Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies

"Extending the writings of Smith and others who have outlined the approach, Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies explicates the key concepts and ideas that researchers have developed over twenty or thirty years of institutional ethnography." -- Marjorie DeVault, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University "This collection will transform how scholars think about, utilize, and analyze texts in ethnographic research and beyond. I can honestly say that I have gained more insight about the 'power' of texts to organize everyday life from this book than from anything else that takes up the institutional ethnographic framework." -- Nancy Naples, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut "Incorporating Texts in Institutional Ethnographies presents a feast of sound, scholarly material that offers practical examples of the many creative and productive ways in which institutional ethnography may be applied." -- Mary Hamilton, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University

Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies presents a selection of essays highlighting the ethnographic investigation of how texts coordinate and organize people’s activities across space and time.

In Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies, Dorothy E. Smith and Susan Marie Turner present a selection of essays highlighting perhaps the single most distinctive feature of the sociological approach known as Institutional Ethnography (IE) – the ethnographic investigation of how texts coordinate and organize people’s activities across space and time. The chapters, written by scholars who are relatively new to IE as well as IE veterans, illustrate the wide variety of ways in which IE investigations can be done, as well as the breadth of topics IE has been used to study.

Both a collection of examples that can be used in teaching and research project design and an excellent introduction to IE methods and techniques, Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies is an essential contribution to the subject.