For institutional ethnography

Abstract

In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of institutions, but about the many structures, effects, and identities working through institutions as territorial forces. In spite of recent interest by geographers, the broader literature on institutional ethnography remains under-engaged and under-cited by human geographers. Critical of this lack of engagement, we suggest that it has left a gap in geographical research on institutions. Our aim is to analyze and advance existing scholarship and offer this article as a tool for geographers thinking about employing IE. We develop a typology, categorized by methodological approach, to highlight ethnographic approaches to institutions undertaken by geographers.

Full text

Article
For institutional ethnography:
Geographical approaches to
institutions and the everyday
Emily Billo
Goucher College, USA
Alison Mountz
Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Abstract
In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional
ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional
ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the
complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to
study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and
associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship
on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on
institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We
argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of insti-
tutions, but about the many structures, effects, and identities working through institutions as territorial
forces. In spite of recent interest by geographers, the broader literature on institutional ethnography remains
under-engaged and under-cited by human geographers. Critical of this lack of engagement, we suggest that it
has left a gap in geographical research on institutions. Our aim is to analyze and advance existing scholarship
and offer this article as a tool for geographers thinking about employing IE. We develop a typology, cate-
gorized by methodological approach, to highlight ethnographic approaches to institutions undertaken by
geographers.
Keywords
ethnography, everyday, institutional ethnography, institutions, studying up
Over the last two decades, geographers have
expressed renewed interest in ethnography
(Herbert, 2000) and institutions (e.g. Anderson,
1991; Herbert, 1997; Schoenberger, 1997; Del
Casino et al., 2000; Hyndman, 2000; Nevins,
2002; Mountz, 2010), and growing interest in
institutional ethnography. Whereas Steve Her-
bert (2000) argued ‘for ethnography’ in this
journal 15 years ago, we argue for institutional
ethnography in geography. Given geographers’
different ways of studying institutions and con-
ducting ethnography, this article parses out
Corresponding author:
Emily Billo, Environmental Studies Program, Goucher
College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road, Baltimore, MD 21204,
USA.
Email: emily.billo@goucher.edu
Progress in Human Geography
1–22
ªThe Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132515572269
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approaches by unpacking how geographers
go about studying institutions, with particular
attention to institutional ethnography.
Institutional ethnography was originally con-
ceptualized and coined by sociologist Dorothy
Smith (1987, 2006), developed subsequently
by other feminist social scientists (e.g. Camp-
bell and Gregor, 2004; Devault, 2006), and
operationalized recently by geographers using
a range of methodological approaches. Institu-
tional ethnography has explicit critical or libera-
tory goals in its exploration of processes of
subordination. Rooted in Marxist and feminist
scholarship, institutional ethnography encom-
passes an integrated approach. Smith (1987)
developed institutional ethnography as an
‘embodied’ feminist approach. Her first analy-
sis began from the example of single mothers
constructed as ‘defective’ within dominant
social narratives, including schooling and health
care. The role of the researcher in this case is to
uncover the ‘ruling relations’ that produce sin-
gle mothers as outside the norm, exposing how
teachers and other institutional actors are bound
up in the production of dominant narratives and
practices. Institutional ethnography brings to
the fore these kinds of ‘problems’ in the system
that discriminate against single mothers and
maps paths to social change.
Institutional ethnography is valuable, useful,
and productive for geographers as it holds poten-
tial to broaden their work on institutions –
including their conceptualization, socio-spatial
relations, effects in daily life – and potential
contributions to social justice movements. In
spite of recent interest among geographers, the
broader literature on institutional ethnography
(often called ‘IE’) remains under-engaged and
under-cited by human geographers. Critical of
this lack of engagement, we suggest that it has
left a gap in geographical research on institu-
tions. Rather than explore the reasons why geo-
graphers have not engaged existing scholarship
more deeply, we explore its potential contribu-
tions to geography, and from geography, in turn,
to the broader field of IE. Our aim is to analyze
and advance existing scholarship and offer this
article as a tool for geographers thinking about
employing IE, which is practiced in a variety
of ways.
We argue that IE holds potential to enrich
geographical research not only about a multi-
tude of kinds of institutions, but about the
many structures, effects, and identities work-
ing through institutions as territorial forces.
We advocate for continued development of
institutional ethnography and find that geo-
graphic scholarship on institutions will be much
enhanced through engagement with scholarship
beyond the discipline. Furthermore, engage-
ment with scholarship beyond the discipline’s
borders will not only enhance scholarship on
institutions, but potentially enhance contribu-
tions of research on institutions to social justice
movements.
We begin with a brief overview of how geo-
graphers have studied institutions over time in
order to situate the recent upswing. We then
explain institutional ethnography in more detail
as an interdisciplinary field developed by fem-
inist scholars from the late 1980s to the present.
In our penultimate section, we examine how
geographers have recently used institutional
ethnography with a typology of approaches. The
section ends with an exploration of avenues to
more sustained, critical engagement with other
social scientists working on and in institutions.
We conclude with a summary of contributions
and new questions.
I Placing IE in geography: A
necessarily incomplete genealogy
of disciplinary engagement with
institutions
Geographers have debated methods with which
to research institutions (Flowerdew, 1982; Del
Casino et al., 2000; Herbert, 2000) and episte-
mological frames through which to understand
them (Philo and Parr, 2000). We aim here to
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situate geographers’ recent interests in institu-
tions within a broader history within the disci-
pline, without necessarily establishing direct
movement or causality between one moment
of institutional engagement and the next (as in
the genealogical tradition). Underlying shifts
in the discipline will be recognizable, including
humanism and managerialism of the 1960s and
1970s, the cultural and institutional turns of the
1980s and 1990s, and the influence of postmo-
dern, poststructural, and feminist thought in the
1990s and 2000s. Geographers have examined
institutions in fits and starts over time, often
lacking the history of disciplinary engagement
and contemporary scholarship on institutions
thriving in other disciplines (e.g. Iskander,
2010; Rodriguez, 2010). The result is a frag-
mented history of engagement.
Our review begins in the 1960s and 1970s,
when geographers studying institutions were
largely managerialists who, influenced by beha-
vioralist geographers, tended to critique the idea
of the institution as monolith and analyze the
role of different government institutions, their
effects on cities and populations, and their geo-
graphical patterns (Pahl, 1977; Flowerdew,
1982; Ley, 1983; Kariya, 1993; Philo and Parr,
2000: 515).
Humanist geographers challenged the work of
managerialists, examining how managers shape
social realities through the internal cultures of
organizations. Ley, for example, contested a
Weberian approach that conceptualized institu-
tions as efficient and rational bodies with ‘perfect
access to information’ (1983: 220). He observed
a ‘lack of everyday empirical analysis’ (Ley,
1983: 220). This dearth of empirical evidence
and the failure to examine quotidian practices are
recurring themes in geographers’ approaches to
institutions. Such an inductive approach would
pay more attention to the everyday contexts out
of which organizational actions emerge and to
the meanings of events to organizational mem-
bers who lie behind their initiatives and
responses (Ley, 1983: 225). As precursor to
contemporary forms of institutional ethnogra-
phy, Ley (1983) explored internal subcultures
of urban institutions and the rise of organiza-
tional consciousness that accompanied explosive
growth in institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. He
critiqued the ‘pure’ or ‘total’ organization of
Weber and of Goffman (1961), analyzing instead
how distinctly and unevenly institutions operated
on the ground (see also Kariya, 1993).
Geographical analyses of institutions have
shifted between macro-theoretical structures to
micro-level theories. Some approached them
at finer scales, focusing on spatial arrangements
within institutions (Philo and Parr, 2000: 514).
Others deemed this approach a ‘middle way’;
following Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory
and associated debates about structure and
agency in the 1980s and 1990s, institutions
offered an ‘interim’ level of social systems,
or the social practices that regulate daily life.
This meso-level approach proved significant
among economic geographers who responded
to the broader institutional turn within geogra-
phy with an understanding that economic deci-
sions were rooted in social institutions (Martin,
2000; Jessop, 2001).
Differing epistemological approaches con-
tribute significantly to how institutions and
organizations are defined and studied methodo-
logically.
1
Del Casino and co-authors (2000)
outline three frameworks for analysis: spatial
science, critical realism, and poststructuralism.
They argue that spatial scientists tend to believe
that social relations can readily and literally be
mapped onto the landscape through rules and
patterns that govern and explain human beha-
vior. Critical realists similarly believe in the
material realities and effects of institutions. In
contrast, poststructuralists tend to look beneath
the surface to understand the underlying condi-
tions, social relations and discourses that brought
such material relations into existence.
Drawing on Foucault (1970, 1995, 1997) and
exemplified by Gibson-Graham (1996), a con-
structivist approach focuses on discourses, such
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as economy, society, and politics, ‘that bring
forth objects and events and determine their
relationship to one another’ (Del Casino et al.,
2000: 526). In this framework, institutions do
not emerge out of preexisting conditions, but are
produced and discursively constructed as enti-
ties with particular social significance and sub-
jectivities (Del Casino et al., 2000). In the
Foucauldian tradition, scholars mapped pro-
cesses of deinstitutionalization and the entrance
of mechanisms of social regulation into the
realm of the social body. This approach under-
stands subjectivity to be constituted through
webs of legal, medical, and social relationships
through which power shifts, operating in more
dispersed, topological fashion (Martin and
Secor, 2014) and highlighting the relationship
between social and spatial relations. Constructi-
vism fueled development of new approaches to
the state and other institutions that grew more
concerned with discourse and representation
(e.g. Olsson, 1974; Jackson, 1989; Anderson,
1991; Driver, 1991) and critiqued spatially
fixed and bounded notions of institutions. Con-
structivists understood institutions as actively
produced through daily social contexts.
Rather than as a repressive, autonomous
body that affects social relations, poststructural-
ists conceptualize institutions as themselves
social constructions able to produce knowledge
and identities. This approach – influenced by
Foucauldian understandings of power and dis-
course and actor network theory, among other
ideas – understands institutional powers and
effects as dispersed, embedded, and entangled,
with more permeable boundaries dividing what
and who lies within and beyond the institution
(Rutherford, 2007) and tends to focus on opera-
tions beyond the architecture of the institution,
such as subjectivity formation and daily life
(Ashutosh, 2010). This approach entails looking
at institutions as sites where employees enact
policies across time and space, where the
everyday relations among those theoretically
conceived of as ‘outside’ bleed into daily
institutional life and vice versa. This geogra-
phical imagination of the institution posits
boundaries as fluid in daily practice. Such an
understanding requires a method that holds
quotidian life as its main focus: ethnography.
Ethnography holds potential to address daily
empirical knowledge on institutions and often
reveals the unevenness of institutional practices
and effects. As the study of daily life, ethnogra-
phy has been important to the discipline since
the early days of cultural geography. Duncan
and Duncan (2009) note that Carl Sauer’s
detailed observations of the landscape drawn
from interviews, archives, and observations
would today likely be considered ethnographic.
The method came fully into practice through
humanistic geographers (Ley, 1974) mapping
detailed observation of daily interactions
between individuals and their environment. The
recent surge in ethnography once again exam-
ines the cultural dimensions of daily work of
institutions (e.g. Herbert, 2000; Hyndman,
2000; Mountz, 2010; Belcher and Martin,
2013; Kuus, 2013; Delaney, 2014). Many eth-
nographies can be found among recent doctoral
dissertations, evidence of renewed interest
among a new generation of geographers (Ashu-
tosh, 2010; Hiemstra, 2011; Houston, 2011;
Lindner, 2012; Santiago, 2013; VandeBerg,
2013). Institutional ethnographies have grown
in popularity as one incarnation of this trend
(e.g. Perreault, 2003a, 2003b; King, 2009; Lar-
ner and Laurie, 2010; Billo, 2015).
II What is institutional
ethnography?
Ethnography isthe detailed study of everyday life,
the ethnographer’s tools participant-observation,
fieldnotes, and interviews (Emerson et al.,
1995). Crucially, ethnography involves more than
the conduct of interviews. Participant-observation
and archival analysis enable the ethnographer to
study how people interact and interpret meaning:
‘what people do as well as what they say’
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(Herbert, 2000: 552). This need to observe is cru-
cial to the workings of institutions. While inter-
views lend insight into actors and operations of
institutions, participant-observation, fieldnotes,
and detailed archival study enable spatial analysis
and associated insights into power relations.
Where, for example, are different workers located
within a building and by social location? How are
embodiments and encounters gendered, racia-
lized, classed, and sexualized? The ethnographer
unravels patterns of behavior and interaction,
categories of identification, modes of manage-
ment, exercises in power and interpretation in
everyday life.
Ethnographic approaches to institutions have
been popular since anthropologist Laura Nader
published a seminal piece in 1972 where she
argued that anthropologists ‘study up’ in order
to better understand how institutions structure
daily life. She suggested that through this effort,
anthropologists could expand analyses beyond
those marginalized peoples upon whom they
had built the discipline. She emphasized how
little most people knew about bureaucracies and
organizations that had lasting material effects
on them (1972: 294). She argued that people
should have access to institutions and knowl-
edge about how they function:
A democratic framework implies that citizens
should have access to decision-makers, institu-
tions of government, and so on. This implies that
citizens need to know something about major
institutions, government or otherwise, that affect
their lives. (Nader, 1972: 294).
Institutional ethnography later became a key
method of ‘studying up’. Below, we discuss the
development of the approach by feminist scho-
lars and, subsequently, by geographers.
Dorothy Smith’s conception of institutional
ethnography relies on a dispersed model of the
institution and its effects, with a focus on map-
ping the daily lived ‘relations of ruling’. Smith
studies processes and practices that determine
social relations from standpoints grounded in
the everyday. Her approach to institutional eth-
nography begins with situated experiences of
women in daily life, then explores relations in
which these experiences are embedded: a com-
plex of interactions between individuals, institu-
tions, and society. Smith argues that sociology’s
ways of knowing the world operate within the
framework of dominant institutions that devalue
women, differentially positioned by class,
race, and other axes of difference. Social rela-
tions engender ‘relations of the ruling’ that
guide, control, coordinate and regulate societies.
Smith developed this approach to create ‘a
sociology for women’, to explore how women
are ‘organized and determined by social pro-
cesses’ that extend beyond their immediate
everyday worlds (Smith, 1987: 152). For DeVault
(2006: 295), ‘ruling relations’ function not simply
as ‘heuristic device’, but closely connect the
contemporary everyday with historic, capitalist
relations that privilege certain understandings
of motherhood and women over others. These
relations are represented visually in feminist
geographer Isabel Dyck’s (1988) diagram in
Figure 1.
In feminist approaches to institutional ethno-
graphy, these processes are constructions of
‘text-based methodologies and practices of for-
mal organization’ (Smith, 1987: 152–3; 2006).
Figure 1. Isabel Dyck’s (1988) p. 131 adaptation of
Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography. Repro-
duced with kind permission of the author.
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Methods include interviews, participant-
observation, and textual analysis. The interview
process includes not just a focus on the ‘subjec-
tive state’ of the interviewee, but a means to
move onto next steps in an ongoing process of
inquiry (DeVault and McCoy, 2002). The
researcher must identify the key ‘problematic’
before moving to the next stage of analysis.
Interviews prove insufficient to address ‘core
power issues that impede social change’ (Winkel-
man and Halifax, 2007: 132). Therefore, institu-
tional ethnography also often involves archival
work, textual analysis, or recollection, as deter-
mined by the investigation (Smith, 1987).
In this tradition, analysis emerges deduc-
tively from empirical observations attentive to
the role of policy documents such as medical
charts and plans as key organizing sites. IE is
designed to ‘reveal the organizing power of
texts’ in order to link local and extralocal activ-
ities (DeVault, 2006: 295). Texts allow the
researcher to ‘reach beyond the locally observa-
ble and discoverable into the translocal social
relations and organization that permeate and
control the local’ (Smith, 2006: 65).
Smith designed IE to facilitate collabo-
ration among researchers (DeVault, 2006). The
approach is considered an ongoing, evolving
practice, rather than a clearly demarcated or
completed project; the practice grows through
networking, relationships, and group meetings
among feminist scholars. The field has expanded
beyond sociology, extending into other disci-
plines with both professional and scholarly appli-
cations (Campbell and Gregor, 2004; DeVault,
2008), the ideas especially influential in nursing
(Winkelman and Halifax, 2007), social work,
and education (DeVault, 2006).
An institutional ethnography begins with
identification of an experience, followed by not-
ing the institutional processes that produce the
experience, and then investigation of processes
identified (Dyck, 1997; DeVault and McCoy,
2002). Dyck (1988) exemplifies this approach
in her adaptation in Figure 1. She explains in a
subsequent publication how Smith’s conceptua-
lization of institutional ethnography framed
research with immigrant women: ‘we consid-
ered the way women talked of their experiences
as a starting point to discovering the social rela-
tions organizing their day-to-day lives’ (1997:
189). What emerged out of these studies were
complex and contextual understandings of iden-
tity, gendered and racialized subjectivities, and
‘more nuanced accounts of relations of oppres-
sion’ (Dyck, 1997: 198).
In their didactic text Mapping Social Rela-
tions, Campbell and Gregor (2004) show how
the approach is rooted in feminist praxis and a
politics of location, committing researchers to
begin from their own socioeconomic locations
and experiences. From there, researchers endea-
vor to address ‘problematics’ and focus on ‘puz-
zles emerging in everyday life’ (2004: 7). IE
does not set out to develop generalized theory,
but rather to explicate ‘experiential data’
(Campbell and Gregor, 2004: 8). Campbell and
Gregor explain frequently how IE is distinct
from ‘conventional research’ in its requirement
that the researcher be ‘a knower located in the
everyday world and find meaning there, in con-
trast to reliance on library research and the
application of theories’ (2004: 11). Winkelman
and Halifax (2007) distinguish between IE and
‘conventional ethnography’ by suggesting that
IE takes both subjective and objective views
of social relations, whereas conventional ethno-
graphy focuses more on participants’ or insi-
ders’ views (Winkelman and Halifax, 2007).
2
As such, the approach is consistent with the poli-
tics of location, positionality, and self-reflexivity
explored by feminist geographers (Katz, 1996;
Mullings, 1999; Pratt, 2000; Moss, 2002).
Scholars in this tradition collaborate, engage
with each other’s work to build upon previous
work and advance the field. Building on this
understanding and operationalization of IE, oth-
ers have focused on neoliberalism and post-
Fordist restructuring as an extension of Smith’s
work (see Naples, 1997). Neoliberalism is
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analyzed as ‘meta-discourse’ that determines
particular institutional relationships, making
way for other IE studies to focus on the ‘intellec-
tual institutions’ that develop the meta-discourses
(DeVault, 2006). Ultimately, scholars doing IE
connect through their scholarship with an ontolo-
gical commitment to examining ‘ruling relations’
at work in historically-specific activities. Indi-
vidual studies build toward meta-discourses
that cross social arenas and create spaces for
new discourses and political projects to emerge
(DeVault, 2006).
While conceptually inspiring, we note two
shortcomings that make space for geographical
contributions to IE. First, IE produces somewhat
aspatial understandings of institutions. The use of
the term mapping in this approach is a figure of
speech. Smith endeavors to write for the masses
in ways that should bereadily accessible as a map
would be (Campbell and Gregor, 2004: 9). Map-
ping itself and spatial analysis more broadly
remain largely absent from the approach. While
deeply rooted in the everyday and feminist epis-
temology, the approach lacks spatial analysis of
the institutional geographies and their effects.
The method of IE does not place as much empha-
sis on differentiation between different spaces of
the institution. As a result, the institution remains
flat, leaving room for more complex analyses of
the spaces of institutional productions of power.
Second, IE is conceptually problematic in its
quest for a ‘meta-narrative’ that risks losing sight
of the messiness of institutional relationships in
everyday contexts.
In contrast, geographical approaches to IE can
and do account for the spatial differentiation by
locating marginal spaces and spaces of exception,
for example, within, through, and beyond the
institution. Geographers often examine institu-
tions as structures that influence society: asylums
and hospitals, for example, seek to control and
regulate, restrain or treat human minds and bodies
(Philo and Parr, 2000:514). Philo and Parr (2000:
515) argue that the geography of institutions and
their relative location to people, land uses, and
resources contribute to understanding social and
spatial relationships that can challenge this disci-
plinary process. Institutional analyses address
daily happenings within and between institutions
and their relationships to larger economic, politi-
cal and cultural processes (Philo and Parr, 2000:
514–15).
Methodologically, institutional ethnography
enables location of the institution in the spatial
relationships of multi-scalareverydayinteractions
to avoid characterizing itasa‘repressiveautono-
mous body that affects social relations’ (Mountz,
2010: xxiv). Ethnographic analysis can point to
the ‘frustrations, subversions and networks’
amongst various actors, contributing to the ‘break-
ing points theorized as an institutional arrange-
ment of social practices’ (Mountz, 2010: xxv).
Ethnography and attention tothespatialrelation-
ships in these processes can link the particular his-
tories of places with ongoing and overlapping
processes of claims to territory and sovereignty.
Geographers’ ethnographies can document
and produce more geographically textured
understandings of institutions. In Herbert’s
(1997) ethnography of local policing carried out
by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD),
for example, the method of conducting ride-
alongs with officers draws into relief individual
officers’ interpretations and productions of ter-
ritoriality in local neighborhoods. His approach
also highlights the nuances and intimacies of
boundaries drawn between private domestic and
public policing spheres.
Social scientists ‘study up’ by researching
institutions of all kinds. Critical ethnography
enables an approach to the state as ‘a set of social
practices’ (Painter, 1995: 34) and diverse institu-
tional actors exercising agency through quotidian
bureaucratic arrangements (e.g. Herbert, 1997).
Ethnographies of the state are another recent
example emerging among geographers (Mountz,
2007, 2010; Houston, 2011) and other scholars
(Nelson, 1999; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002;
Sharma and Gupta, 2006; Iskander, 2010; Rodri-
guez, 2010). Hansen and Stepputat (2001)
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advocated localized, ethnographic approaches to
the state centered in the field and relying heavily
on participant-observation (e.g. Herbert, 1997).
As Timothy Mitchell (2002) suggested, analysis
of disciplinary power must occur at ‘the level of
detail’, or the scale of the everyday. Related
developments are anthropology of bureaucracy
(Heyman, 1995; Gupta, 1995), ethnographies of
modernity (Englund and Leach, 2000), globaliza-
tion (Burawoy et al., 2000), neoliberalism
(Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2002), and events (Brosius
and Campbell, 2010).
Institutional ethnography can address the pro-
duction of institutions and subjectivities in partic-
ular places and moments that become imbued
with meaning. Institutions provide an impor-
tant and necessary entry point into boundary-
making, categorization, and subjectivity-making
(Anderson, 1991, Ashutosh, 2010). To explore
these possibilities more deeply, we examine
recent work in geography characterized by
authors as institutional ethnography. We also
note, though, the significant omission of engage-
ment with work by Smith and other IE scholars
among some geographers doing institutional
ethnography.
III How geographers have
conducted institutional
ethnography
This review provides a foundation for more
cross-referencing and fuller engagement, offer-
ing potential to develop and expand ethno-
graphic approaches to institutions within the
discipline. In the first part of this section we
explore studies by geographers who explicitly
identify their own work as institutional ethno-
graphy, beginning with the earliest such refer-
ences that we could find. Our findings are
based on key term searches for ‘institutional
ethnography’ and ‘geography’ in Google scho-
lar, WorldCat dissertations database, and for
‘institutional ethnography’ in the following
journals: Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, Progress in Human Geography,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geogra-
phers, The Canadian Geographer, Area, and The
Professional Geographer. We include scholar-
ship by anyone who framed writing as institu-
tional ethnography and was either housed in a
geography department, publishing in a geography
journal, or trained as a geographer. Additionally,
we presented the work at a national conference,
workshopped the paper with graduate students
in a large geography department in North Amer-
ica, and asked 15 additional geographersworking
in related fields to provide feedback on this paper
and apprise us of any omissions.
In this section, we track uses of the term insti-
tutional ethnography by geographers (listed in
Table 1), and then explain and illustrate a typol-
ogy of ethnographic approaches to institutions
more broadly (located in Table 2). Table 1
shows geographical scholarship where authors
explicitly frame research as institutional ethnogra-
phy. We note the specific methods (interviews,
participant-observation, andtextualanalysis)used
in each study. In every case, interviews proved
central, but only half used all three methods.
As a study of daily life, we suggest that ethno-
graphy must involve more than interviews, or
what participants say, as Herbert (2000) notes.
We ask what makes these studies ethnographic
if, in some cases, everyday life in the institution
is overlooked?
The earliest use of the term institutional eth-
nography that we could find was by feminist
geographer Isabel Dyck (1988, 1997), followed
by Jennifer Hyndman (1996, 2000). Both
applied Smith’s approach to governmental and
supra-governmental organizations. Both scho-
lars began from experience, in Hyndman’s case
prior employment with the agency studied. They
locate the institution in daily life by following the
quotidian experiences of people and policies.
Dyck’s (1988, 1997) work in health geography
tracked health-related institutions through peo-
ple’s daily encounters, and she also studied the
experiences of immigrant women. Hyndman
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(1996, 2000) researched the practices and
effects of the United Nations High Commis-
sioner for Refugees’ management of refugee
camps in Kenya. She merges political economy
with feminist analysis to understand how donor
states and governments hosting refugees work
through the organization across sites and scales
to ultimately manage bodies, subjectivities,
and resources on the ground.
The next usage of the term institutional eth-
nography occurs among geographers doing
work related to environmental and develop-
ment agencies (Perreault 2003a, 2003b; King,
2009; Larner and Laurie, 2010; Wolford,
2010a). Beginning less often with personal
experience, this scholarship attends closely to
the movement of ideas, discourses and policies
about development, beginning within and ema-
nating outward from institutions and often
focused on the role of elites within institutions.
King (2009) suggests that institutional ethno-
graphy, development ethnography, and network
ethnography are interchangeable terms, linked
by their ‘concern with penetrating organizations
and social networks to understand how particular
discourses and policies are created’ (King, 2009:
409). Scholars working in the field of environ-
ment and development (cf. Watts, 2001, 2002;
Perreault, 2003a, 2003b; Wainwright, 2008;
King, 2009) have asked how ideas about develop-
ment become institutionalized, which gain cur-
rency in ‘battlefields over knowledge’ such as
the World Bank (Bebbington et al., 2004), where
and how conflict transpires and consent is pro-
duced, sometimes exploring the internal
dynamics of large development institutions (Hart,
2004). In these studies, the researcher usually
conducts interviews with or analyzes discussions
of those on the inside (Perreault, 2003a, 2003b;
Bebbington et al., 2004; Goldman, 2004, 2005;
King, 2009; Wolford, 2010a).
Whereas Table 1 includes only those who
frame their own work as IE, Table 2 broadens
the analysis to include recent ethnographic
approaches to institutions undertaken by geo-
graphers, whether explicitly labeled ‘institu-
tional ethnography’ or not. We designed a
typology to categorize these studies by metho-
dological approach in order to discern different
ethnographic approaches to institutions, as
Table 1. Scholarship characterized by geographers as institutional ethnography.
Year, General topic (citation)
Participant-
observation Interviews
Archival or
textual
1997 Health care
(Dyck 1988, 1997)
ppp
2000 UN management of refugee camps
(Hyndman 1996, 2000)
pp
2003 Indigenous organizations
(Perreault, 2003a)
ppp
2007 Federal immigration bureaucracy (Mountz 2007,
2010)
ppp
2009 Conservation organizations
(King 2009)
ppp
2010 Policy development
(Larner and Laurie 2010)
pp
2012 Corporate social responsibility (Billo 2012, 2015) pp
Disaster management (Grove 2013) pp
2013 UN agency fighting piracy
(VandeBerg 2013, Gilmer 2014)
6
pp
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well as some associated insights and shortcom-
ings. Our typology notes distinctions in meth-
ods used (participant-observation, interviews,
textual and discourse analysis), and the spatial
dimensions of each approach.
1. A typology of approaches to institutions
We delineate five ethnographic approaches to
institutions in our typology. The first,
‘following’, refers to the tendency of res-
earchers to follow institutional actors in their
daily work. This following relies heavily on
participant-observation to document power
relations at a microscale, such as movements
into and out of the material structure of the insti-
tution, and along territories constructed by insti-
tutional actors, such as neighborhoods, refugee
camps, and border crossings. As noted earlier,
Herbert’s (1997) ethnography with the LAPD
Table 2. Typology of approaches to institutional ethnography within geography.
7
Methodological
approach
Types of
institutions
studied
Geographical
conceptualization
of the institution Authors
8
1. Following Following actors,
participant-
observation,
interviews
Enforcement
agencies, CSR,
health and
humanitarian
agencies
Transnational,
translocal,
institution that
produces
territoriality,
people who cross
thresholds
Herbert (1997, 2000),
Hyndman (2000),
Nevins (2002), Larner
and Laurie (2010),
Wolford (2010b),
Moran et al. (2012,
2013), Billo (2012, 2015)
2. Time on the
inside
Participant-
observation,
interviews
inside the
institution (a
specific place)
Asylums,
bureaucracies
More attention to
the rhythms of
interior
institutions
spaces, observing
roles and
interactions
Kariya (1993), Hyndman
(1996, 2000), Parr
(2000), Mountz (2010),
Houston (2011), Moran,
Gill, and Conlon (2013),
Vandeburg (2013),
Gilman (2014)
3. Getting at the
inside:
interviews
with
organizational
actors
Interviews,
discourse
analysis
Development,
governmental
and non-
governmental
agencies
Interviews may take
place inside or
outside the
institution
Perreault (2003a, 2003b),
Bebbington et al. (2004),
King (2009), Peck and
Theodore (2010),
Wolford (2010a),
Houston (2011), Grove
(2013)
4. Influencing life
on the outside
Participant-
observation and
interviews,
textual analysis
from outside of
the institution
Governmental
and non-
governmental
agencies
Constituted by
people once
inside, now on
the outside
Dyck (1988, 1997),
Hiemstra (2011),
Bhungalia (2013),
Moran, Piacentini, and
Pallot (2013)
5. Event
ethnography
Short-term
participant-
observation of
key events
Development,
environmental
events where
policy is
developed
Fleeting temporal
and spatial
dimensions
Brosius and Campbell
(2010), Corson and
McDonald (2012),
Suarez and Corson
(2013)
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involved riding with police officers to under-
stand how constructions of space and renderings
of the boundaries of neighborhoods enacted vio-
lence on residents. Like Herbert, Nevins (2002)
did ride-alongs with US border patrol along the
Mexico-US border to understand how readings
of the landscape and daily transgressions therein
enabled authorities to enact racialized violence
that built on historical dispossession in the
region. Although Herbert, Nevins, and others
(e.g. Hiemstra, 2011; Bhungalia, 2013) do not
label their work institutional ethnography, we
find these to be contemporary and ethnographi-
cally rich accounts of institutions located along
borders and carrying out bordering processes
beyond office walls. Other geographers have con-
ducted research thatwe find to be important to the
development of ethnography in the discipline, if
not labeled as institutional ethnography, includ-
ing Anderson’s (1991) and Houston’s (2011)
work on city government and Schuurman’s
(2008) innovative database ethnographies.
The second approach, ‘time on the inside’,
overlaps with the first, but has the researcher
placing more emphasis on dwelling in the
offices of the institution, and particularly in
the bureaucracy. Whereas Herbert (1997) and
Nevins (2002) spent more time in the field
following actors in their work outside of the
office (with occasional visits to the field beyond
office), for example, Mountz (2010) and Vande-
Berg (2013) spent more time studying daily
work within bureaucratic offices of federal and
UN agencies (with occasional visits to beyond).
Importantly, both of these first two categories
involved participant-observation, which lent
insights into the daily life of institutional spaces,
whether in the office or the field. While time on
the inside reveals much about the operation of
power within the institution, less time is gener-
ally spent beyond the institution looking at insti-
tutional effects. This may relate to the topic
itself, such as the difficulty of pursuing people
involved in piracy (VandeBerg, 2013) or human
smuggling at sea (Mountz, 2010).
As an illustrative example, we explore Gil-
mer’s (2014) work in greater depth.
3
Gilmer
worked for the UN agency created to combat
piracy in and around Somalia. Like previous
scholarship on agencies that regulate mobility
(Herbert, 1997; Hyndman, 2000), Gilmer makes
extensive use of participant-observation. Hired
by the agency to design and implement a public
campaign to assist in this fight, Gilmer builds on
her insider perspective to undertake a critical
ethnography of the agency and its construction
of pirates and piracy. She finds that many of the
initiatives fail to thwart piracy, instead lining
the coffers of development workers who them-
selves become the lucrative subjects of securiti-
zation as they compete for funding and become
what she calls ‘piratized’ in the process. By
‘following’ and ‘spending time on the inside’,
Gilmer’s analysis addresses distinct social
locations of those who work across the hierar-
chy of the organization, with English-speaking
employees from countries of the Global North
performing the higher skilled and higher paid
jobs, for example. She is also able to observe the
minutiae of daily work, the power struggles
over decisions made within the office and the
corruption encountered on her trips into Soma-
lia and island prisons where people arrested for
piracy are held and interviewed.
One of the challenges of this approach involves
the intimate entanglements that emerge through
friendship and working ethnographic relation-
ships in which researchers become embroiled,
and the inevitable betrayal that ensues (Stacey,
1988; Visweswaran, 1994; Mountz, 2007). Her-
bert (2000) writes about the emotional and
physical effects of participant-observation that
may involve witnessing violence or discrimina-
tory behavior or omitting information from the
analysis. Such violence may be another reason
why those who spend more time on the inside
are sometimes less able to gain access to those
who are biopolitically managed by institutions.
The third category, ‘getting at the inside:
interviews with organizational actors’, is
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perhaps the most common approach among geo-
graphers identifying their work as ‘institutional
ethnography’ over the last ten years. This
approach relies less on participant-observation,
and more heavily on analysis of interviews and
documents to access the institutional structure,
sometimes characterized as a ‘black box’ (Beb-
bington et al., 2004: 37). In these studies, the
researcher is usually located outside of the insti-
tution and accesses information about the institu-
tion by conducting interviews and corresponding
with institutional actors or accessing discourses
of those on the inside through reports and publi-
cations (Perreault, 2003a, 2003b; Goldman,
2004, 2005; King, 2009; Wolford, 2010a).
4
Analysis may also examine how institutional
discourses travel into the world beyond the
institution (Bebbington et al., 2004). These
studies have tended to adopt more bounded
notions of the institution with more clearly
defined populations, policies, and cultures
(e.g. Goldman, 2004; 2005; Lewis and Mosse,
2006; King, 2009) and have drawn on discourse
and debates among elites (e.g. Bebbington
et al., 2004) to understand how institutions and
individual actors within them shape develop-
ment (e.g. Goldman 2004, 2005).
Perreault (2003a, 2003b), for example, draws
on interviews with key informants to examine
how ethnicity, territory, and identity intersect
in an indigenous Kichwa organization in Ecua-
dor, producing a discourse through which indi-
genous peoples participate in development
processes. His analysis focuses on the ways in
which indigenous organizations ‘resist, refract,
and at times reproduce dominant narratives of
development, modernization, and citizenship’
(Perreault, 2003a: 586). Perreault (2003a: 602)
aims to uncover the organization’s political stra-
tegies to contest and negotiate processes of
development and ‘social transformation’. King
(2009) analyzes the centrality of a neoliberal
commercialization discourse in a South African
conservation organization, while Goldman
(2004, 2005) focuses on the production of the
World Bank’s ‘authoritative green knowledge’.
These studies are linked by their ‘liberatory
potential’ in negotiation of development pro-
cesses (Perreault, 2003a: 603), but limited in
their articulation of the daily operation of insti-
tutions and the social locations or embodiment
of those who do (and do not) inhabit them.
While acknowledging the partiality of their
findings, these studies produce disembodied
institutions, rather than what the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz (1973) famously called ‘thick
description’ of daily life of and in the institution.
While not working under the rubric of institu-
tional ethnography, Bebbington and co-authors
(Bebbington et al., 2004, 2006) study discursive
debates over the concept of social capital tran-
spiring in the World Bank. They explore the
relationship between the institution’s inside
and out, arguing ‘that ‘‘getting inside’’ develop-
ment institutions is important for understanding
how and why certain discourses emanate from
them, for interpreting the significance of these
discourses, and for understanding the indetermi-
nate relationship between discourse and practice’
(Bebbington et al., 2004: 34). Through discourse
analysis of publications and personal communi-
cations, the authors find:
different arenas in which the contests are waged:
internally among its staff (the battlefield we focus
on here); externally with non-Bank actors and
those encountered in the course of implementing
projects; and – more intriguingly – cross-border
battles in which different sub-communities within
the Bank are linked to different communities out-
side the Bank, and where the battles engage larger
communities whose memberships transcend insti-
tutional boundaries. (Bebbington et al., 2004: 38)
In this approach, the embodiment and positional-
ity of researchers is not the starting point. Instead,
researchers examine the discourses and players at
work within a powerful institution and struggles
over knowledge production among them. They
accomplish this through examination of texts
rather than the social locations of their authors.
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These studies did not involve participant-
observation in the form of following actors or
spending time on the inside, but tended to involve
the conduct of interviews with employees both
within and beyond institutional spaces. As Kuus
(2013) argues, this limitation may reflect the chal-
lenge of actually conducting ethnographic study
of policy issues.
5
Yet data drawn from interviews
without the insights of participant-observation
limit the claims a study can make to understand
and interpret daily life in Geertz’s (1973) terms:
detailed-oriented ‘thick description’.
In contrast, anthropologist Diane Nelson
(1999) makes related arguments in her ‘ethno-
graphy of the state’, studying representations
of indigenous and state identities in Guatemala
with a distinct approach. She posits the state is
imagined and lived through multiple ‘bodies
politic’ of Mayan women, rooted in ‘manipula-
tion and violence’ tied to indigenous rights and
nation-building. She operates not only within a
distinct discipline, but with a distinct set of
epistemological frameworks from development
ethnographies: feminist, postmodern, and post-
structural approaches. The result is a more dis-
persed understanding of institutions and their
embeddedness in daily life. Sawyer (2001,
2004), also an anthropologist, examines the daily
social and environmental consequences of
increased demand for oil via indigenous mobili-
zations in Ecuador. She employs participant-
observation and interviews to explore social
relationships between an indigenous organiza-
tion, multinational oil companies, and the state
that produce ‘indigenous opposition to economic
globalization in its neoliberal guise’ (Sawyer,
2004: 7). She focuses specifically on the power
inequalities that emerge in this ‘terrain of strug-
gle’ over ‘identities, territories, and relations’
as indigenous peoples sought recognition and
rights in a plurinational Ecuadorian state (2004:
222). In these analyses, people themselves
embody, inhabit, and shape institutional struc-
tures at the same time that they are shaped by
them.
While some geographers engage in discourse
and ideas on the inside, others use ethnography
to understand how institutions influence life on
the outside. The fourth and fifth categories,
‘influencing life on the outside’ and ‘event eth-
nography’, involve even more distance from the
physical spaces of the institution, deriving
material from purviews outside of institutional
spaces, either through interviews, archives, or
observations that provided more limited
glimpses and allow for less triangulation than
sustained time on the inside. Although they do
not characterize their work as institutional eth-
nography, for example, both Hiemstra (2011)
and Bhungalia (2013) conducted ethnographic
research on US agencies: detention and deporta-
tion systems run by the Department of Home-
land Security and the work of US AID in
Palestine, respectively. Their ethnographies
were not in the headquarters in countries where
these institutions are based, but rather in the
remote locations where the effects of their insti-
tutional policies and practices were felt power-
fully. Hiemstra worked with deportees and
their families in Ecuador to learn about deten-
tion in and deportation from the United States.
Bhungalia worked in Palestine with organiza-
tional actors securing funding from US AID.
The result is a decentralized landscape of the
institution – what some would call a govern-
mentality approach (Foucault, 1991) or ‘state
effects’ (Mitchell, 2002) – with effects that
extend into daily life well beyond the borders
of the institution or that reverberate transna-
tionally (Hiemstra, 2011; Bhungalia, 2013).
Research in the margins holds potential to shift
understandings of power in and of hegemonic
institutions that advance imperialism and con-
finement of populations.
While these more spatially removed
approaches may not come as close to the daily
rhythms of life inside the institution, including
institutional oppression, they also result, we
suggest, in a more geographically dispersed
topography of the institutions being studied and
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a rich rendering of the effects of institutions in
the daily lives of those whom they affect. Their
analyses show production of subjectivities of
aid workers in the West Bank and detainees and
deportees in Cuenca, Ecuador, shaped by US-
based national agencies, uncovering mundane
acts of resistance in daily life. Both authors
show the racialized, gendered, and classed
dimensions of institutional effects beyond insti-
tutional walls and national boundaries. An obvi-
ous limitation of working ‘from the outside’ is
the lack of direct observation of the daily oper-
ations of the institution, with reliance instead on
narratives about institutional practices or poli-
cies from aid workers and deportees.
The final category, ‘event ethnographies’,
encompasses a recent development undertaken
by 17 scholars in environmental studies work-
ing collaboratively to do short, intensive periods
of participant-observation to study events such
as conferences and workshops of powerful insti-
tutional meetings (Brosius and Campbell, 2010;
Corson and McDonald, 2012; Suarez and Cor-
son, 2013). This approach draws on ethno-
graphic traditions in development rather than
the field of institutional ethnography. Event eth-
nographies differ from other approaches for
their temporality: rather than pursue the tradi-
tion of long periods of time devoted to under-
standing the daily rhythms and relations in
place, the event ethnography is premised on
short-term, yet important (if fleeting), moments
of coming together.
Similar to Wolford’s (2010a) characteriza-
tion of ethnography of a site, yet differing in
their use of participant-observation, Corson and
MacDonald (2012) reconceptualize the field
through the event by drawing on research at the
UN Convention on Biological Diversity. We
find this approach innovative for the character-
ization of the field as a place that brings together
a number of institutions and actors in one time
and place. The opportunity to see people inter-
act in one setting is important, and yet at present
under-developed in the findings reported – the
potential insights of an ethnographic approach
are not yet fulfilled in this incipient work. The
innovative framing of a new field – the event
as place – is at odds with the lack of description
of that place and those within it. Missing from
these analyses is Geertz’s (1973) ‘thick descrip-
tion’. In the decision to conceptualize the event
as a place, the description of its characteristics,
landscape, feel, or context has not yet been illu-
strated. The authors draw primarily on public
statements made in side events, yet those who
spoke them are not described, located, identified
or embodied. The messy, everyday unfolding of
institutional operations that might be con-
structed from fieldnotes would enhance the
development of event ethnography. Participants
in UN conventions generally agree that much
of the ‘real’ conversation and work happens
before the event, with the short event providing
apublicforumforthestatementofpositions
and agendas. What kind of negotiations occurred
before the more public performances quoted?
Does the event ethnography include participant-
observation in the more mundane, daily lead-up
to the annual coming together? As a result of
the decision to focus temporally and spatially
on the event itself, this approach provides new
insights while missing others.
‘Fast policy transfer’ (Peck and Theodore,
2010) and ‘collaborative event ethnography’ are
part of the upsurge in ethnographic research, but
not necessarily engaged with institutional ethno-
graphy. Peck and Theodore (2010) make brief
reference to institutional ethnography in their
writing (citing Larner and Laurie, 2010, who in
turn cite Goldman, 2005). Yet this scholarship
remains largely disconnected from earlier work
on institutional ethnography by geographers and
others. Still, there are important continuities to
observe. As Delaney notes, contemporary trends
in economic geography are influenced by the
Deleuzian assemblage which ‘offers a frame in
which to examine how institutions and policies
‘‘territorialize’’’ and by actor network theory
with its ‘focus on the act of translation in
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bringing policy and practice networks into coher-
ent structures’ (Delaney, 2014: 19). These
approaches render more dispersed ethnographic
mappings of institutions that could draw from
and advance practices of institutional ethnogra-
phy. They also share thematic interests, such as
advancing understandings of neoliberalism.
Our typology uncovers distinctions in the
methodological approach and epistemology and
ontology of institutions, with spatial differences
tied to ethnographic methods employed by
researchers. We found that studies that either
omit participant-observation as a method or
do not draw on these data in their analyses fail
to observe the influences and embeddedness
of the institution in everyday life. Participant-
observation is attentive to emotion, subjectivity,
power struggles, resistance, and proximity of
the institution. IE is about accessing the every-
day, as is ethnography generally. We still
have much to learn from anthropologists such
as Nelson, who is indiscriminate in engaging
ephemera collected in daily life. Chance
encounters, t-shirt slogans, cartoons, conversa-
tions – all become locations where the institu-
tion, its effects and productive capacity are
readily evident. The result is Clifford Geertz’s
(1973) ‘thick description’ of daily life. This
more textured view of an institution differs from
a more fixed notion of the institution whose pol-
itics, projects, subjects, and discourses are
accessed primarily through interviews – in other
words, the ways that institutional subjects or
employees narrate the institution. The latter
cannot readily account for the sociospatial dif-
ferences in power operating within and across
the daily productions of an institution. Institu-
tional formation and operation across center
and periphery lead to differential outcomes of
discourse and practice, with unequal impacts
and effects. More sustained, critical engage-
ment with heterogeneous and interdisciplinary
approaches to institutional ethnography will
improve understandings of institutions within
and beyond the discipline of geography.
2. Enhancing scholarship on institutions
Here, we explore institutional ethnography from
geographical perspectives. With limited space,
we offer two areas drawn from our own fields
of research to demonstrate how critical engage-
ment across approaches within and beyond the
discipline of geography holds potential to
enhance scholarship on institutions. The two
kinds of institutions we discuss are corporate
social responsibility (CSR) (Billo, 2012, 2015)
and institutions where people are detained (spe-
cifically, detention centers and prisons) (Moran
et al., 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Loyd et al.,
2012; Mitchelson, 2013; Mountz et al., 2013).
Both are sets of institutions that geographers
have shown more interest in of late (Moran
et al., 2012).
CSR programs are the business response to
social and environmental criticism of corporate
operations (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009 ; The Econ-
omist, 2008; Watts, 2005). In Ecuador, these
programs emerged out of state, corporate, and
indigenous relationships, and are designed to
ensure ongoing resource extraction. Mandated
by the Ecuadorian state, CSR programs incorpo-
rate indigenous peoples in local development
projects, such as drinking water systems and
community infrastructure – things the state
might normally provide. Billo’s (2012) research
uncovers the disciplinary techniques of CSR
programs through implementation of corporate
programs for local development (cf. Foucault,
1991). An IE engages the everyday processes
of implementation of CSR programs that can
at once co-opt and legitimate discourses and
practices of indigenous rights to resources
through the material projects and programs of
CSR. The subsequent presence of CSR programs
in everyday interactions produces ambivalent
indigenous subjects; indigenous entanglement
with dominant power structures complicates
notions of resistance and contributes to new
forms of resource governance and development
processes in Ecuador(Billo, 2012, 2015). In turn,
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rather than focus solely on narrowly defined cor-
porate projects labeled CSR, IE seeks to under-
stand the relationships that form within CSR
programs and expand well beyond the local indi-
genous communities, raising questions about
indigenous citizenship and about how the corpo-
rate and philanthropic come together to produce
subjectivities in extractive industries (Billo,
2012).
Scholars have argued that prisons are not
what Goffman (1961) labeled ‘the total institu-
tion’: enclosed facilities that contain everything
and everyone therein (Moran et al., 2013: 110–
12). Rather, they can be conceptualized as more
fluid, ‘transcarceral’ entities (Moran et al.,
2013). Although prisons immobilize and con-
tain those imprisoned, they have surprisingly
permeable boundaries. Many material things
move across prison walls: food, supplies, medi-
cal services, information, capital, paperwork,
statistics, workers, visitors, and detainees them-
selves. This movement proves helpful in study-
ing prisons and detention facilities where people
are held; these are difficult sites for researchers
to access and where researcher access can put
vulnerable populations at further risk. Penal
institutions are therefore highly suited to study
through institutional ethnography in Smith’s
tradition. IE opens the institution to research
in ways that do not necessarily require physical
access. Interviews and participant-observation
may fruitfully be conducted with workers, for-
mer detainees, and visitors such as family,
friends, and lawyers. This opens a broader land-
scape through which to understand the prison.
Focusing on what happens not only within but
across boundaries also fosters research on sensi-
tive topics and vulnerable populations in rela-
tively ‘safe’ ways for those institutionalized.
Conversely, research premised on entry into
prisons would be riskier for participants and
more likely prone to failure should access not
be granted.
Feminist approaches to studying imprison-
ment have fruitfully pursued more dispersed
understandings of the social relations of impri-
sonment with exciting outcomes. Mary Bos-
worth (2005), for example, conducted research
on imprisonment and co-authored findings with
four prisoners who reflected on the experience.
The result is ‘a situated example of, as well as a
call for, dialogue about research across prison
walls’ (2005: 250). The authors aim to destabi-
lize power relations and boundaries between
researcher and researched, ‘make clear the
fundamentally affective nature of qualitative
research’ and show how emotions motivate par-
ticipants in research and, in so doing, that pris-
oners – like researchers – are individuals with
desires and emotions (2005: 251). Bosworth and
co-authors bring to our discussion the alterna-
tive media and kinds of texts that can be part
of IE, such as the role of letters, their potential
to engage a broad emotional register through
their play with time and space beyond and
within the institution (as in the daily nature of
mail call woven into the slow movement of
mail). In so doing, they disrupt boundaries
between inside and outside of prison and
research project, and what counts as personal
and professional interaction. Similarly, Moran
and co-authors (Moran et al., 2013) concep-
tualize Russian prisons as ‘mobile, embodied
and transformative’ transcarceral spaces that
permeate prison walls. By recasting research
as cooperation and intimacy, such approaches
destabilize ownership of research agendas
and outcomes and disrupt masculinist notions
of penetrating institutions, while simultane-
ously reconfiguring geographical understand-
ings of institutions. These approaches have
tended to be feminist, premised on the project
of analyzing women’s experiences (e.g. Dyck,
1997; Bosworth, 2005; Moran et al., 2013).
IV Conclusions
As we have shown in our typology and accom-
panying discussion, geographers have practiced
institutional ethnography in a variety of ways.
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Yet the collective potential for geographers to
deepen development of institutional ethnogra-
phy and contribute to institutional analyses
remains unrealized. Geographers stand to con-
tribute more sophisticated socio-spatial under-
standings of institutions. Content analysis of
references found shows that geographers often
do not reference earlier ethnographic research
on institutions in geography or the vibrant, inter-
disciplinary field of institutional ethnography.
Our typology of institutions will aid in more
direct engagement and discussion of the benefits
and limitations of varied approaches, resulting in
further development of the field. A deepening
and diversity of approaches to institutions can
advance understanding of micro- and macro-
processes, as well as meta-discourses such as
neoliberalism.
We have called for institutional ethnography
and engagement with literature within and
beyond geography. Indeed, pursuing the same
method in distinct contexts illuminates parallels
in the operation of states, capitalism, and the
punitive and productive natures of institutions.
In this context we note subject formation that
emerges through institutions as mediators
between state and subject, at times ‘erasing’ dif-
ference in the name of securing wealth and
membership in the nation-state (cf. Nelson,
2001; Lindner, 2012). Institutional ethnography
offers the possibility to study up to understand
the differential effects of institutions within and
beyond institutional spaces and associated pro-
ductions of subjectivities and material inequal-
ities. IE can function as an approach to look
within, through, and beyond the architecture,
policies, texts, and problematics of the institu-
tion to understand how, why, and for whom.
Practiced in a variety of ways, IE holds potential
to enrich geographical research, both in kinds of
institutions studied and territorial dynamics
rooted in institutional effects, structures, and
identities.
Our research demonstrates that institutions
are not uniform across times and places,
although they often construct discourses and
practices that produce a coherent, monolithic
appearance. Through discussion of research on
prison facilities and CSR programs, we show
that IE can be attentive to where the institu-
tion is produced and in turn produces daily
lives. Further engagement with subjectivity
and intersectionality will deepen understand-
ings of institutional power and help in the break-
ing down of barriers between those confined and
those on the outside. Byattending to gender, race,
ethnicity, sexuality, and class, the approach can
note differences within and among institutional
actors and those affected by institutions. We
argue that this approach is attentive to inequal-
ities, relationships of power, and researchers’
social locations in conceptualizing institutions.
A diversity of approaches will also potentially
result in fewer masculinist constructions of
knowledge predicated on accessing elites.
Our analysis opens a new set of questions yet
unanswered. We are interested to learn more,
for example, about how recent methodological
developments in geography intersect with insti-
tutional ethnography, including fast policy
transfer, event ethnography, actor network
theory, and science and technology studies.
While we have mentioned these approaches
in this text, more work remains to be done
as to their productive intersections and diver-
gence from institutional ethnography as it
has been practiced by geographers and other
social scientists.
We have argued for institutional ethnogra-
phy. Rather than suggest that there is one way
of doing institutional ethnography, our goal has
been to review the range of approaches pursued
by geographers and other scholars and the
potential insights and shortcomings of various
approaches, with the ultimate objective of
broader engagement. Institutions are fundamen-
tally powerful and spatial in nature. As such,
their ethnographic mapping across sites and
scales is essential to advance understandings
of political, economic, and social relations.
Billo and Mountz 17
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to many insightful readers of earlier
drafts of this article who shared feedback and their
own scholarship: Ishan Ashutosh, Mat Coleman,
Isabel Dyck, Roberta Hawkins, Nancy Hiemstra,
Jennifer Hyndman, Vicky Lawson, Keith Lindner,
Jenna Loyd, Jacob Miller, Dominique Moran,
Lawrence Santiago, Nadine Schuurman, Margaret
Walton-Roberts, Richard Wright, and graduate stu-
dents at the School of Geography and Development
at the University of Arizona. This material is based
upon work supported by the National Science Foun-
dation under Award #0847133 (Principal Investiga-
tor: Alison Mountz). The research in Ecuador was
supported by a National Science Foundation Doc-
toral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
(#0825763) and by an Inter-American Foundation
Grassroots Development PhD Fellowship.
Notes
1. Del Casino and co-authors (2000) suggest few dif-
ferences between institutions and organizations, both
sites of a ‘coalescing’ of structural relations that
emerge from innovation or habituation of actors
(2000: 525).
2. This position is not unique to IE, but central to feminist
approaches to ethnography and methods more broadly
(cf. McDowell, 1992; Moss, 2002).
3. VandeBerg changed her name to Gilmer between pub-
lication of her dissertation and book.
4. We note that Wolford (2010b) used participant-
observation extensively in her work with Brazil’s Land-
less People’s Movement (MST). While an ethnography
of a social movement, she does not characterize this
work as institutional ethnography.
5. Kuus (2013: 116) distinguishes further between study
of conceptions of policy in the offices of policymakers
and the effects of those policies in other sites.
6. VandeBerg (2013) creates and analyzes an archive of
some 200 media stories, which are about if not of the
institution she studies.
7. Note that there is overlap across the five approaches
delineated in this typology.
8. Our aim in this figure is to create a typology and pro-
vide examples of scholarship that demonstrate these
categories. We do not claim to represent the fullness
or complexity of what these studies actually do and
find.
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