Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography by James Reid Lisa Russell

Author:James Reid, Lisa Russell [James Reid, Lisa Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SHARED THEORETICAL ROOTS

The work of both Dorothy Smith and Pierre Bourdieu draw on and diverge from the work of Karl Marx. Developing from the Marxist idea of historical materialism, institutional ethnographers seek to understand and reveal how people’s everyday experiences are governed through ruling relations, specifically how work is socially organized through text-based institutional technologies (DeVault & McCoy, 2002). Karl Marx (1964) posited that workers come to develop a deeper understanding of how society works since they are subject to, and experience, the powerful forces of subordination that the privileged do not. This understanding may not be explicit but implicit through a sense of alienation and oppression. Nonetheless, this involves actual people understanding the material conditions of their experience including of epistemic privilege and standpoint. They have access to a double consciousness in the experience of both the work of the privileged and their own oppression. This is an epistemological point rather than a suggestion of osmosis from material experience to consciousness. For Marx, the development and evolution of the material world is distinctly concrete and a result of human experience and action. There is no separation of consciousness and reality, consequently, Marx’s dialectical conceptualization involves a consistent and entwined relationship between everyday experience and thought where each is shaped by and shapes the other (Allman, 2007, 2010).

The development of concepts is a key feature of human organization and can be thought of in two ways. First, the concepts of reflexivity and standpoint may be understood to be externally related insofar as they are aspects of the researcher’s work that interact with one another. The focus is on the concepts and their interaction, which does not necessarily change the concepts themselves, yet develops a new object in their interaction. Reflexivity and standpoint continue to exist outside the new object and vice versa. IE does not proceed on this basis, and while Bourdieu (1990) is cognizant of external structures, his argument is that these exist in relation to habitus, thus the internalized consciousness of the researcher is produced in relation with standpoint, and through a reflexive process that reproduces the other. The second approach, therefore, is to think of concepts in an internal relation. This requires focus not just on reflexivity and standpoint but also on their relation and the continuing development of the new object in light of the attributes of its founding concepts, from which it cannot be separated. The conceptual object arising from the interaction between reflexivity and standpoint in its internal relations is, therefore, historically contingent; it is persistently molded and defined within the relation (Allman, 2007). Historical materialism, therefore, posits that people do not exist apart from predominant ideas, philosophies, laws, moral codes, et cetera, but that both subject and object are embedded in the actual doings of actual people.

Dorothy Smith recognizes two aspects of experience; the social and conceptual relations of ruling and awareness by people of the work that they do. However, there is no linear, discursive move from conceptual relations of ruling through

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