Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research developed by English-Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1922– 2022) in collaboration with colleagues and students (D.E. Smith, 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1999, 2005, 2006b; Griffith and Smith, 2014; Smith and Turner, 2014a; Smith and Griffith, 2022). It largely focuses on how people's everyday lives are coordinated with others (Smith and Griffith, 2022, p 3), beginning in people's experiences and examining how they are organised by institutional texts and language, including audit processes.

Confusingly, given the name, IE is not simply an ethnography of institutions, but rather provides a comprehensive ontology of the social, concepts to help describe the dynamics of the social, and a methodological framework for doing research. IE has become an expansive interdisciplinary, international field, with researchers taking up Smith's work and the IE approach in vastly different ways, as I discuss in my thesis (Murray, 2019, pp 43– 64), and as shown through IE edited collections (Campbell and Manicom, 1995; Frampton et al, 2006; Smith, 2006b; Griffith and Smith, 2014; Smith and Turner, 2014a; Reid and Russell, 2018; Lund and Nilsen, 2020; Luken and Vaughan, 2021, 2023). As such, it is difficult to succinctly describe and so for those who are unfamiliar with IE, I recommend Smith and Griffith (2022) and Smith (2005), which provide a comprehensive overview of the approach.