ABSTRACT
This chapter explores dialogue and collaborative knowledge production in institutional ethnography. Ethnographic research is widely viewed as a specific type of research that always produces knowledge collaboratively in the sense that knowledge is generated through the researcher’s interaction with the field under study (Mesman 2007, Holmes and Marcus 2008). In institutional ethnography (IE) (Smith 1987, 2005), there is little research on how collaboration and dialogue take place as part of the research process. This is an obvious shortcoming in methodological literature on IE, because there are key methodological issues relating to dialogue and collaborative knowledge production in IE that are important to consider in reflexive analysis of IE practice. These issues relate to the tendency of institutional complexes to exclude or marginalize the individual’s perspective and experience-based knowledge and thus hinder collaborative efforts.
