Institutional ethnography (IE) originated as a feminist alternative to sociologies defining people as the objects of study. Instead, IE explores the social relations that dominate the life of the particular subject in focus.

Simply Institutional Ethnography is written by two pioneers in the field and grounded in decades of ground-breaking work. Dorothy Smith and Alison Griffith lay out the basics of how institutional ethnography proceeds as a sociology. The book introduces the concepts – Discourse, Work, Text – that institutional ethnographers have found to be key ideas used to organize what they learn from the study of people’s experience. Simply Institutional Ethnography builds an ethnography that makes this material visible as coordinated sequences of social relations that reach beyond the particularities of local experience. In explicating the foundations of IE and its principal concepts, Simply Institutional Ethnography reflects on the ways in which the field may move forward.

Dorothy E. Smith is an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria and the author of Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (UTP 1988) and The Conceptual Practices of Power (UTP 1990).

Dorothy E. Smith's profile page

Alison I. Griffith was a professor emerita in the Faculty of Education at York University.

Alison I. Griffith's profile page

“In this slim volume, the authors encapsulate decades of their efforts to create and develop this particularly unique form of sociology and document its conceptual and theoretical refinement along the way. The result is a sophisticated, comprehensive overview that lays out for readers the promise and potential of this approach to studying human lived behavior and the myriad institutions in which such behavior is embedded.”

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"This book serves as a fitting legacy of the work of authors Smith and Griffith, two pioneers in the field of institutional ethnography, both of whom passed away prior to this book's publication. The authors encapsulate decades of their efforts to create and develop this particularly unique form of sociology and document its conceptual and theoretical refinement along the way. The result is a sophisticated, comprehensive overview that, although rather complex at times, nonetheless lays out for readers the promise and potential of this approach to studying human lived behavior an.d the myriad institutions in which such behavior is embedded."

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