Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociological method of inquiry. IE was created to explore the social relations that structure people's everyday lives. For the institutional ethnographer, ordinary daily activity becomes the site for an investigation of social organization.
IE was first developed by Dorothy E. Smith

Dorothy E. Smith

Dorothy Edith Smith is a Canadian sociologist with research interests, besides in sociology, in many disciplines including women's studies, psychology, and educational studies, as well as sub-fields of sociology including feminist theory, family studies, and methodology...

 as a Marxist feminist sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

"for women, for people;" and is now used by researchers in social sciences, education, human services and policy research as a method for mapping the translocal relations that coordinate people's activities within institutions.

External links

• What is institutional ethnography?
• Institutional Ethnography – Towards a Productive Sociology. An Interview with Dorothy E. Smith by Karin Widerberg (MS Word document)
• Dorothy E. Smith (Ed.) Institutional Ethnography as Practice reviewed by Kevin Walby, Carleton University
• The Praxis Safety and Accountability Audit: Practicing a "Sociology for the People" by Jane Sadusky, Rhonda Martinson, Kristine Lizdas and Casey McGee
• Institutional etnography in Wikiversity http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Institutional_ethnography