Analysis of Walby's (2007) On the Social Relations of Research

While institutional ethnography takes critical position vis-a-vis traditional sociology and investigates relations occurring between local action and extra-local relations, the binary oppositions that govern its discourse call for its reflexive reformulation within the larger field of sociological theorization. As Smith asserts the inevitability with which institutional ethnographers are drawn into the ruling relations through their professional agency (2005: 206), forging conceptual linkages between theoretical discussions in sociology is as much incumbent on it as is awareness of its effects on relations of ruling in contexts of its application. In formulating institutional ethnography Smith draws on feminism (Smith 1987; 1990a; 1990b; 1992), Marxism (Smith 1977; 2004), and sociology of knowledge (Smith 1984; 1990c; 1999; 2001) in order to propose an alternative sociology (Smith 2005) that turns the knowing subject into an "entry point into the social" (Walby 2007: 1009) transcending traditional forms of objectification.

Smith's approach (2005) converges upon place that texts occupy in organizing inter-individual relations across contexts where "sequences of action coordinated in extra-local sites" (Walby 2007: 1009) enable distanciation of social relations (Smith 1987). Even though institutional ethnography intends to uncover the implication of textual mediation of relations in modes of ruling (Smith 1990b), the disciplinary distance that it claims for itself apart from the rest of the ethnographic practices is not tenable for reason that it shares with the social sciences their methodological tools (Mauthner and Doucet 2003). Institutional ethnography fully belongs to the discussion on the place of social relations in the research practice that has already been widely covered in relation to ethnographic methodology across the width of its application (Burawoy et al. 2000; Denzin 1999, 2002; Hammersley 1990; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Lofland and Lofland 1995; Williams 1993). In so far as institutional ethnography aims to reduce the degree to which objectification takes place in the process of research the remedy to the objectivist research practices lies in reflexive intervention in how ethnographic methodology is configured (Walby 2007: 1010).

As the intention of institutional ethnography is to seek access to extralocal organization of forms of knowledge via methodological attention to individuals (Campbell 1998), as opposted to ethnomethodology, it goes beyond the individual towards the social (de Montigny 1995: 14; DeVault 1991) and its draws attention to the locally specific organization of the setting of ethnographic research (Smith 1990b: 118). Beginning with critique of Schutz's phenomenology as a form of gendered symbolic violence (Smith 1987: 83), Smith (1977; 1990c) borrowed form Marx's method to ground her alternative sociology in in the site of people's experience, as she proceeded to investigate subjects that objectified knowledges make invisible (Smith 1987; 2005). For Smith ruling relations arise from the processes whereby governmental discourses subsume forms of knowledge originating in lived and intuitive experience of individuals (Smith 1990: 31). From the initial position of institutional ethnography on active production of social meanings by texts (Smith 1990b: 216), subsequent research reveals that texts act as "processing interchanges" (Pence 2001; Walby 2005a; 2006) in the subjective constitution of social relations where people perform interpretive work in the settings of reading (Turner 2002: 309).

From the methodological standpoint, institutional ethnography investigates how texts achieve institutional organization (Smith 2005: 181) the process of which remains constitutively open to further explication of "institutional nexuses" (Grahame 1999) and to additional problematics to which each context leads (DeVault 1999: 50). Common methodological focus on institutional ethnography turns its practitioners into participants in collective work (Smith 2005: 219) as their activities all concentrate on institutional interconnections at interview sites (DeVault and McCoy 2002: 758), multiple contexts that texts cross (Walby 2005b: 165), and rigorous explication of ruling relations (DeVault and McCoy 2002: 764). While institutional ethnography has been categorized as a philosophy of the subject (Reinharz 1992) and an individuated approach (Connell 1992), its declared aim is to produce explanatory maps of dynamic relations (Smith 1999: 129; Campbell and Gregor 2002). Despite claims to the contrary (Smith 2005: 35, 49; DeVault 1999: 66), institutional ethnography actively involves theoretical frameworks in the production of its results, shares methodological concerns with other sociological theories, and constitutes its subjects and data interpretations in the process of its research practices (Walby 2007: 1013-1014).

To designate alienation obtaining between ethnographer and informants obtaining in the process of fieldwork a designation of "social relations of research" (Oliver 1992: 102) has been proposed. However, the calls for changing social relations of research with the aim of advancing emancipatory goals do not take into account the place of ethnographic fieldwork within the larger process of knowledge production which implicates the practice of ethnography in definitions of discursive authority in science. Even though the spread of the social constructivist approach in social sciences has been widely associated with reflexive turn as a means to rectify positivist obscuring of role of researcher's subjectivity and of implicit procedural principles (Haggerty 2003: 155-156), the implications of the reflexive turn remain to be translated into reorganization of research practice. Seen as an "intervention into research practice across paradigms" (Walby 2007: 1015), reflexivity intervenes to reduce such negative effects of objectifying effects of research as truncation, ill confluence, and misrepresentation (Wilby 2003: 1015). Taken to its conceptual limits, reflexivity becomes instrumentalized for purposes of valorization of critical research (Lynch 2000), loses connection with methodological foundations of research (Macbeth 2001), and leads to unending fetishization of the research practice (Davies et al. 2004).

As researchers strive to arrive at economical explanations of reality (Law 2004), selection of relevant elements of social reality during research practice necessarily involves truncation of other components (Law and Singleton 2005) that reflexive attention to ontological and epistemological assumptions can bring to bear on ethnographic practice. Reflexivity is primarily helpful for "reconfiguring social relations of research" (Walby 2007: 1016) that through "epistemological accountability" (Mauthner and Doucet 2003: 424) can contribute to critical examination of textual practices of research and to interrogation of practices that establish authority within the relations of knowing. While institutional ethnography fails to offer methodologically viable alternatives to what it terms as monological theoretical frameworks (Smith 1990c), its focus on standpoint, institutions, and texts (Smith 2005: 52) puts it within the conceptual horizon of classical sociology (Sorokin 1956) as its theoretical stress on discovery necessitates interventions in the "research design itself" (Walby 2007: 1017) rather than in its ethical dimensions (Guillemin and Gillam 2004).

Given that sociological findings are irredeemably provisional (Vahabzadeh 2005), the process of rendering real intelligible in terms of research ontology involves truncation of its aspects (Law 2004) that reflexive attention to theoretical and methodological foundations of research practice can make transparent. Reliance on overly schematic theoretical models of social reality demands correction of "limitations that define substantive theories" (Katz 2002: 260) which finds correspondence in Smith's positing of the "subject-centered ontology of the social" (Walby 2007: 1018). Awareness of the constitutive role of ontological status of research categories makes possible reflexive intervention in the social relation of research at its decisive stages. In common with action network theory (Callon 1986; Latour 1987; Saldanha 2003), institutional ethnography concerns itself with social organization of knowledge that, however, differs from decentering of subjects in favor of "networks of sociotechnical performance" (Law 1999: 10) that submerges articulation of subject-object nexus (Smith 1990b) in the organization of the network (Latour 2000). The social relations of research are inescapably part of ethnographic fieldwork that can only ameliorate its objectifying effect by keeping the discussion of its theoretical underpinnings open (Vahabzadeh 2003) and by reflexively intervening into practical considerations that inform research practice (Law 2004).

As opposed to one-sided methodological emphasis on researcher subjectivity in the interview setting, the research interview has been recovered as a site where identities are contructed (Presser 2004), a process whereby identities are negotiated and solidified (Arendell 1997; Best 2003), a relationship where researchers and informants mutually exercise power (Thapar-Bjorkert and Henry 2004), and a space where material objects influence the interchange through their presence (De Leon and Cohen 2005). In institutional ethnography interviewing allows to "tap into people's expertise" (Campbell 1998: 57) that in the process of translation into research results becomes integrated into intersecting experiential dialogues (Smith 2005: 135-139). Within the social relations of research, interviewing corresponds to the aspect of research design that renders the statements of research participants "intelligible within one's orientation toward the world" (Walby 2007: 1020). While Goffman (1974) employs the concept of frame to describe governing structures behind everyday communication, in its attempt to displace the dominant frame of organization of knowledge (Smith 1987) institutional ethnography has developed towards sharing theoretical preoccupations of the sociological discourse its orientation to individual experience notwithstanding (Smith 2005: 139).

Interpretive practices arising during fieldwork directed to achievement of institutional ethnography aims (DeVault 1999: 66) are "always governed by the frame of institutional ethnographic discourse" (Wilby 2007: 1021). Though interview situations are fraught with possibilities of ill confluence when well-being of informants can be at stake or when researcher's frame of reference regulates articulation of the interview (Wilby 2007: 1021), they play crucial role in "method assemblage" (Law 2004: 84) that constructs a bundle of theoretical relations around research subjects and objects the practice of which institutional ethnography implicitly shares. The proposed reflexivity of institutional ethnography towards implicit accounts of social organization and ruling relations (Smith 2005: 143) does not provide methodological safeguards against self-referential reinforcement that researcher's frame of theoretical reference can impose on research results. Excessive reliance on everyday communication as experiential source of rooting authority in subjective knowledge that institutional ethnography evinces encloses it in the circle of interpretive problems that philosophical hermeneutics recognizes as pertaining to communicative practices (Gadamer 2003).

The transition to technologies of interview recording that enable production of exact interview transcripts has affected the distribution of authority within social relations of research (Lee 2004), revealed the relative paucity of application of data analysis methods in ethnographic practice (Mauthner and Doucet 1997), and shifted the focus of institutional ethnographic work towards secondary dialogue with the documentary record (Smith 2005). The process of editing (DeVault 1999: 73), explicating (DeVault 1999: 71), and integrating (Smith 2005: 143) the interview transcripts into explicative research accounts does not address in its methodology the possibilities of misinterpretation inherent in the institutional ethnography assumptions of the place of experience in knowledge organization (Smith 2005: 135). Due to the constitutive role that theory plays in qualitative data analysis (Honan, Knobel, Baker and Davies 2000), institutional ethnography has to dedicate effort to elaboration of its theoretical framework since it mediates the access of research practice to reality that it purports to discover (Walby 2007: 1024).

That institutional ethnography produces rather than discovers its research findings is accounted for by enactment of theories that researcher employ in their work (Lapadat and Lindsay 1999) and by encompassing role of analysis in data collection, assembly and representation (Weston et al. 2001). As a means for encouraging researchers to take responsibility for their authoritative role in the production of research materials a practice of interview narrative composition can be used that openly involves informants in iterative, reflexive, and participative writing of their accounts that are not unlike products of ghostwriting (Rhodes 2000). However, only bringing to bear of fully developed theoretical framework on research practice will put limitations on the authority of the institutional ethnographer (Walby 2007: 1025). To avoid infliction of symbolic violence on research subjects (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 167), institutional ethnography should seek reflexive intervention into its processes of construction of social reality (Walby 2007: 1025) that remain methodologically inaccessible as long as comprehensive connections to theoretical discussions in sociology fail to be forged.

While the initial impetus for the development of institutional ethnography has come from the postmodern and poststructural bodies of theory (Smith 1999), a necessity remains to go beyond the project of critical sociology towards integration into the tradition of sociological discourse albeit from a reflexive standpoint. The way out of methodological impasse that concentration on "emancipation-regulation dichotomy" (Walby 2007: 1026) of institutional ethnography leads to lies in shifting the attention to the theoretical roots of its research practice rather than in ascription to its methods liberatory effects (DeVault 1999). In order to fulfill its mandate of creating new possibilities for sociological practice (Hammersley 2004; Smith 2005; Vahabzadeh 2003) institutional ethnography should open itself to developments that take place elsewhere in sociological discourse (Law and Urry 2004) in terms that build upon history of theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary reflection in sociology.