Bruddlinjer som utgangspunkt for analysearbeid i institusjonell- etnografisk utforsking

Abstract

In this chapter, we use material from two research projects to show how institutional ethnography’s sensitivity toward disjunctures has put us as researchers on the trail of everyday life problematics. In institutional ethnography, disjuncture refers to the contradiction between institutional discourses and authoritative texts by which society is governed, and the local experiences that people have. One of the research projects was concerned with the experience of parents who were institutionally identified as part of a “high-conflict divorce case”. This exploration began from parents’ accounts of meetings with professionals from the welfare, legal and therapy apparatus and then examined how professionals accounted for the same type of meetings. The second research project explored school-related stress and assessment practices among girls in upper secondary school. Here, a disjuncture between the girls’ experience of daily homework and preparing for tests on the one hand, and school policy guidelines and official intentions on the other, was explored. In this project, the exploration of the disjuncture was accomplished by looking specifically at how the girls explained their use of certain texts in school, tracing their authority to more general or “boss” texts.