XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

988

The Social Organization of Knowledge

TG06 Institutional Ethnography (host committee)

Language: English

Institutional ethnography (IE) investigations of the social organization of knowledge, regardless of their topical concerns, as well as theoretical discussions of institutional ethnography’s approach to the study of ideology, will be presented at this session. Institutional ethnography includes a focus on ideological practice or, more specifically, ideology as practice. IE investigations discover how ideology operates in specific settings, how it shapes work practices, how it is incorporated in particular social relations, and how it produces actual consequences in people’s everyday lives.

These investigations differ from other studies in the sociology of knowledge in many respects, but it is the requirement that the point of departure for research be the experiences of particular people and the conditions under which they work that fundamentally separates this sociology of knowledge from other prominent theoretical approaches. It is from this standpoint in the everyday world, which includes the sociologist, that knowledge is explored as it is socially organized. Furthermore, the aim of institutional ethnography, as Smith has asserted, “is to reorganize the social relations of knowledge of the social so that people can take up knowledge as an extension of our ordinary knowledge of the local actualities of our lives.” Papers addressing these concerns are welcome.