Productivity, institutionalization and embodied knowledge

March 29, 2011 | 11:00 h - 12:00 h

Marie Campbell from the University of Victoria, Canada, talks about Institutional Ethnography

How do social relations structure people's everyday lives? For the institutional ethnographer, ordinary daily activities can become a spot for investigating social organization. Prof. Marie Campbell demonstrated institutional ethnography using the example of medical organization. The starting point for her research was: Why do people in hospitals die more often at night then during daytime? To answer this question, she did not start with a hypothesis, but with observing social relations in a hospital. Campbell identified different social groups: On one hand there is the hospital as an institution with its doctors and management, called “the institutionalized knowledge”. On the other hand there are the nurses with their “embodied knowledge” which is a combination of technical knowledge and day-to-day experience.

For her work, Campbell chose the perspective of the nurses for investigating her research question. Nurses form the connection between the patients and academic knowledge. They decide if it is necessary to call upon a doctor – driven by their experience. However, Campbell noticed during her research, that many nurses talked about flexibility and productivity according to the concept and presets of their “institution”. The amount of productivity, for example, is being assessed by the daily expenditures for a nurse. Thus, managers on the mid level stick to this preset when they have to reduce expenditures: They “flexibilize” the working time of nurses by sending them home early. This decision is not being based on actual need for personnel, but on financial considerations.

The internalization of presets and conditions set by superiors at the lower levels of the work floor is difficult to change, so the observation of Campbell. Opportunities created to empower nurses were not really put into practice. Instead of having a real chance of bringing in their experimental knowledge and experiences into the decision-making process, the nurses adapted to the institutional system. Their objections were being downplayed, and they tended to obey the rules.

Campbell concluded that many problems in social frameworks are created by inflexible structures and interventions from above, which are not understood by the people below dealing with the consequences. There is a lack of communication, and a disproportionate impact of financial factors. In her opinion, these outcomes could be transferred into different fields of social life, such as in development projects.

Sebastian Eckert