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An Institutional Ethnography Approach to Housing Studies

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An Institutional Ethnography Approach to Housing Studies An institutional ethnography approach to housing studies Paul Luken and Suzanne Vaughan Paul Luken Dept. of Sociology and Criminology State University of West Georgia Carrollton, GA 30118 [email protected] Suzanne Vaughan Dept. of Social and Behavioral Sciences Arizona State University West P.O. Box 37100 Phoenix, AZ 85069-7100 [email protected] In this paper we discuss how institutional ethnography, a feminist materialist method of inquiry, can be use to study the social institution of housing. We begin providing a brief description of institutional ethnography and then recount how we are applying this approach in a study of changes in housing in the United States in the twentieth century. For purposes of illustration, we summarize two of our investigations.1 We conclude with a few remarks on the value of institutional ethnography to housing studies research. What Is Institutional Ethnography?2 Institutional ethnography is a method of sociological inquiry that was founded by sociologist Dorothy Smith in the 1970s. She describes it as an outgrowth of the women’s movement in North America at the time. She observed that there were two different modes of consciousness active in her double life of running a household and being a mother, and her life as a scholar in the university. The life in the home was one of particularities and real people; whereas the life of 1 To date most studies using institutional ethnography have been in the areas of education, health care, and social services. To our knowledge, Susan Turner (1995; 2002) is the only other research to use this approach to study housing-related social relations. 2 The term “institutional ethnography” is first used by Dorothy Smith in a 1986 article in Resources for Feminist Research and the approach is further developed in chapters of her The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987) and other works. This section relies heavily on her 2002 chapter in Tim May’s Qualitative Research in Action. the university was impersonal and the social relations were extra-local. According to Smith, “The consciousness that organizes household work and child care is highly attentive to particularities of the local setting -- the physical layout of the household, taking in the state of the floors, putting clean sheets on the bed, checking the refrigerator to see what’s there for supper, calling the kids in from play to get ready for school. It is a consciousness that coordinates multiple particular details, cues and initiatives, involving relationships with particularized others -- children, partner, neighbors, and so on.” (2002, 17) In contrast, the consciousness that is organized in a university setting is one that participates in a discourse in which particular others appear as printed names in text, “or positioned as members of definite classes of others -- colleagues, students, supervisors, administrators and others.” (2002, 17) Smith states that in the women’s movement of the ‘70s she learned to take her own experience as a woman as the basis for how she could know the world. She also realized, as did many others involved in the women’s movement, that the academic disciplines were written almost exclusively by men and from their viewpoint. Furthermore, the disciplines, sociology in Smith’s case, claimed objectivity while excluding women, their knowledge, and their concerns, from the discourse. Smith determined that it was necessary to remake sociology from the ground up. It would be a sociology for women, one which would discover the social relations which shaped women’s everyday experiences but which are not wholly invisible to them. In contrast to other sociologies, institutional ethnography does not take its problems or questions from the various sociological schools of thought and research. Rather, inquiry begins with people’s lives and from the standpoint of their experience of the actualities in their everyday living. However, it is not limited to description of the social organization of people’s activities or their expressions of their experiences. These are important for institutional ethnography. Smith would say that they are “essential.” Yet, people’s everyday activities are permeated and organized by social relations that coordinate activities at multiple sites. The sociologist’s task is to discover these relations and then map them so that people can see how their lives and activities are connected with the lives and work of others, others of whom we are often unaware. Our everyday worlds are not self-contained, although we do have intimate knowledge of them. They are coordinated with unknown others who are acting elsewhere and at other times. This becomes the problematic of institutional ethnography. It takes up a stance in people’s experience in the local sites of their bodily being and seeks to discover what can be grasped from within that experience, namely the social relations that are implicit in its organization. The project calls on us as sociologists to discover how the everyday/everynight worlds we participate in are being put together in people’s local activities, including, of course, our own. It conceives of the social as actually happening among people who are situated in particular places at particular times and not as “meaning” or “norms.” It draws on people’s own good knowledge of their everyday/everynight worlds and does not substitute the expert’s “reality” for what people know in the doing. The aim is to create a sociology for people rather than of people. (Smith 2002, 19) Institutional ethnography recognizes that people are expert practitioners in their everyday lives. As Smith says, “they know how they go about doing things” (2002, 21). Institutional 2 ethnographers begin by learning from people and then they locate people’s accounts by showing how they are connected with social relations beyond their immediate experience. Social reality is viewed as rising within people’s activities. Included in these activities are language, thinking, concepts, beliefs, ideologies; and the social is the ongoing coordination of these activities. How this coordinating occurs remains to be discovered. Institutional ethnography assumes that people experience and understand things differently; therefore, those forms of social organization that generalize and objectify – overriding individuals’ perspectives – are of special interest. Texts are fundamental to these generalized forms of consciousness. Objectification and generalization are themselves practices of people and they are locally achieved. “In a sense the collection of data and their analysis aim at discovering just how the institutional is being produced by people at work in the particularities of their everyday/everynight lives” (Smith 2002, 23). The topics of the research are generally some issues or problems that people experience in their everyday lives, but the starting point should be people’s actual experiences. Research might begin with one’s own experience or with another particular actor because institutional organization can be found in what people have to say about their activities. Other people can also be interviewed, and they will provide different perspectives. A “standpoint sample” is developed from multiple interviews. It is important to keep in mind that the population is not being studied; rather, the focus is on institutional processes. Another challenge of interviewing is to get people to talk about the actual work that they do. Respondents often utilize institutional discourse, that is, they employ ideological language that generalizes rather than particularizes. The researchers learn from one interview and there is a progression to the next. Often different questions are asked of each of the respondents (See DeVault and McCoy 2000). Interview transcripts are analyzed for what people say about the work that they do, particularly work that connects them with work that others are doing elsewhere. Analysis involves discovering how work that is performed at one site connects with work which is performed at other sites. Language is very important in his analysis. Social relations, Smith says, “are already implicit in how people talk about their work” (2002, 31). Texts, especially those that are replicable and standardized, are commonly examined in institutional ethnography research since they coordinate people’s activities in local settings. They mediate social relations and coordinate the doings of people translocally. Texts, as they are taken up in local settings, enter actions and organize actions at multiple sites. While one party in the text is fixed, the reader is not. The reader is active in interpreting and acting upon the text. Furthermore, in many work processes one textual step is followed up by another textual step that is dependent upon the prior step and the anticipated next step, and so on. Thus, forms are filled out and reports are generated in manners that transform particular events into generalized forms that are critical in coordinating the work of others. Such regulation through texts is widespread in modern, literate societies, and it is an important consideration in many institutional ethnographic investigations. 3 Studying Changes in the Social Institution of Housing: Applying Institutional Ethnography In 1992 we began a study of changes in the social institution of housing from the standpoint of women. As subjects in this research we selected five women who lived in the Phoenix metropolitan area at the time of the interviews. All of the women were at least 60 years of age and had lived alone for at least six months. After an initial contact, we interviewed the women on at least four occasions for approximately two hours per session. Throughout the interviews we worked with the women to generate their oral housing histories. We tape-recorded and transcribed approximately 10 to 12 hours of conversation with each woman. Our interviews focused on their housing experiences throughout their lives. Aside from learning about the types of places in which they resided and people with whom they lived, we were interested primarily in the activities that they performed, the work that they did to acquire and to maintain their homes.
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