ABSTRACT
Ethnographic designs were originally developed to study societies with traditions, institutions, norms, values, epistemologies and not at least languages, which were completely different from our own. When turning ethnography towards the study of our own society, this task became a little easier. Institutional ethnography caries this development to its third stage, where we are actually studying our own world. The gathering of data does not follow a fixed schedule. It is dependent of people's access to the field, the situations which people accidentally fall into and the informants people are able to find in the field. The initial research question might even be transformed during the research process and the research strategies might be regulated thereafter. The interpretation of functions links people's observation to people's own theoretical idea of a wider structure or system in relation to which each action has a certain function.
