Institutional Ethnography — A Sociology for People

Conventional ethnography aims to describe the culture or practices of a social group in rich, contextual detail, typically staying within a bounded site. Institutional ethnography shares the ethnographic commitment to fieldwork and participant accounts but has a different analytic goal: to trace the institutional organization that coordinates local experience across sites. IE always moves outward from a standpoint to map ruling relations, while conventional ethnography may remain within a single community or setting.

IE was developed within a feminist intellectual tradition and retains its commitment to centering marginalized standpoints, but it is not exclusively a feminist method. It has been applied to standpoints defined by race, class, professional role, disability, and many other social locations. The feminist origin shapes its critical orientation and its insistence on beginning from embodied, particular experience rather than from abstract sociological categories.

A good standpoint is a specific, populated social location where people routinely encounter practical troubles they cannot fully explain from within their own position — troubles that seem to originate elsewhere. The standpoint should be one the researcher can access in depth through interviews and, ideally, observation. It is not a theoretical category but a real group of people doing real work within an institutional context.

Yes. Textual analysis is a defining feature of IE, not an optional add-on. Documents, forms, policies, electronic records, and other texts are treated as the primary carriers of institutional coordination — the means by which ruling relations are activated in local settings. An IE study that collects only interviews without examining the texts that organize participants' work has not completed the method.

IE does not specify a minimum sample size in the way that some other qualitative traditions do. The criterion is adequacy: the researcher must interview and observe enough people at enough institutional positions to trace the full work process from the original standpoint outward through the coordinating apparatus. In practice this typically means 10–40 participants spanning multiple institutional levels and sites, though complex studies may involve more.