Institutional Ethnography as Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research and the...

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CCC 64:1 / september 2012

Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas

Institutional Ethnography as Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research and the Faculty-Staff Work Standpoints Project

Institutional ethnography seeks to uncover how things happen—how institutional dis-course compels and shapes practice(s) and how norms of practice speak to, for, and over individuals. The Staff and Faculty Standpoints project is shaped by this methodology, as it explores writing center staff and faculty relationships to their work.

How might we think more explicitly about our institutions and the insti-tutional nature of our daily work in writing programs? The field of writing studies is intricately bound up with institutions. Yet, the term institution seems significantly absent from the field’s journals and ongoing research ef-forts. Further, even as we theorize, examine, and explicate relationships and approaches, debate best practices, and administer programs to articulate those values, few researchers have explicitly examined how our most common prac-tices emerge in relationship to the institutional locations that situate, compel, and organize them.

Institutional ethnography (IE), developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, is a methodology that works within this gap. Institutional ethnographers

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seek to understand the ways that institutions—as sites of practice—organize people and their experiences. The goal of IE research is to uncover how things happen—what practices constitute the institution as we think of it, how discourse may be understood to compel and shape those practices, and how norms of practice speak to, for, and over individuals. Institutional ethnogra-phy’s focus on the day-to-day work life of individuals, as well as its emphasis on describing how individuals choose to interact with/in their institutions, provides a methodology for explicating, and thereby gaining insight into, the actualities of our academic work lives.

In this essay, we outline the basic prin-ciples of IE, a methodology that offers a criti-cal approach for understanding institutions and the organization of professional practices within the field of writing studies.1 We use survey findings and participant observations from the very early stages of the ongoing Staff and Faculty Stand-point Project to illustrate the ways that IE opens institutions and institutional sites for deeper understanding. Because IE provides a framework within which individual experience, local practice, and institutional discourse are viewed as mutually constitutive, shifting the ethnographer’s gaze from the “site” (the writing center, the classroom, the writing program) to the ways people in or at a site co-create the very space under investigation, we believe that IE, as a methodology, has the potential to extend important conversations in writing studies, especially how the hierarchical structure of the academy impacts our work and how the work of writing studies gets carried out.

Coming to Institutional EthnographyIn rhetorical terms, institutions exist as discursive constructions that shape-shift according to the particular standpoint of the person interacting with the institution. For example, a university is something about which we all share a general macro-level idea. But as soon as we move from this generalized view of the university, the screen gets fuzzy.2 A professor experiences university differently from the student, who experiences university differently from her parents, who, as well, experience university differently from the trustees. Even an individual’s micro-level account of university changes over time: a first-year student has a different relationship with university than a senior, whose defini-tion will change again after graduating.

In this essay, we outline the basic principles of IE, a methodology that offers a critical approach for understanding institutions and the organization of professional practices within the field of writing studies.

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At the time we launched the Staff and Faculty Standpoints project, we had become interested in exactly this sort of effect within our own writing centers. We became aware that even though our entire staff shared the same mission, we all were approaching our daily work in dramatically different ways. We be-gan to wonder if some of these different approaches could be correlated with the ways our university, as institution, coded our positions through a human resource (HR) classification. In particular, our project evolved from a series of conversations among three different writing studies professionals: Melanie,3 who holds a PhD in English, and is the assistant writing center (WC) director, a staff position; Michelle, the acting director of the WC and a visiting assis-tant professor; and Melissa, an associate professor with no real authority in the center, but who is deeply invested in writing center research and practice. As we explain elsewhere (LaFrance and Nicolas), these conversations began innocently enough with a question about professional development activities. Professional development for Michelle and Melissa was often dictated by the formal institutional mechanisms used to evaluate faculty—that is, the contract renewal and tenure and promotion processes. We saw ourselves as conversant within a larger field of professionals, making real the values espoused in the national conversation about writing instruction through our daily choices as practitioners on campus. Our work days and work practices were organized according to the priorities of having faculty appointments: teaching classes,

administering writing programs, and conducting research, activities related to our pursuit of tenure and our faculty identities. As faculty, even though we had administrative responsibilities for

the writing center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), the institution made few demands for where our bodies needed to be located or what hours we needed to work; nevertheless, there were expectations that we would re-main active with professional duties such as researching and being involved in national conversations in our field. Melanie was classified as staff and her daily work expectations were far more specific and limited to concrete activi-ties. Melanie was required to be physically present in the writing center for a specific number of hours per day, and she had a detailed list of daily tasks such as opening and closing the center, responding in a timely manner to email, answering phones, and monitoring the schedule. Professional development, for Melanie, often included learning new software programs or developing structures to manage her daily work flow more effectively. In other words, our

In other words, our actual work practices came about as we negotiated the expectations of our human resource classification in variable ways.

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We started to think more intentionally about the assumptions we—as academics, as faculty members, as people with a stake in national conversations about the field—make about the interests, needs, and desires of those with whom we work.

actual work practices came about as we negotiated the expectations of our human resource classification in variable ways.

These conversations about the institutional expectations for our work were our “aha” moment. We started to think more intentionally about the assumptions we—as academics, as faculty members, as people with a stake in national conversations about the field—make about the interests, needs, and desires of those with whom we work. We wondered about the impact of HR classification or its related discursive child, a job de-scription, on how work gets done in the field. We began to think a good deal about how individuals come into their institutional work with significantly different expectations about what their work will entail. These points of origination make a difference to what gets done, how it gets done, by whom, and for what purposes.

We are drawn to IE because it takes into account this situated variability of experience within institutions, casting individuals as active and interested, mindfully negotiating the competing priorities and material conditions of their work day. IE allows us to ask how the shape of work practices for one employee may be dramatically different from the practices of another due to numerous personal, institutional, and cultural factors that arise out of the categorization of their work within a hierarchical system of labor. IE, in a sense, allows us to explore a landscape through the perspective of an individual whose work is institutionally shaped toward quite specific ends. Further, IE’s concern for how things happen—that is, how practices are taken up and for what reasons—en-ables us to think through how the discourses of educational sites bind individu-als to particular workplace and educational philosophies, coordinating their actions and organizing their daily lives around key notions of the value of labor, access, and institutional mission. While our initial conversations originated within the context of writing centers, we quickly realized that our central question resonates not only in writing studies but also in the academy at large.

Our aim in this essay is to explain institutional ethnography with the goal that others in the field will adopt and adapt this research philosophy; therefore we do not report extensively on our findings. Rather, we focus on the ways that IE, as a methodology with a corresponding and useful set of methods, asks us to frame our inquiry as researchers and situate our research within the active discourses of writing studies.

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Institutional Ethnography: Framework Originating with the work of Dorothy Smith (Campbell; Campbell and Gregor; Smith, IE: Sociology), IE is a research strategy that is equally influenced by feminist research methodologies and the work of Marx and Engels (Campbell 6).4 Smith’s Marxist feminism recognizes the highly personal, situated, and embodied nature of knowing, while, at the same time, allowing Smith to rethink the ways in which social science research—traditionally grounded in a positivist

paradigm—has frequently oversimplified and reified the material conditions of sites of study, overlooking the agency and personal experi-ences of research subjects. As a form of critical ethnography, IE does not seek to generalize about or to understand the “structures” com-

monly found at similar institutional locations.5 Rather, IE asks ethnographers to focus on individuals and to understand their personal experiences as uniquely responsive to the social organization of institutions.

IE draws on data collection methods typical in more traditional forms of ethnography: interviews, case studies, focus groups, textual analysis, discourse analysis, autoethnography, participant observation, and archival research. IE’s methodology, however, follows a heuristic that is particular to its practitioners; Smith describes this as “looking up from where you are” to study how personal experiences (and so, work practices) express a social order (IE as Practice 5). Marjorie L. DeVault and Liza McCoy describe the typical sequence of IE research: “(a) identify an experience, (b) identify some of the institutional pro-cesses that are shaping that experience, and (c) investigate those processes in order to describe analytically how they operate as the grounds of experience” (20). Our research project began in the moment where we “looked up” from the general conversations we were having about professional development in the writing center and started to think about how differently the three unique individuals involved approached a shared element of our work (professional development). We could not explain these differences by solely focusing on ourselves as individuals or by naming them the product of the roles granted to us by the university—there were far more complex trajectories of participation and identification that we saw in action.

Institutional ethnographers often begin by surveying and interviewing individuals or conducting focus groups to get a sense of the “language, thinking, concepts, beliefs and ideologies” that infuse a site (Luken and Vaughan 1604). Analyzing the ways individuals speak of their daily practices can reveal the

Rather, IE asks ethnographers to focus on individuals and to understand their per-

sonal experiences as uniquely responsive to the social organization of institutions.

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interests and discourses active in the ongoing coordination of these activities. Disjunctions, absences, or rationales may reveal themselves in this process of “looking up,” as these complex moments tell a story about the ways personal experience and work practices have been reflexively contoured by the mate-rial and discursive conditions of the site (Campbell 4). Once we began looking up from our writing center, we decided to expand our investigation to other writing centers. We created a pilot survey in 2010 that we distributed to the WCenter listserv. Just examining the responses we received to one question is illustrative of the ways that IE can reveal interesting disjunctions. For example, we asked, “How many hours of your work week do you spend in the writing center?” Almost half of those who held staff positions (45 percent) reported spending all their time in the writ-ing center, but only 2 percent of those who held faculty positions reported spending all of their time there (LaFrance and Nicolas). This question about where someone is physically located during the work day opens up rich avenues for further investi-gation: How does the physical location of a person’s work perhaps institutionally mark their efforts or lend value to their labor? How does an HR classification sanction types of movements for our bodies through space and time?

To understand the connections between experience, practice, and other conditions of work, an institutional ethnographer sets out to uncover insti-tutional factors that most order participants’ experiences and practices. We have begun a series of participant observations of sites, shadowing participants as they go about their everyday routines. As our research progresses, we will turn to analysis of institutional communications, policy documents, and other texts produced at or about the site to get a sense of the character and inner workings of each location. The narrative we compose will seek to explicate the confluence(s) of individual experience, work practice, and dominant dis-courses at each location. In this way, IE can be said to develop “an empirical bridge between local and particular processes,” as it brings to light the ways in which individuals actively negotiate the “social relations that order everyday existence” (Luken and Vaughan 1604).

Key TermsThere are five core concepts that undergird IE: standpoint, social coordination, ruling relations, problematic, and institutional discourse. We offer a synopsis

To understand the connections between experience, practice, and other conditions of work, an institutional ethnographer sets out to uncover institutional factors that most order participants’ experiences and practices.

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of these concepts to provide readers with a general sense of IE’s approach to research inquiry.

StandpointA concept that roots the research narrative within an individual’s relationship to his or her work, standpoint foregrounds the singular and situated nature of institutional (qua social) experiences.6 IE research recognizes that the ways individuals must “be” in the world are often highly proscribed; we are all impli-cated in social networks, often in ways that may not be entirely clear to us or to others. Practice is a way of participating in these social orders—an interplay between the material conditions of work and the array of powerful discourses that infuse, shape, or grant value to what we do and how we do it. But practice is always grounded in highly personal processes of identification. As such,

standpoint materially situates partici-pants and researchers in the narratives that are generated. The uniqueness of individual experience—the researcher’s

personal experience or knowledge of a site and what has been gleaned from interviewing and observing—provides the guiding perspective for the research narrative that may be produced.

The reality show Undercover Boss provides an excellent example of standpoint in action. In this show, bosses disguise themselves as workers and perform ordinary, un-boss-like jobs to better understand the work life of employees. Part of the drama of the show is the boss discovering how the company is experienced from the “bottom up” instead of from a bird’s-eye view from the top. More drama is added when the workers discover that the “new employee” is really the boss. The changing relationship(s) between the boss and the employees clearly illustrates the shifting nature of standpoint for an institutional ethnographer; who we are, what we do, and how we relate to others will be affected by our place in an organization.

In our writing center, when Melanie “looked up from where she was,” she noted that her interest in publishing research on writing centers was not going to be rewarded, or even recognized, by the institution. Particularly, there was no place on her annual review—the key institutional document defining her success at work and determining her salary—to even place a publication. At the same time, Michelle and Melissa spent much time working out the logistics of scheduling, a process that had become unwieldy in our writing center, but

Standpoint materially situates participants and researchers in the narratives that are generated.

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they soon realized that such a necessary task was not going to be given much (if any) attention in our annual contract and tenure/promotion reviews.

Social CoordinationAn individual’s social alliances matter within a setting. These alliances are en-abling, resistive, and productive. Social mechanisms grant practices legitimacy within institutions, discursively mobilizing individuals into work sites in ways that are sanctioned by prevailing notions of labor and value. In this way, the social order comes to sanction doing, knowing, and being. Grounding the social science project of IE in Marx and Engels’s critique of the German ideologists, Smith argues that history and society do not exist independently of people’s activities. She writes:

the social might be conceived as an ongoing historical process in which people’s doings are caught up and responsive to what others are doing; what they are doing is responsive to and given by what has been going on; every next act, as it is concerted with those of others, picks up and projects forward into the future. (IE: Sociology 65)

Institutions in the IE framework, as such, are social entities created in the moments that individuals take up particular practices toward specific ends—“networks” or “complexes” that serve a distinctive function (education, gov-ernment, health, for instance), perpetually constructed and reconstructed (socially coordinated) through the active participation of individuals. The Marxist lens focuses social researchers on tracing actualities of experience, especially “distinctive relational sequences”—or how work gets done—as these reveal the ways local cooperative efforts respond to and reinscribe broader economies of value (IE: Sociology 56).

For our project, a concern for the ways HR designation sometimes equates to place within a work site hierarchy cues us to specific concerns for the larger social context that surrounds universities and writing programs, especially as an HR designation may also lend a sense of privilege and power to the work of some over others. Indeed, the actual expectations for a staff member overseeing a writing program may be no different than those for a faculty member—but in many institutions the work of each would be evaluated (and perhaps valued) very differently.

Responses to our pilot survey bring to light some of the ways that the social coordination of an individual, defined institutionally as “staff ” or “faculty” mat-

An individual’s social alliances matter within a setting.

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ters; these designations correspond to social processes of identification within an institutional landscape. They suggest (or lead to misconceptions about) the types of work that we are most likely to do. For instance, in our initial survey, 19 percent of writing center employees designated as “staff ” noted that other members of the institution often did not recognize them as educators, even though these same staff members had teaching duties.7 As we explore how staff and faculty experience the institution differently and the ways in which individuals are positioned by institutional discourse to make assumptions about and assign value to the work of others, we cannot help but think that such assumptions are a product of institutional history, local systems of value, and any number of other factors that may impact what an individual does. IE’s focus on the social nature of institutions recognizes the complex layers of value and meaning at work within a site.

Ruling RelationsIt is in this term that we see IE’s most explicit nod to Marxist cultural material-ism.8 Ruling relations are “that extraordinary yet ordinary complex of relations. . . that connect us across space and time and organize our everyday lives” (Smith, IE: Sociology 10). Akin to powerful social or workplace norms, ruling relations draw on complexes of power and authority—expertise, marginality, influence, decision making that coordinates us with particular daily practices. Social rela-

tions are not accidental; they do not simply happen to people. Working conditions and daily routines bear traces of ideology, history, and social influence. As people act with purpose and knowledge, they act

in concert with professional standards and the expectations of organizations, colleagues, and employers. Participating in these forms of social organization naturalizes the multitudes of practices that imbue a site, entrenching certain practices into the cultural fabric. In our WC, for example, we acutely felt the pressure of how it had always been done when we wanted and needed to make small changes to Melanie’s daily responsibilities. Melanie’s predecessor, des-ignated by HR as “Assistant to the Director of the Writing Center,” had often covered tutors’ shifts when they did not show up for work. As “Assistant Director of the Writing Center” (note the critical difference a preposition makes!) we all felt that it was inappropriate for Melanie to be covering missed shifts. Melanie simply did not have the time to do this as the responsibilities of the position significantly expanded with the change in the position’s title. Nevertheless,

Social relations are not accidental; they do not simply happen to people.

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tutors, clients, and even some upper-level administrators had a difficult time adjusting to the fact that there would no longer be someone covering missed shifts. In this case, ruling relations (inflected as they were with institutional memory) had to be recast in order for the new policy to take hold.

From our experience as writing program administrators (WPAs), we know that tracing ruling relations is never simple. Rather, instructors and colleagues are always actively making choices about their practices while under an array of competing and varied influences—professional and personal. Their feelings about their work, the institution, or their work site may hold as much sway over the actual methods that are employed in a center, classroom, or office as scholarly research or familiarity with the accepted professional norms in a field. The notion of ruling relations helps us to think through the ways in which our local realities are ordered in line with professional standards of writing instruc-tion, histories of labor at our institutions, and other educational discourses.

ProblematicsAccording to Smith, “[a] problematic sets out a project of research and dis-covery” suggesting a direction for investigating how a standpoint is situated within and contoured by discourse (IE: Sociology 227). A problematic takes into account that not all individuals will be oriented to a situation or practice in the same way. Problematics can be read for the ways they expose an overlap of competing ideals or as sites where discourse and the particularities of lived experience refuse and resist one another. A problematic is not necessarily a “problem” in an organi-zation—for example, our original question about professional development. While our curiosity about professional development activities did indeed trigger a study, our goal is not to “fix” professional development, but rather to understand the dynamic of working conditions in a broader sense. Professional development, then, may be one aspect of a larger inquiry into the personal and professional conditions of employees. The uneasy moments at the center of any work place story often suggest that people within an institution are differently organized in relation to their daily work. Thinking of these differences in relation to the “problematic” of HR designation reaffirms that some practices within institutions will always be scripted for individuals, but that individuals will also actively negotiate these points of institutional contact in highly personal ways.

A problematic takes into account that not all individuals will be oriented to a situation or practice in the same way.

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Institutional Discourse, Texts, and Textual MediationOrganizations must coordinate individuals over time and space; they rely upon texts to do much of this work. Texts, then, can be thought to have an “architectural significance” within organizations (Smith, “Texts” 160); texts mediate institutional discourse, regulating and authorizing the practices that

are taken up by individuals. Some institutional ethnographers have sought to literalize the flow of information (and hence the prescriptive na-ture of institutional discourse) by “mapping” sequences of texts and actions in the form of dia-

grams (see, for example, Smith, IE as Practice 67; Turner). Others use discourse analysis to interrogate how texts shape practice and construct experience (see Smith, IE: Sociology 17; Nichols and Griffith).

The power of texts arises out of their replicablity and seemingly fixed nature; Smith explains:

Texts and documents make possible the appearance of the same set of words, numbers or images in multiple local sites, however differently they may be read and taken up. They provide for the standardized recognizability of people’s doings as organizational or institutional as well as for their co-ordination across multiple local settings and times. (“Texts” 160)

Texts are shapers of thinking, language use, and ideology. Usefulness, mean-ing, purpose, and accountability often arise from the reality texts can offer, naturalizing and organizing actions.

For our project, institutional discourse is multileveled and stratified, ap-parent on micro- and macro-levels and spaces in between. So, on one hand, we seek to understand how faculty and staff may see existing relationships between the texts that describe their work, the texts they produce, and the broader discourses of their institutions and the field at large. On the other hand, we also note the particular power of HR documents to dramatically mediate our professional lives, producing often well-scripted relationships with and in the institution. These documents determine when our work year and workday begin or end, the hours of our workday, the type of work that will be rewarded, and other elements of our work. A simple distinction between staff and faculty (literally a notation on a piece of paper) can make an enormous difference in the institutional mobility of an individual—who that individual has access to, who introduces key practices into a site, and who must take up practices introduced by others. A document such as a time sheet can be said

Texts mediate institutional discourse, regulating and authorizing the practices

that are taken up by individuals.

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to order (and discursively represent) our institutional experiences in key ways. These texts are so rolled up in the nature of our institutions that it is easy to take the work they do for granted, overlooking their symbolic significance and organizational influence. For example, Melanie has a specific number of vacation and sick days. To use them, she needs administrative approval. How-ever, Michelle and Melissa do not have to have vacation and sick time approved because their HR classification does not afford them official sick or vacation time. The very different ways the process of taking time off is handled for staff and faculty give us important insight into how staff and faculty positions are monitored by the institutional discourse that creates them.

Individuals are far from powerless in the face of institutional texts, how-ever. IE holds that texts are “activated” through the participation of individuals and not always entirely in accord with what the author of a particular text has intended. The individual must actively take up the discourses presented and may do so in highly unpredictable and dynamic ways. Even texts that impose policy upon a site, for instance, require activation by individuals and so can be misunderstood or refused (Nichols and Griffith 244–45). Returning to our example of time sheets for a moment helps illustrate how people need to activate institutional discourse. Even though HR documents state that Melanie needs to request time off and have it approved by her supervisor, her supervisors consider the act of the “request” to be pro forma, and both Melanie and her supervisors understand that all such requests will be “approved.” Likewise, while Michelle and Melissa are given time off in the form of institutional holidays, neither one of us actually use these official breaks as work breaks. Indeed, we often use this time to catch up on grading or research. In both examples, the participants in the institutional discourse of time away from work have activated the text that is meant to regulate their time and modified the text to their own purposes.

These five organizing principles demonstrate the ways that an IE frame-work asks researchers to approach ethnographic work. The terms themselves are very flexible, opening out in numerous ways and enabling the researcher to focus on the situated and flexible nature of experience and practice. As a methodology, IE challenges notions that work practices or experiences in an institutional setting are accidents of circumstance or the inevitable product of processes beyond anyone’s control. IE foregrounds the relationships that exist between the material conditions of work practice and choices individuals make as they negotiate their situations. In this, IE has the potential to further develop

Individuals are far from powerless in the face of institutional texts, however.

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many of our active critiques and discourses about the material conditions of writing instruction. Our work on staff and faculty experiences in writing centers is just one example of the ways IE can be taken up to explicate the connections between the lived experience of individuals and the ruling relations that give them shape, meaning, or value.9

Situating Institutional Ethnography IE comes to a field already concerned with two elements central to its approach: context and practice. Writing studies has increasingly grappled with questions about the legitimacy and purpose of its research practices. Because many early

writing studies scholars were trained in liter-ary studies where the predominant research method is close reading, they often needed to look outside their home discipline (English) for methods and methodologies that enabled them

to explore the questions that were germane to the growing field (North). Since the publication of Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition, the ways writing studies scholars approach research have changed dramatically. As Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan predicted in 1992, “[c]omposition studies and rhetoric are likely to be shaped by methodological pluralism” (introduction 10). This pluralism has created rich opportunities for researchers to pursue the many forms qualitative research can take.

Arguably, today we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in our thinking about qualitative research. As a field, we have become increasingly savvy about how the methods we choose will help us to produce different sorts of data, which will in turn support different types of knowledge claims. Cindy Johanek identifies this turn as a move away from debating “what kinds of evidence we should value” to more productive questions about the ways that the context(s) of a research situation may inform the researcher’s methodological choices (53). Being attuned to the context of our research questions, according to Johanek, and allowing that context to shape the questions we ask allow us to ground the answers we uncover in the specifics of a reflexive research practice as it is shaped with and in our sites of interest. Rooted as it is in the everyday nature of work, IE is a methodology highly attuned to the context that surrounds a researcher’s questions. Further, as it foregrounds the unique nature of sites of interest and the highly situated nature of practice, IE is a methodology that speaks to the desires of researchers to understand the variability and flexibility of institutional work.

Writing studies has increasingly grappled with questions about the legitimacy and

purpose of its research practices.

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We see a sympathetic convergence between conversations about our methodologies and feminist concerns for the contextually situated and reflexive nature of work in writing studies. Feminist researchers are particularly drawn to “standpoint theory.” While standpoint theory—or at the very least, the idea that it matters who speaks, under what conditions, and for what purposes—may not seem novel from our early twenty-first century-perspective, during the 1980s and 1990s feminist researchers, such as Kirsch, worked to remind scholars that “research methods are never neutral, impartial, or disinterested” (“Methodological” 257). Indeed, even though researchers in the social sciences were adopting standpoint theories during the 1980s, as Patricia A. Sullivan notes, until the 1990s feminist research methodologies were largely absent from composition studies (37–41; also see Herrington). Feminist research methods have made a significant impact on our methodological scholarship, and work on feminist methods and methodologies dominates much of our contemporary research literature. IE’s grounding in feminist theory and focus on standpoint will likely resonate with others already working with similar questions and concerns in writing studies.

In a 2010 article in College Composition and Communication, for example, Kirsch and Jacqueline J. Royster highlight the rhetorical and methodological practices that feminist scholars have developed in writing studies. These new methodological patterns are not singularly focused, and they are not based on an exclusive epistemology. Rather, Kirsch and Royster trace patterns and themes that have emerged in feminist research, including: increased reflexivity and awareness of the personal nature of research, desire in the field to hear from and listen to participants within a site, valuing individuals and their experiences, and noting that rhetorical acts always occur in interconnected webs of relations. To Kirsch and Royster the paradigm shifting work of feminist researchers has “become the new norm, not only in feminist work but also in rhetoric and writing studies more generally” (643). The field’s move to a more general acceptance (and maybe even embrace) of feminist methodologies has drawn us to the potentiality of institutional ethnography to add to the sophisticated toolkit available to researchers in writing studies. Because IE is grounded in standpoint theory and is concerned with understanding—not explaining, theorizing, or dictating to—those studied, it aligns with what Kirsch and Royster identify as the “critical terms of engagement”—“critical imagination,” “strategic contemplation,” and “social circulation”—of feminist methodological scholarship (648).10

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IE’s attention to the contextual nature of practice resonates with other active conversations in the field as well, particularly persistent concerns for the material conditions of writing programs and the value of—or philosophical grounds for—professional research-scholarship. These conversations take on numerous guises, from attempts to understand the ways that writing studies research and writing instruction continue to be situated within and against traditional English departments and curricula (see Horner) to concerns over the relationship between pedagogy and the management of adjunct instruc-tors (see Bousquet, Scott, and Parascondola; Strickland; Worsham). Authors engaged in these conversations point out that the material actualities of writing program work are not accidents of history: practices associated with writing instruction must be understood as products of historically grounded values and institutional modes of organization. IE, then, enters a field that has be-come more attuned to the ways that our own discourses may elide the material conditions underwriting our most valued practices (see Schell). IE may also speak to the number of researchers and scholars who, like Donna Strickland, seek to bring to light the implicit connections between our material situation and the institutional ordering of our professional lives. IE can be a useful tool for understanding the ways that the ruling relations of higher education have shaped our work. Because IE focuses on how things happen, it has the potential to extend and deepen these discourses, carrying what is now largely discourse driven by theory and anecdote into rigorous, data-driven, and replicable ex-plication of actual practice and the organization of our work. IE’s tools for the examination of practice and the contexts that shape it have the potential to shine a light on how our institutional realities shape what we do and how we do it, as we seek out possibilities for reinvention, intervention, and reform.

Rethinking Institutions: Our Local RealitiesAs a methodology, IE makes visible the interindividual and rhetorical construc-tion of the institution. Most importantly, IE foregrounds that “institutions exist only in actual people’s doings and that these doings are necessarily, particular, local and ephemeral” (Smith, “Texts” 163). IE calls on researchers to recognize the ways in which practice is a unique and local expression of specific insti-tutional belongings.

We are not the first to call for more attention to the specific nature of our institutional realities, of course. Nor are we the first to present a methodol-ogy that demystifies the discursive mechanisms of institutional organization.

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In their 2000 article, “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change,” James Porter et al. highlight the many theorists who have helped scholars think about how institutional narratives shape our actions (613–14). Drawing on this rich work, Porter et al. call for<BLQ>

“institutional critique,”[. . .] a method that insists that institutions, as unchange-able as they may seem [. . .] do contain spaces for reflection, resistance, revision, and productive action. This method suggests that sometimes individuals [. . .] can rewrite institutions through rhetorical action. (613)

For Porter et al., the usual critiques of the field (administrative, classroom, and disciplinary), while valuable, often elide agency for change by treating institu-tions as “monoliths” (611). Instead of thinking of institutions as immutable and impermeable, Porter et al. urge us to think of institutions as “rhetorically constructed human designs” (611) because, as such, institutions become open to critique.

IE’s focus on discursive and textual mediation takes these attempts to understand the institution a step further; individuals—as fully embodied—performing their work and participating within institutional discourse, are the starting point for IE and ultimately the fulcrums that help researchers identify stronger articulations between broader discourses and how work is done. The IE framework refocuses us on the ways that disciplinary discourse is always articulated to the local; these discourses inform the mechanisms that actualize and generalize the individual’s lived experience.

In our own work, we have been pleased with the ways IE engages us with the very personal and particular realities of work. Like skipping stones on a pond, we have uncovered a starting point for further exploration and are watching the resulting ripples endlessly roll over the surface of our original interest. When you really get the knack of skipping stones, you can make the stone bounce off the water, creating multiple points of contact—much like how IE has offered us multiple ways to understand the connections between work practice and the conditions that relate to those practices. Each point of contact with IE creates its own series of ripples, some overlapping and encircl-ing the first, others forming new patterns, just as our institutional situations, while always highly personal, also exist in relationship to a broader and shifting array of discourse.

When we think forward to the possibilities of more IE in our field, we find promise in the central question asked by institutional ethnographers about

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how things happen in particular locations. With so much of the work in writing studies carried out by individuals, such as adjunct instructors, who are increas-ingly articulated to universities and programs in tenuous and impermanent

ways (Wilson), frameworks that allow us to trace how things hap-pen can inform researchers about the disjunctions and experiences that underwrite the day-to-day operations of writing programs. What actually lies below our

discourses? How do they gloss over or respond to the conditions that have produced them? How do our discourses actually mobilize the work of our pro-grams? IE’s capacity to uncover how things happen takes us in a surprisingly new direction, repackaging tools familiar in writing studies and engendering new ways of thinking for a field increasingly concerned with an analysis of the social elements that surround and inform it.

AcknowledgmentsWe would like to thank Steven J. Corbett, Ann Dean, Scott Whiddon, and Gail Stygall for their comments on early drafts of this writing project, as well as the many “cooleagues” who commented on the work-in-progress presentation at the 2011 Dartmouth Summer Research Institute: Neal Lerner, Christina Haas, Tiane Donahue, Gail Corso, and Bradley Dilger. Finally, we are grateful to the reviewers and editor at CCC for their invaluable advice.

Notes

1. We use writing studies because we believe, like Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, that such a term embraces the broad field that has grown out of composi-tion and rhetoric studies.

2. We use the term screen here to invoke Kenneth Burke’s idea of a “terministic screen” that “directs the attention” (49). IE is likewise concerned with the terministic aspect of individuals’ experiences with the institution. IE positions ethnographers to pay particular attention to texts because while the text may be “scientistic” in Burkean terms (i.e., may refer to an actual, observable thing), an individual’s acti-vation of the text is purely “dramatistic” (i.e., is filtered through their own unique standpoint) (44).

3. “Melanie” is both a pseudonym and a composite of individuals who have held this position in multiple institutional settings.

IE’s capacity to uncover how things happen takes us in a surprisingly new direction, repackaging tools familiar in

writing studies and engendering new ways of thinking for a field increasingly concerned with an analysis of the

social elements that surround and inform it.

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4. Smith eschews the term feminist and instead chooses to use women’s standpoint because, for her, feminist standpoint is too restrictive, essentialized, and loaded with political baggage.

5. Smith stands among a number of researchers who have questioned the politi-cal ends of traditional ethnographic research, particularly research on “disposed” peoples. Consequently, IE aligns with critical ethnology, a reflexive form of eth-nographic practice that seeks to examine cultural practices as they may coincide with “hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhabit, repress, and constrain” (Thomas 2–3).

6. Since first appearing in feminist theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Hard-ing 45), standpoint has undergone many iterations; even within the feminist com-munity, there is debate about how, when, and why it should be applied (Naples 579). However, in “Feminist Standpoints,” Sandra Harding identifies five “central themes” in feminist standpoint theory: (1) the knower and what-can-be-known are socially constructed; (2) feminist standpoint suggests that one’s position in a hierarchy determines how one sees the world and interacts with and in it; (3) in a hierarchy, systems are created to reify the power structure that makes domination seem “real” or “natural” (50); (4) one does not possess a standpoint simply because one is a member of the oppressed group; (5) the telos of feminist standpoint is the “possibility of liberation” (51).

7. N = 42.

8. While Smith situates her work against more mainstream sociological theorists, such as Simmel, Durkheim, and Giddens, there is strong resonance in Smith’s discussion of social mechanisms with Gramscian notions of the relationship between the everyday, ideology, and hegemony (see Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.) For Gramsci, dominant ideologies maintained the social order, as they tended to cast social relations as the inevitable outcome of the relations of production.

9. Researchers in other fields have used IE to trace other sorts of “empirical bridges” between individuals and discourses. For examples see Luken and Vaughan; Nichols and Griffith; Rankin, Malinsky, Tate, and Elena.

10. Applying Kirsch and Royster’s terms of engagement to IE demonstrates the potential of IE in writing studies. Critical imagination is about asking research questions thoughtfully, invoking an “ethos of care” (653) and “listening deeply and respectfully” (649). Strategic contemplation asks researchers to engage in the re-search process while “paying attention to insight, intuition, and sensory experiences and engaging more directly in cognitive tasks associated with examining evidence/artifacts” (657). The last term, social circulation, is concerned with “connections among past, present, and future in the sense that overlapping social circles in

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which women travel, live, and work are carried on or modified from one generation to the next and give rise to changed rhetorical practices” (660). Social circulation emphasizes that rhetorical acts occur in interconnected webs of relations; scholars may work to “make more visible [these] social circles” (660).

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Michelle LaFranceMichelle LaFrance is assistant professor and director of First Year English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her ethnographic research explores the take up of classroom practices in relation to institutional discourses. She has pub-lished on writing centers and writing center pedagogy and is coeditor (with Steven J. Corbett and Teagan Decker) of the forthcoming collection Peer Pressure, Peer Power: Collaborative Peer Review and Response in the Writing Classroom.

Melissa NicolasMelissa Nicolas is associate professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Drew University. She is the coeditor (with Beverly Moss and Nels Highberg) of Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom and editor of (E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center. She has published several book chapters as well as numerous journal articles about the politics of institutions.

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