Me, Myself, and IE: describing the actualities of undertaking institutional ethnography

Oliver Birch; Peter Adams; Bruce Cohen; David Newcombe

doi:10.1057/s41285-026-00251-2

Back

Me, Myself, and IE: describing the actualities of undertaking institutional ethnography

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Me, Myself, and IE: describing the actualities of undertaking institutional ethnography

Oliver Birch, Peter Adams, Bruce Cohen and David Newcombe

Social Theory & Health, Vol.24(1), pp.1-18

2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-026-00251-2

Files and links (1)

pdf

s41285-026-00251-21.27 MBDownload View

Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open Access

Abstract

institutional ethnography

mapping

opioid substitution treatment

practical guidance

qualitative methods

disjunctures

Through Institutional Ethnography (IE), one can explicate how people’s lives are being socially organised. The ethnographer creates an empirical account of what happens within a complex of institutional order, moving iteratively between data collection methods to see how the ‘institution’ occurs through people’s work, how texts are used to coordinate it, and how these texts reproduce ideology. They follow findings as they arise, with reference to the perspectives of ‘standpoint informants’. However, because this process is iterative, descriptions of IE studies vary greatly. Guidance on how to undertake IE’s methods is often specific to the institution being studied. To aid prospective ethnographers, the article describes a step-by-step process through which IE was interpreted and implemented in practice in a healthcare setting. Though it references research at an Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) service, the account is not prescriptive; rather, it illustrates how one might undertake IE-informed data collection and analysis while being consistent with what is expected of an IE.

Details

Title: Me, Myself, and IE: describing the actualities of undertaking institutional ethnography
Authors: Oliver Birch (Corresponding Author) - University of Auckland
Peter Adams - University of Auckland
Bruce Cohen - University of Auckland
David Newcombe - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Health - Psychology
Publication details: Social Theory & Health, Vol.24(1), pp.1-18
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Date published: 2026
DOI: 10.1057/s41285-026-00251-2
ISSN: 1477-822X
Copyright note: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Data Availability: No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Organisation Unit: Healthy Ageing Research Cluster; School of Health - Psychology
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991212980402621
Output Type: Journal article

Metrics

1 Record Views