ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of Institutional Ethnography (IE) as a method of inquiry well suited for researching education policy. IE was developed by Dorothy Smith, who sought to build an alternative sociology that avoids the abstractions evident in traditional research. IEs therefore begin in the everyday, making visible the often overlooked work that constitutes daily life. This chapter provides an overview of IE as a research method, including its ontological foundations, and its focus on texts as a mechanism for orchestrating action. Texts (including policy) in IE are not understood as static documents. Rather, IEs examine how readers respond to texts, and how this activation of texts unleashes further chains of activity. This chapter shows how IE has been used to research how teachers’ and school leaders’ work is organised within contemporary schooling systems, in particular via the datafication of education. Practical steps are discussed including the importance of explicating text–action–text sequences to illustrate how work is reshaped by external forces through a series of texts that flow across institutions. This chapter explains how it is possible to map the operation of power and to understand how the situated realities of real people are organised by policy texts.
