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On the Social Relations of Research

A Critical Assessment of Institutional Ethnography

Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations. This article explicates some of the shortcomings of IE, so future institutional ethnographers can work with these. I offer a critical assessment of IE, focusing on its ontology of the social and the issue of truncation, the constitutive hermeneutics of interviewing, and the production of possible subjects in data analysis. The promise of IE is its critique of traditional sociology and introduction of ethnographic practice inquiring beyond nominalism into extra-local social relations that, through texts, govern local action. But IE establishes itself in a binary of emancipation versus regulation, so it is less concerned with its necessary complicity in objectification. IE must continue to be a sociology of possibilities, open to its own contradictions and continual reflexive intervention into itself.

Key Words: institutional ethnography • objectification • interviewing • data analysis • reflexivity

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