University of Victoria
Institutional Ethnography and Making Change from Below
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.
Chair: Marie Campbell, University of Victoria
Session Organizer: Marie Campbell, University of Victoria, mariecam@uvic.ca
Confusion and Tension at the Crossroads of Career Development and Knowledge Mobilization
Cheryl Zurawski, University of Regina, cdz@arialassociates.com
A new IE scholar will discuss the confusion and tension she is experiencing as she encounters a funding agency's interest in knowledge mobilization as an actuality in her life after a PhD. On the surface, the interest of the funding agency appears to coincide with her own interest - explicitly stated in her dissertation - to do more with the findings of her IE research than enrich the body of knowledge in her academic discipline. Yet as she begins to explore what to do with her IE research findings in an era when knowledge mobilization is all the rage, she asks herself how the social relations in which she is now partiicpating as part of an effort to secure funding for a project expressly designed to "make change from below" are drawing her into a ruling apparatus that is shaping and determining how it is that she proceeds to develop her career after completing her PhD program. It is this overarching question that will frame the new scholar's presentation at the roundtable.
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
'Tweaking' institutional discourse - illustrative examples of failed attempts to re-orient nurses thinking
Janet Rankin, Faculty of Nursing University of Calgary, jmrankin@ucalgary.ca
The good intentions of nurse managers who occupy ruling standpoints in healthcare are necessarily harnessed to particular (theorized and industrialized) constructions of problems and solutions. Nurse managers have socially organized vested interests which produces their 'faith' in the abstracted, calculative (ideologically) organized strategies that they believe will improve patient care in hospitals. Nurse manager's strong faith in the approaches to streamline and optimize care is coordinated by the formal institutional discursive practices within which they produce their daily work. It is work that is buttressed by the terms of their employment, within job descriptions,, performance appraisals and the like. Their job security and sense of their own competence is tied to ruling strategies that fit with particular forms of evidence -- completely aligned systems of accountability and metrics of quality and safety. In my experience, those (rare) managers pursuaded by IE's discoveries about "how things work" are rapidlyobjects of the very ruling relations in which their prior 'faith' was placed. These ruling relations are, in my experience, impenetrable as they enforce and reify the ruling agenda. Those few people who are convinced by an IE analysis move to the margins of research and scholarship whilst new legions of the "faithful"replace them. And so it goes. It is my hope that a strategically organized cohort of IE influenced thinkers at each level of the institution; thinkers who are linked into an activist research network and (to use Ellen Pence's term) poised to 'tweak' the ruling relations at every possible turn may be able to make "change from below” (from within and from throughout) using as a basis of understanding the social and textual organization of everyday life in institutions. My (as yet unsuccessful) efforts rest in a series of incremental 'illustrative examples of my efforts to engage front-line nursing leaders.
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
Giving institutional feed-back within an academic supervisory relationship
Elena Kim, Center for Development Research, Bonn, Germany, kimelenal@gmail.com
In recent doctoral research, I conducted an institutional ethnography in Uzbekistan within an action-research development project, one of several development projects sponsored in Central Asia by a German research institution. I discovered that this project’s practices unwittingly subordinate and marginalize local beneficiaries/participants, especially women. My proposed presentation focuses on the ongoing processes of interaction between me, as researcher, and an informant who is both a project coordinator and also my academic tutor. As my tutor, she reviewed my proposal, visited me in the field and read my data and early analytic notes. Supervision proceeded as I submitted my written analysis, chapter by chapter, for discussion. During these discussions I received her reaction to my analysis of what she saw as my criticism of her institutional work. I propose to share how this process evoked a variety of responses - her curiosity, disappointment and strong reluctance to accept my findings. It is too early for me to be able to say how this interaction will or may influence the institutional practice in the development research organization, but I recognize some movement in my tutor’s responses. As she is becoming acquainted with the full version of my inquiry, she has begun to agree with its analytic findings, although about the untoward effects of the project on women, she makes repetitive attempts to justify the project and to depoliticize it. My presentation will offer lessons I have learnt reflecting on the manner in which I presented my newly discovered knowledge, its sequence, language, etc.
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
A spy in the house of healing: Challenges of doing critical qualitative research in clinical settings
Fiona Webster, University of Toronto, fiona.webster@utoronto.ca
This talk draws upon my xperiences of working as a critical ethnographer in health care settings in Ontario. This presentation will explore what it means to work closely with health care providers and patients in health care settings as a non-clinical researcher. It will also explore the designation of “scientist” and how this label serves to legitimize ethnography as a form of inquiry while at the same time undermining its ties to critical scholarship. As ethnography and other qualitative methods become increasingly popular in health care, the position of the researcher to her academic discipline and methodological foundations, as juxtaposed to her location within the health care setting, may continue to pose tensions in terms of authenticity, identity and ethics.
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
To "Gemba" and Back
Karen Melon, University of Calgary, melonjk@telus.net
One of the challenges in disseminating the alternative evidence discovered through Institutional Ethnography is framing the analysis in language others can 'hear' and make sense of from their conceptual position. Map in hand, from my own research, I made an effort to study (from the inside)the dominant discourses that organized how those key institutional players approached their management work; the language, the ideological underpinnings, the rhetoric, the procedures, and so on. This understanding helped me articulate and illustrate how IE was different and the gaps in other approaches that an IE analysis could fill. I will share a step by step approach to framing IE that those positioned differently seem to at least follow. In the session, I will provide an example of applying an IE lens to "Process Improvement".
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
Taking research further: Exploring the institutional ethnographer’s relationship with research informants to promote social change
Erin Sirett, McGill University, erin.sirett@mail.mcgill.ca
IE is a method of inquiry that is thought by many researchers to promote social change. One of the ways it is believed to do so is by identifying ruling relations – processes that originate outside the local contexts of people’s work in a given institution but that organize this work. These ruling relations supersede the interests of the people for whom institutions and their services are said to exist. However, there are also features of IE that may make it challenging as a research methodology for social change. By “taking sides”, the institutional ethnographer is faced with particular questions about how to use research knowledge to promote social change. How does this relationship help or hinder social change efforts? This question will be explored as I consider the challenges I face in the process of doing IE with two non-governmental organizations (NGOs), given my goal of making the institution of international development in which they work more equitable.
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
“This really is a full-time job!”: Making visible the healthwork of a patient-institutional ethnographer
Manda Roddick, University of Victoria, manda.ann.roddick@gmail.com , Daniel Grace, University of British Columbia, grace.dan@gmail.com , Dorothy Smith, University of Victoria, desmith@uvic.ca
In this paper we expand upon the concept of ‘healthwork’ advanced originally by Eric Mykhaloskiy and Liza McCoy. The present analysis is based on the experience of one of the authors. It is shaped from the experiential standpoint of a patient-institutional ethnographer who is engaged in complex healthwork across legal, educational and health institutions and is playing an active role in coordinating the institutional processes of the health care system. This institutional ethnography aims to extend our knowledge both of patients' experience of managing health problems (e.g., developing a medical cloak of not only competence but expertise so as to help manage one’s pain in the context of health care institutions) and of how patients' work coordinates the diverse institutional processes in which patients may be engaged, including, of course, the various functions of formal health care institutions as well as, for example, the work of patient advocacy groups, lawyers, students and policy actors. The paper gives special importance to the complexities and ethical tensions in the healthwork of a patient-institutional ethnographer who seeks to ‘talk back’ and provide feedback to organizational actors – including her doctor-informants – from whom she both receives ongoing medical care and ethnographic knowledge of ruling institutional practices.
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
Proposed Presentation title: Doing “sociology for people” in the age of “knowledge transfer” and “return to community”
Liza McCoy, Department of Sociology University of Calgary, mccoy@ucalgary.ca
Research funding regimes and university strategic plans emphasize the dissemination of research beyond the academy, and university-based researchers are increasingly accountable to these priorities. Does this new institutional focus on being “relevant” make it easier to conceive and carry out “sociology for people” in the context of a mainstream career, either as a graduate student or professor?
Saturday June 8, 2013 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-061
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