Institutional ethnography is said to be a sociology for people because of its focus is on discovering “how things work” from the standpoint of those who are involved in and subject to ruling institutional practices. Such analytic information can help organizational actors talk back about features of institutional settings that otherwise remain taken for granted, perhaps creating unrecognized difficulties for less powerful organizational actors. But there are potentially serious drawbacks, not yet fully explored, for researchers who would change their analytic focus and attempt to give feedback to their organizational informants. Short presentations are invited addressing the experiences of researchers who, after successfully analysing some institutional processes, discuss their findings with variously located members of the institution they studied. Topics of interest in the session include experiences of determining and connecting with appropriate institutional actors; successes and difficulties the institutional ethnographer encountered; illustrative stories of “what is successful feedback?” or of “who is interested and why?” and other contributions to the goal of “making change from below” on the basis of understanding the social and textual organization of everyday life in institutions.
Session Organizer & Chair: Marie Campbell, PhD, University of Victoria, mariecam@uvic.ca
Session Code: Inst1
Schedule, location, and presentations
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.