Voice: Notions of Bias, Competency & Institutional Capture within Qualitative Research for Institutional Ethnographer’s with Lived Experience of the Ruling Relations Being Investigated..

Dorothy Smith's (1987) sociology of institutional ethnography (IE) emerged to address the objective birfurcation of knowledge whereby ordinary people could no longer see themselves, or their lived experiences within the sociological accounts being created about them. Smith's ontological turn towards a sociology for the people came from listening to the women's voice and taking action. Smith's notes (2021) the aim was to develop a useful methodology that would both capture the actualities of their lives and extrapolate how their lived experiences tied into the wider web of relations to talk back to decision-makers. It was Smith's ontological turn that captured my attention as a traditionally trained sociologist and later drive to pursue a PhD.

Fast forward to three decades later, at the launch of Simply Institutional Ethnography (2021) Smith is reflecting upon a question about her legacy mused she had hoped more sociologist's had taken up IE. As a PhD student, I felt sad because I could see its usefulness driving meaningful progress,however, my attempt to apply the sociology within the context of institution had not been good and i would later fail out of my programme. In actuality, unfortunately had found beginning in my lived experience to locate a door into the social triggered supervisory concerns, overshadowed my voice as a competent researcher, brought my credibility into question and feelings of wrongdoing to the fore.

This paper’s aim is to explore the tensions between traditional sociological training and conducting institutional ethnographic work in contemporary academic institutional settings. In doing so, I discuss the key concepts underpinning qualitative working practices being navigated by researchers at the subjective/objective interface e.g. bias, voice, competency, institutional capture and how these are connected to other wider institutional procedures used to guide and assess the work of researchers producing knowledge within the lived experience paradigm.