the issues and questions most often raised – or which could or should be – when doing IE research. Simply Institutional Ethnography shows how issues come to the surface but also how they are solved. Here is something for us all, representing every level of knowledge." -- Karin Widerberg, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, and founder of the Nordic Network on Institutional Ethnography
"Institutional ethnography may at times appear to be a complex enterprise, but it is at heart a brilliantly straightforward way of thinking about ‘how things work’ in people’s everyday lives. In this book, Smith and Griffith adopt a conversational tone in order to offer an overview of its basic ideas and the varied approaches developed by practitioners over time. Brief discussions of exemplary research studies provide a valuable specificity that grounds the discussion – and suggest avenues for further learning." -- Marjorie L. DeVault, Professor Emerita, Syracuse University
Institutional ethnography (IE) originated as a feminist alternative to sociologies defining people as the objects of study. Instead, IE explores the social relations that dominate the life of the particular subject in focus.
Simply Institutional Ethnography is written by two pioneers in the field and grounded in decades of ground-breaking work. Dorothy Smith and Alison Griffith lay out the basics of how institutional ethnography proceeds as a sociology. The book introduces the concepts – Discourse, Work, Text – that institutional ethnographers have found to be key ideas used to organize what they learn from the study of people’s experience. Simply Institutional Ethnography builds an ethnography that makes this material visible as coordinated sequences of social relations that reach beyond the particularities of local experience. In explicating the foundations of IE and its principal concepts, Simply Institutional Ethnography reflects on the ways in which the field may move forward.