ABSTRACT

This exploration originated in an obscure contradiction arising in institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography is a sociology that begins and works from people’s actual doings viewed as they are coordinated. Starting with the ongoing of people’s actualities means that nothing is ever quite the same as it was before or will be, though many if not most changes may be imperceptible. Hence institutional ethnographers are always investigating a historical process shaped by what has been going on before and projected into what’s coming next. There is no place for a concept such as social organisation that rides outside the particularities of people’s actual lives and doings. At the same time institutional ethnographers do use it. It allows a movement of representation in the ethnographic text that goes beyond the detail of raw observation to recognising forms of co-ordinated activities as recurring or being ‘the same’ as what is done at other times and by other people. And those, indeed, are what the ethnographer is going after.