Institutional ethnography for communication and media research

ABSTRACT The goal of this article is to illustrate how an existing sociological methodology “institutional ethnography” (IE), coined by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, can inform qualitative research projects in communication and media studies. In introducing IE to our field, I hope to equip communication and media studies researchers with a qualitative methodology that opens up opportunity to map the undergirding ruling relations and institutionalized processes that shape the many aspects of human and mediated communication. Upon explaining IE’s methodological anchoring in feminist ontology and epistemology, I detail several methods for data gathering (participant observation, interviewing, textual analysis) and put forward suggestions to analyze IE data. I then offer potential avenues for IE in communication and media scholarship across the journal’s three perspectives – communication and culture, communication as a social force, and communication and new media – and close by discussing some of IE’s methodological opportunities and limitations for our discipline’s diverse research agenda.