Search

This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith‘s wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith‘s conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society‘s ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Books like "Plainville," "Street Corner Society," "The Gang," "The Irish Countrymen," and a series of others, were part of a kind of sociology done in the U.S. mainly twenty five to thirty years ago. It's associated with the University of Chicago and also with Harvard. At that time those fellows were trying to build ethnographic studies in a tradition that had been developed largely in England in social anthropology largely by studying tribal societies. But in recent years, anthropologists are again returning to detailed ethnographic work, and the term "ethnographer" which had fallen into considerable disrepute. This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard, that is, not reproduceable, not stating hypotheses, etcetera, the new ethnographic work-which is calling itself things like "ethno-cognitive studies," "ethnocultural studies," "ethno-science" and the like-is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. There are several bases for this renaissance. But the most important one is the development of very strong tools by linguists.

This essay reflects upon a recurrent theme of observation and questioning in the social sciences, the relationship between children and adults. From the point of view of social science practitioners, particularly ethnomethodologists, ethnographers and sociolinguists, who have most recently observed and reported upon child-adult interaction as well as to the scientific community which comprises their audience, it would appear that these observers confront dominant concepts in these fields and, in that sense, produce new ideas. In particular, the notions that children could have a separate culture what is referred to as kids' culture, generationally transmissed by children to other children, that they possess interpretive competence equal to or even greater than that of adults, that they are potentially, when adults avoid judging their behavior narrowly and conventionally, more creative, more honest, in short, in some ways more human than adults, challenge mainstream understandings of the younger members of the society. The elements of this framework represent commonsense convictions about children, which emerge in adult theories and research on them.

Ethnography as a research process is notoriously difficult to articulate. In the anthropological literature, there are descriptions of its mystique, awkward mixtures of detachment and involvement, and efforts to refine elusive concepts like participant observation. Because of its emergent nature, and its emphasis on the apprehension of pattern in activities controlled by others, much of ethnography fits poorly into traditional models of social science. Inference is a word that calls to mind elegant formal systems as Euclidean geometry and first order predicate calculus. Inference can only occur in those systems if small number of rules are followed. Further, rules are guaranteed to work with some truths and the rules of inference, then whatever one winds up, is a truth as well. Further, the incorporation of the concepts into ethnographic work leads to some new concepts of inference and schema. Inference had to do with the need for careful attention to the different traditions that serve as sources for inferences and schemas, those of the ethnographer, informants, and the potential audience of a report may all mix in complicated ways in schema construction. A second had to do with those conventional higher-level schemas that are themes, a traditionally important goal of ethnographic work.