Institutional Ethnography, Theory, and Social Action


Naomi Nichols, Trent University

Many scholars who take up Dorothy Smith’s approach to studies in the social organization of knowledge (often described as institutional ethnography or IE) do so as a means of challenging discrimination and hate, while simultaneously engaging in collective efforts to create new social and political futures (for Canadian examples, see the work of Colin Hastings, Gary Kinsman, Jayne Malenfant, Alexander McLelland, Eric Mykhalovskiy, Susan Turner, and George Smith). IE was designed to ensure sociology is used in service of people outside the academy – particularly those engaged in movement organizing, collective struggle, and solidarity building. But in seeking to create a sociology that is useful to people, Smith conceived of a different engagement with theory and theoretically derived concepts than her contemporaries. While it remains the case that theory elaboration and creation are central aims of much sociological work, Smith encouraged institutional ethnographers to eschew these ordinary epistemic practices. This does not mean an IE’s analytic aims are strictly descriptive nor that IE is atheoretical; rather, instead of using theory to explain social life, institutional ethnographers use theory to bring certain aspects of social life into view and to orient in particular ways to the social and institutional relations that comprise the focus of inquiry. These theoretical practices are often misunderstood by people familiar with other sociological traditions and by emerging IE scholars. In this presentation, I will describe several ways theory is used and remains useful to IE and seek to clarify Dorothy Smith’s reticence, regarding the standard theoretical engagements of her sociological colleagues. The arguments put forward in this talk are first anchored in a close reading of Smith’s own work, as well as personal communications with her. I draw heavily on her engagements with Karl Marx’s work – especially her reading of the German Ideology . Smith’s early scholarship can be read as a critique of sociology and the sociological practices of her (largely white, straight) male mentors and colleagues that comprised the field of sociological research in North America at the time of her early writings (e.g., Smith, 1984; 1987; 1990a; 1990b). Aspects of her critique reflect a re-engagement with Marx’s work, after finding that her own sociological training did not allow her to explain the problems that she experienced in her own life nor those that ordinary people brought to her as a specialist in organizational theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As Smith shared with me during a conversation in 2016, she took what she "had come to understand as Marx’s critiques … essentially of the separation of the concepts from the actualities that they may reflect or originate in. Then the treatment as if the concepts themselves were the determinants in the social process and in the society. I thought that was exactly what sociology was doing, and I thought that you have to find something else to do." The “something else” Smith decided to do was conduct scholarship that revealed and interrogated conceptual practices of power – including the development and use of social theory as a strategy for knowing and ruling social life. But in doing so, she would remain engaged with an extraordinary range of interdisciplinary theories across her career and would, herself, put forward several orienting concepts – such as work, standpoint, and ruling relations (for example). These concepts are not used to name or explain social relations; rather, they serve as heuristics to be used in the field and when one moves from field-based observations and interviews into analytic practices (whether alone in the office or with those for whom findings are hoped to be most pertinent). In IE, analysis seeks to explain how the problems people have experienced and the struggles they face are shaped by institutional, social, and political-economic relations that transcend individual experience and hook us into complexes of social coordination through which societies function. These explanations tend to be ethnographic, rather than theoretical in nature, but they are no less generalizable in this regard; the objects of inquiry are the generalized and generalizing institutional and political-economic relations that also comprise targets for social and political action. In the proposed presentation, I will move from a careful engagement with Smith’s work into an examination of my own use of theory in IE across more than a decade of community-based and participatory research. As I do so, I point to the work of other IE scholars that provided me a model for how to conduct theoretically engaged IE without falling back on the ideological practices that Smith problematizes. In the end, I argue that continued engagement with sociological (and other disciplinary) concepts and theories is essential to the production and evolution of IE scholarship, and we need to do a better job of ensuring those who are new to IE understand how to fruitfully engage with theory in their work, while maintaining a commitment to IE’s ontological, epistemic, and ethical ideals.

This paper will be presented at the following session: