This book explores recent developments in Institutional Ethnography (IE) and offers reflective accounts on how IE is being utilised and understood in social research. IE is a sociological sub-discipline developed by Dorothy E. Smith that seeks to explicate the textual mediation of people’s everyday experiences in their local sites of being. As an approach, IE is growing in significance across the globe, particularly in Canada, USA, Australia and UK.  
This collection includes contributions from those involved in the early development of IE alongside Smith as well as early career researchers, new to the sociology, theory and method of IE. Chapters focus on IE as a sociological theory and qualitative research method; the relationship between data generation and analysis in IE; implications from its findings for policy; and IE as a significant methodological approach. This involves explication of the theoretical, the operationalization of IE, and links between the theoretical and the empirical. It illuminates the relationship between data generation and analysis and includes consideration of its own textual relations of ruling.

In order to explore the distinguishing and developmental feature of institutional ethnography, education scholars assemble a collection of debates and findings of and from an number of institutional ethnographic studies on a variety of disciplinary and international perspectives. Their topics include reflexivity and praxis: the redress of "I" poems in revealing standpoint, using Bourdieu to understand institutional ethnography and the researcher's relation with knowledge generation, community-based and participatory approaches in institutional ethnography, and using institutional ethnography to explore the everyday work of learning mentors in an English state secondary school. -- Annotation ©2018 * (protoview.com) *

James Reid is Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Subsequent to social work practice with children and their families, he taught social work and worked with UNICEF in Central Asia in developing academic infrastructure and practices.  
Lisa Russell is Senior Lecturer in Education and Community Studies at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She has published in the areas of social justice, ethnography and social inclusion, and is author of Education, Work and Social Change: Young People and Marginalization in Post-Industrial Britain.