Using Institutional Ethnography to research political work, institutions, and inequalities

This paper contributes to theoretical and methodological discussions over how to investigate political work, institutions, and inequalities. I show how Institutional Ethnography (IE), a ‘feminist research strategy’ developed by Dorothy Smith, provides multiple possibilities for researchers. IE goes beyond just a methodology and is distinct from traditional ethnographies of institutions; it constitutes a complete research approach that aims to explain how people’s everyday lives are caught up with institutional and global processes. IE combines a feminist ‘ontology of the social’ and a specific methodological that focusses on mapping institutional processes and the organising capacity of texts and talk. I show how IE’s distinctive features enable researchers to navigate some of the methodological issues associated with doing traditional ethnography in in (elite) political spaces. As a complete ‘feminist research strategy’, IE can also support feminist institutionalists can further engage with the complexities of intersecting gendered, racialised, colonial, classed and sexualised governance. In my research on the inequalities in English local politics, I conceptualised formal politics as a form of (gendered, classed and raced) work and political institutions as workplaces (see also Charles 2014; Charles and Jones 2013; Jones, Charles, and Davies 2009; C. Miller 2021). This built on Dorothy Smith’s own generous conceptualisation of work as, ‘anything done by people that takes time and effort, that they mean to do, that is done under definite conditions and with whatever means and tools, and that they may have to think about. It means much more than what is done on the job’ (Dorothy E. Smith 2005, 151–52). If one understands practising politics as a form of gendered, classed and raced work, it is crucial to use a research strategy that foregrounds gender, race, class and other inequalities as some of the key organising principles in that work. Institutional ethnography is a particularly apposite and useful research strategy for this, not only because it centralises work and what people do, but also because it is an approach that ties feminist ontology, epistemology and methodology together. I argue that Institutional Ethnography (IE) offers an important contribution to the study of political institutions – and not just elite parliamentary spaces, but a range of political spaces across time and space. IE does not linger at the level of the everyday but is committed to how everyday worlds are linked with broader social relations, and its focus on textually mediated institutional processes offers researchers a way to navigate the difficulties associated with accessing elite political spaces via more traditional ethnographic methods. Yet despite these advantages, Smith’s feminist approach (which incorporates IE) is used very little for studying political institutions of any kind. I draw on my own IE in English local politics which examined the inequalities of political work across three English local authorities over a year (2016-2017. In this paper, I tie together some of the methodological and analytical discussions to emerge from this project, to argue for the unique contribution IE can make.