Me, Myself, and IE: Describing the Actualities of Undertaking Institutional Ethnography

Abstract

Through Institutional Ethnography (IE), one can explicate how people’s lives are being socially organised. The ethnographer creates an empirical account of what happens within a complex of institutional order, moving iteratively between data collection methods to see how the ‘institution’ occurs through people’s work, how texts are used to coordinate it, and how these texts reproduce ideology. They follow findings as they arise, with reference to the perspectives of ‘standpoint informants’. However, because this process is iterative, descriptions of IE studies vary greatly. Guidance on how to undertake IE’s methods is often specific to the institution being studied. To aid prospective ethnographers, the article describes a step-by-step process through which IE was interpreted and implemented in practice in a healthcare setting. Though it references research at an Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) service, the account is not prescriptive; rather, it illustrates how one might undertake IE-informed data collection and analysis while being consistent with what is expected of an IE.