Confronta i metodi

	Etnografia Istituzionale Critica	Etnografia Critica
Campo	Qualitativo	Qualitativo
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1987 (IE foundational); critical applications prominent 1990s–2000s	Late 20th century (~1980s–1993 systematisation)
Ideatore	Dorothy E. Smith (institutional ethnography); critical variant developed through feminist and critical scholars	Jim Thomas (systematised); rooted in Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno, Horkheimer) and feminist/postcolonial traditions
Tipo	Qualitative research design	Qualitative research method
Fonte seminale	Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. AltaMira Press. ISBN: 978-0759105010	Thomas, J. (1993). Doing Critical Ethnography. Sage Publications.
Alias	Critical IE, critical-IE, institutional ethnography with critical orientation, CIE	critical ethnographic research, critical qualitative ethnography, advocacy ethnography, emancipatory ethnography
Correlati	6	6
Sintesi	Critical institutional ethnography (CIE) combines Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography with an explicit critical theory lens to investigate how ruling relations, texts, and institutional discourses reproduce inequality and power asymmetries. Starting from the lived experiences of people positioned within or subordinated by institutions, CIE traces how abstract institutional processes coordinate everyday life and subjects those processes to normative critique aimed at social transformation.	Critical ethnography is a qualitative research approach that combines sustained fieldwork immersion with explicit critical theory to examine how power, inequality, and ideology shape the lived experiences of marginalised communities. Unlike conventional ethnography, which aims to describe a culture as it is, critical ethnography commits the researcher to questioning what is taken for granted and to producing knowledge that can serve as a resource for social change. Rooted in Frankfurt School critical theory and expanded through feminist, postcolonial, and race-critical traditions, it treats the research process itself as a political act.