Combining linguistic ethnography and institutional ethnography in studying the workings of institutions

Reynolds, Judith ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3154-4919 2020. Combining linguistic ethnography and institutional ethnography in studying the workings of institutions. Presented at: Linguistic Ethnography and Organizations Workshop, Vitrual, 3 April 2020.

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Abstract

In this presentation, I offer some thoughts about the potential affordances of combining linguistic ethnography with institutional ethnography (Smith 2005, 2006) as a means of uncovering the workings of legal (and other) institutions and organisations. Smith focuses on how people’s activities are coordinated and organized within institutional work settings through ‘intertextual hierarchies’ of hierarchically-ordered written and other material forms of texts, which regulate such activities. The law is perhaps the classic illustration of the textually-organised institution. Communicative practices in legal contexts are highly intertextual (Heffer, Rock and Conley 2013; Komter 2006), and the primacy of written texts in legal processes underpins much of the activity taking place in legal organisations. Legal actors of various kinds are continually engaged in ‘work-text-work’ sequences (Smith 2005: 184) of (written) text production and (written) text verification activities. I will draw on my own linguistic ethnographic study of communication in refugee and asylum legal advice meetings (Reynolds 2018), and the work of Rock (2013) which informed this, to argue that institutional ethnography offers a useful theoretical framework within which to situate linguistic ethnographic investigation of intertextuality in institutional processes. Combining the two allows us to shine a light on the connections between macro-institutional structures and the use of communicative resources at the micro- and meso-levels.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	In Press
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2022 11:17
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/135142

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