ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining the logics of using data to understand and manage education. It discusses institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry and its key sociological concepts. This discussion explains why institutional ethnography is so well-suited to revealing governance by numbers and has transformed the everyday work of school teachers and leaders, and created a culture of data in schools. Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry developed by Dorothy E. Smith and colleagues as a means of providing a critical research method for examining the operation of power relations in society. Assembling large data sets about populations required a capacity to develop and agree on categories that would be used for measurement in a process I. Hacking described as “making people up”. The production of national datasets such as student achievement data is only possible by enlisting teachers, school principals, education department staff and so forth into process of quantification through tasks such as administering student assessment.
