Institutional ethnography begins from everyday experience and investigates how that experience is organised beyond the immediate setting. Rather than treating a difficult shift, an incomplete task or professional distress as an isolated event, it traces the policies, texts, technologies, staffing systems and institutional relations that coordinate what people can do.

I use institutional ethnography to study nursing and healthcare because care is produced across several connected levels at once: the bedside, the ward, the organisation, professional regulation, digital infrastructure and wider political and economic systems.

Posthuman institutional ethnography

My work extends institutional ethnography through critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. Posthuman institutional ethnography retains institutional ethnography’s concern with ruling relations and textually coordinated work while taking seriously the active role of technologies, spaces, bodies, objects and material conditions.

This approach does not displace nurses’ accounts. It follows those accounts outward, asking how human and non-human relations produce the practical conditions of care.

How I use the method

Depending on the research question, my institutional ethnographies can combine:

• observation and participatory ethnography;
• interviews, diaries and multimedia elicitation;
• analysis of policies, standards, records and institutional texts;
• workforce and organisational data;
• mapping of technologies, material environments and work processes;
• collaborative analysis with the people whose work is being studied.

The purpose is not simply to describe culture. It is to explain how everyday work is coordinated, where institutional contradictions arise and where change may be possible.

Foundational work

My doctoral thesis, Ecologies of Care: a posthuman institutional ethnography of nursing, applied the method in an acute NHS ward. It combined workforce demographic data, documentary analysis of the Nursing and Midwifery Council Code, participatory ethnography, multimedia diaries and interviews.

The peer-reviewed study Navigating the System of Regulation and Practice in the UK: Towards a Posthuman Institutional Ethnography of Nursing shows how individual professional accountability is produced in tension with staffing shortages, technologies, material constraints and gendered expectations.

Applications

I apply institutional ethnographic thinking to:

• nursing workforce wellbeing, stress and retention;
• implementation and process evaluation;
• professional regulation and accountability;
• health technologies, electronic systems and AI;
• gender, inequality and the organisation of care work;
• academic and healthcare organisations.

I am interested in collaborations where a problem appears individual or local but is likely to be institutionally organised.

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