Institutional ethnography (IE) was developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith. This is a method of social research that studies the way people’s everyday life is structured through institutions. This method looks at the way people interact within a social institution. A social institution can be work, school, marriage, etc. The goal of IE is to produce research that helps people understand their own lives better. IE helps people understand how their lives are organized and coordinated in ways they might not see. This does not necessarily mean understanding what they do, it is more along the lines of understand that what they do is controlled by an institution without the person even realizing it. Institutional ethnography asks …show more content…
The term “work” is something that a person does in his or her life. They are processes that may or may not usually be counted as work. For example, we had to choose three types of work that our classmates wrote about in an essay. The three I chose were: 1) “Being a student at a university is not cheap and it is difficult to work full time as well as being a full time student.” This is a prime example of how an institution organizes or coordinates the way this person lives their life. In order for this person to pay the high cost of tuition they must work full time. But, it is hard for him/her to balance work and school work. Therefore, they need to pick one before their grades start to slip or they become stressed …show more content…
Once an ethnographer determines what “work they do, they need to find a problematic in order to further their research. According to Smith, problematics open up many doors of concerns, issues and questions. The questions being asked need to be structured in a way that leads us out of our “local setting”. For example, asking a question like “why is he stressed out?” may not lead us out of our local setting. A better question could be, “why can’t he work full time and go to school full time?” That is a question that requires us to leave our local setting to find answers. Suppose that person has school from 9am to 1pm, then they have work from 2pm to 10pm, there is no time for he/she to do their school work. Stress can arise because they are falling behind on their assignments. There is no “right” answer for a problematic. In any given situation, there can be a different problematic due to each person’s experience. Ethnographers begin every problematic by asking the question “why is this the way it is?” This question gives us a direction of where to
Previous generations have a strong belief of keeping work and home life separate; that work is for work and home is for play (Rampell, 2011, para 21). Today’s professionals do not seem to abide by similar beliefs, constantly crossing the borders of one into the other. While many recognize this as an issue that could result in employees being less productive, it has actually resulted in them accepting that their work may run late into the evening or even into the weekend. I agree with this completely in that I grew up being taught that business is business and personal is personal; you leave your home life at the door. But now times have changed, and my weekends are no longer dedicated to my home life, but for work, because I attend classes during the week. Also, in my line of work in the Allied Health industry, it is a requirement to work off hours. Long gone are the days of working nine to five, Monday through Friday; technology and the demand of wanting affairs done and done as soon as possible, has made it so the “work week” is now 24-7. “Jon Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard Institute of Politics, said, ‘Some experts also believe that today’s young people are better at quickly switching from one task to another, given their exposure to so many stimuli during their childhood and adolescence’” (Rampbell,
The term, work can have several meanings and interpretations. Some people view work as a necessity and a social norm, others might view it with a negative perspective, giving how people are so dependent on it. Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman all have a similar interpretation of work. Your encounters with society affects your actions, yielding a specific outcome. They all acted accordingly to what they observed around them, and the actions hey took was to yield a result of change.
Work is a word that one hears on a daily basis on multiple different levels; work out, work at school, go to work, work at home, work for change. Society today is made of people that work hard every moment of their day from sunrise to twilight, these workers work for food, housing, family, education, and transportation. Essentially in today’s world if one wants something they must work for it, gone are the days where handouts are common and charity is given freely. The question then arises, who speaks for these voiceless workers that are often working so hard they have no time to voice an opposition? The authors Levine and Baca speak very well for these workers and for society in general, their narrators speak of not only work but of the world
This essay is an ethnographic study of Whole Foods Market which is located in Kensington, London. Whole Foods Market is a niche supermarket that sells high quality organic and natural products at high prices. In this essay, I will provide a brief orientation of ethics with regards to the concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility - macroethics and Business Ethics - microethics and the theoretical frameworks of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. I will be using deontology framework in ethics devised by Immanuel Kant to assess if the marketing strategy and the products sold at Whole Foods Market support their principle of ‘organic and natural’.
In the field of academia, ethnographic studies are often overlooked as a serious source and reviewed as literature for the mass populace. Because of the often common language, fluid writing styles, format, and production of typical ethnographies, it is much more appealing and attainable to popular culture than the research within a scholarly journal or anthology. Although, perhaps instead of deeming ethnographic work unworthy of a scholarly title due to the appeal it possess, historians should relish in this relativity new form of research for its popularity. Ethnographic studies provide readers with a rare and untarnished micro historic view of the customs of a particular culture or individuals within said culture. Opposing most academia, these studies can sometimes be void in political agenda and personal biases, providing the audience with more objective material. Ethnographies often allow readers to see private and intimate moments within the milieu of the subject which is not often reserved for public life, which is the typically sphere of scholarly study; because of this tendency, individuals and groups which lack a strong public voice are frequently the foci of ethnographic studies. Throughout history women have often been the victims of such marginalization, with a recent focus on Eastern and Islamic women. Considering the previous, Muslim women and gender have been the center of contemporary ethnographic studies, giving a voice to non-Westernized Muslim women and providing a natural research of gender relations with little bias or political agenda.
Even nowadays, there still an issue that connected with language and related to cultures such as cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism is a behavior in one culture that should not be judged by another’s value system which basically is a belief of own culture practice with respect and understand the different of other culture. While ethnocentrism is the opposite of cultural relativism. It is the ideal that one’s own culture is the main standard and better than other cultures such if other’s culture practice is contrary to your cultural norm, that practice would be immediately wrong. In Language Myths provide many examples of this issue in many chapters which I will be discussing below.
To understand American society fully, one must understand America’s political makeup. In order to do that, it is necessary to understand a person’s political opinions and how they came about. This is done by examining how political ideology and political socialization influence society and individuals within that society. Political ideology is the set of beliefs that shape the way someone views government action; it is the way that they think the government should act and react to certain situations. In the United States, the two main political ideologies are liberal and conservative. How American’s teach the tenets and goals of the political system is known as political socialization. This is typically done through parents, peers, school,
Personal experience and reflexivity should be used within anthropology as a tool to reflect on the culture that is being studied and not a refocusing of attention on the self. Works such as Dorinne Kondo’s “Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self,” use the idea of reflexivity as a mirror in which to view the culture being studied in a different manner. This use of reflexivity allows for the focus to stay on the culture being studied. A move away from this is the new branch of humanistic anthropology represented in this essay by Renato Rosaldo’s “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” and Ruth Behar’s “Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart” allows anthropologists to use reflexivity as a way to explore universal human feelings. For me, this is not the study of anthropology as much as self-reflexive psychology. The focus shifts from culture to self. The anthropologists completely understands the feelings of the people he/she is studying. I think that it is rather ambitious to state that emotion is univeral, and I do not think that it is the job of anthropologists to do so. The reflexive voice is a necessary aspect of ethnographic writing, but the anthropologist must be careful not to shift focus from concentrating on culture to concentrating on herself.
The simplest way to put it is the study of cultures. This differs from Anthropology because it is the process of first hand experiences that allow you to learn about the culture. Ethnography studies the customs, languages, rituals, survival methods etc. that a group of humankind uses in order to progress and/maintain their culture. Participating, listening, and observing are all parts of fieldwork – which is a very important part of research. Interacting and observing is essential to ethnography. The more opportunities Anthropologists have to participate in ethnography and fieldwork, the more open society can be about all the different types of humans there
James P. Spradley (1979) described the insider approach to understanding culture as "a quiet revolution" among the social sciences (p. iii). Cultural anthropologists, however, have long emphasized the importance of the ethnographic method, an approach to understanding a different culture through participation, observation, the use of key informants, and interviews. Cultural anthropologists have employed the ethnographic method in an attempt to surmount several formidable cultural questions: How can one understand another's culture? How can culture be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed? What aspects of a culture make it unique and which connect it to other cultures? If ethnographies can provide answers to these difficult questions, then Spradley has correctly identified this method as revolutionary.
Observation allows researchers to experience a specific aspect of social life and get a firsthand look at a trend, institution or behaviour. It promotes good communication skills, improves decision making and enhances awareness.
the sociological institutionalists tend to define institutions much more broadly than political scientists do to include, not just formal rules, procedures or norms, but the symbol systems, cognitive scripts, and moral templates that provide the ‘frames of meaning’ guiding human action. The new institutionalists in sociology also have a distinctive understanding of the relationship between institutions and individual action, which follows the ‘cultural approach’ described above but displays some characteristic nuances. Individuals internalize the norms associated with institutional roles (=> identity and preferences). Individuals perceive their actions in a particular
The poem, “What Work Is” by Philip Levine is an intricate and thought-provoking selection. Levine uses a slightly confusing method of describing what work actually is. He gives the idea that work is very tedious, however necessary. It is miserable, however, it is a sacrifice that is essentially made by many, if not all able-bodied members of society. Many have to sacrifice going to a concert or a movie, but instead works jobs with hardly a manageable salary. This poem seems to have a focus on members of the lower-class or middle-class who live paycheck to paycheck and are unable to put money away for a future for their children or for a vacation and how difficult life can be made to be while living under this type of circumstance. Levine
It is very common that many high school students hold part time jobs while going to school. When these teens work, they are able to learn and experience life lessons from ethical and moral work. Knowing that school is aways and should be a priority, students should work while in high school because working helps students be more responsible with their lives, help them practice time managment, and also helps students see and experience the real world.
He did not consider studying and readins as being “work”. He states: “Men like to work`.” (Lodge 126)