Teaching Ourselves and Reviewers Institutional Ethnography in the Process of Publishing

Methods textbooks in the United States often introduce institutional ethnography(IE) as one of a number of qualitative methodologies used by researchers, rather than as a mode of inquiry whose aim is to provide an alternative sociology. Institutional ethnography, as  proposed by Smith (1987), is a much more radical departure meant to challenge "the objectified  subject of knowledge " including  the discursive practices of established  social science discourse. This presentation focuses on how the work of institutional ethnographers differs from qualitative researchers who are often sympathetic to IE, but fail to recognize these differences in practice. Drawing on our experience of publishing our research in standard sociology journals, we explore how reviewers' comments and questions turn subjects into objects of investigation and explanation, standpoint into a subject position or category within society, everyday world into the object of study, and generalize forms of consciousness into generalizations about people. We discuss the ways we have responded to reviewers and how this process has taught us more about the distinctive features of institutional ethnography as an alternative sociology.