Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography

This edited volume gathers top scholars from across disciplines, generations, and countries to provide constructive commentary on the theory, methods and practices of institutional ethnography. These contributions explore themes of relevance to institutional ethnographers that are both enduring and newly emerging: how institutional ethnographers can take an expanded view of social institutions, how they might explore the dynamics of ruling relations over time, what results from understanding experience as dialogue (including internal or in-skull dialogue), the significance of “standpoint,” and the opportunities for institutional ethnographers to move beyond texts as they discover and describe social relations.

A key aspect of Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, and one that distinguishes it from others, is the forward-looking orientation of the authors. This perspective allows them to establish bridges between the institutional ethnography that has been developed heretofore and the potential that is looming for such a mode of inquiry into the social. As such, the book is both informative and inspirational.

Paul C. Luken is Associate Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of West Georgia, USA, where he taught graduate-level courses on institutional ethnography (IE). He has helped to draw together IE scholars in multiple contexts, from special issues of journals such as The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, to the co-founding of the Institutional Ethnography Division of the Society for Study of Social Problems and the ISA Working Group on Institutional Ethnography of the International Sociological Association. He is the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).

Suzanne Vaughan is Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, USA, where she taught undergraduate and graduate classes in institutional ethnography. She is a co-founder and past Secretary-Treasurer of the Working Group on Institutional Ethnography of the ISA. She has co-authored numerous journal articles on the institutional ethnography of housing, including in the journals Social Problems and Social Forces, and has co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. She is the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).