This project compares the tradition for institutional ethnography with the intentions and practices of other approaches to applied social science, which have tried to investigate and develop the social services for people.

It addresses the epistemological and theoretical challenges of the different traditions and discusses the dilemmas when intervening political processes as well as getting into conflicts with strong political actors. This is done by reviewing the articles and books reporting results from institutional ethnographic research and comparing it with governmentality studies as well as recent approaches to evaluation research. Institutional Ethnography is not a theoretical approach and it is not at set of methods. It is primarily a mode of inquiry.

Its’ goal is to be grounded in the concrete and specific experiences of people in different positions within modern institutions and from gathering these experiences as ethnographic data to get an idea of the specific problematic of specific agencies and in the end get an idea of how the whole institutional complex is formed and developed in modern society.

It “begins where people are and proceeds from there to discoveries that are for them, for us, of the workings of the social that extends beyond any one of us, bringing our local activities into coordination with those of others” as Dorothy Smith writes it in her book from 2005 Institutional ethnography – a sociology for people.

It is the aim of such a sociology to make all of us more aware of “dimensions of the social that transcend the local and are all the more powerful and significant in it for that reason”. As such the premises and aim of the ethnography is basically the same as it was to Max Weber, and the understanding of the social as influenced by factors that transcend our ordinary knowledge of everyday life could likewise be seen as being in accordance with the basic sociological paradigm and the very legitimacy of Sociology as articulated by Emile Durkheim. Thus, Institutional Ethnography can be seen as a distinct version of the basic stipulations of classical sociological thinking as regards its aims and profound episteme.

The distinction belongs to its research strategy. To understand this distinction we have to compare this strategy with the strategies of other forms of applied sociology which had the same ambition of making people more aware of the social factors that influenced everyday experience.

The project focus on the following questions:

1. Does IE represent a genuine new contribution to evaluation research that fits the demands and recent development of modern institutions.
2. Does IE implicate certain theoretical considerations when it aims at a general definition of the work and dynamics of modern institutions.
   What is its relation in general to different approaches to sociological theory.
3. What is its relation to mainstream ethnography.
4. Does IE have unique potentials to contribute to sociological theory?
5. What is the relation between IE studies in practice and other traditions which have had approximately the same intensions and slightly the same guidelines like Grounded Theory, Hermeneutic Ethnography, Neo-institutional Theory, Actor Network Theory, Governmentality Studies, Assemblage Studies and Situational Analysis.

The project continues the discussions in the following contributions:

Rieper and Høgsbro (2023): Sustainability evaluations of integrated care for people with cognitive difficulties. In Ida Kristine Lindkvist, Kim Forss and Per Øyvind Bastøe: Towards Sustainable Futures – A role for evaluations? (in progress) Routledge.

Høgsbro, Kjeld (2020): How to conduct ethnographies of institutions for people with cognitive difficulties. Routledge.

Rebecca W.B. Lund, Ann Christin E. Nilsen (2019) Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region. Routledge.

Høgsbro, Kjeld (2015): Evidence and research designs in applied sociology and social work research. In Nordic Social Work Research. 5.