Using Institutional Ethnography in Socio-Legal Studies

Institutional Ethnography, developed by the prominent Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, is both a social ontology and a social scientific procedure for investigating social relations. Institutional ethnographers investigate the theoretical and empirical linkages among local settings of everyday life, organizations, and translocal processes of coordination. While the application of Institutional Ethnography is widespread most studies examine administration and governance in fields such as, health and education. Institutional ethnographers, including Dorothy Smith, have recognized the need to examine other realms of social life from this alternative sociological perspective. The law, its institutions, discourses, practices, and processes are fundamental to power relations and inequality yet continue to be under studied by institutional ethnographers. Further, socio-legal scholars underestimate the potential of Institutional Ethnography to examine their topics of interest.

This session invites empirical and theoretical contributions as well as reflections which concern the application of Institutional Ethnography in the field of socio-legal studies. We are interested in papers which focus on the study of people's needs and actualities concerning legal institutions in their social, cultural, and historical contexts while showing the strong potential of Institutional Ethnography to make contributions to knowledge and institutional change.

We search for theoretical analyses, comparative studies, quantitative and qualitative and mixed method studies which can provide an understanding of the legal/judicial institutions and people’s experiences within them through Institutional Ethnography or which creatively intertwine different theoretical and methodological approaches that are more typical of the socio-legal studies with the features of Institutional Ethnography.