Reflections on the Future Development of Institutional Ethnographic Inquiry

Institutional ethnography [IE] is a robust sociology committed to empirical investigation of the social organization of contemporary ruling relations.  While the conventions of scholarly writing within IE privilege reporting results of original research, IE practitioners have begun to produce a reflexive consideration of the nature, form and future directions of institutional ethnographic inquiry.   This paper responds to the invitation to consider “issues and developments in institutional ethnography” by contributing to this emerging trajectory of dialogue.  The paper draws on three principal sites of reflection to structure its engagement with key issues related to the future development of IE inquiry. They include: (1) a critical reading of recent published work that methodologically and/or theoretically problematizes IE; (2) my experiences, over the past 7 years, of teaching IE in a graduate sociology program; (3) my efforts to enter IE into dialogue with insights from Science and Technology Studies and Foucauldian work on governmentality in two recent research projects.  Among the issues that the paper raises as areas for ongoing reflection about the practice of IE are the limits and possibilities of a critique of objectification, the place of social theory in IE inquiry, and the relationship of IE to other intellectual projects that investigate contemporary forms of governance or rule.