Abstract
Institutional Analysis (IA) is based on institutional ethnography (IE), a method developed by sociologist Dorothy Smith to describe how workers are organized to act on institutionally constructed “realities” in their case processing. IA was originally designed to help advocacy groups and jurisdictions better improve their responses to victims of gender-based violence. The IA method identifies how institutional practices produce outcomes that can be unintentionally harmful to the people whose lives are being managed as “cases” within an institution or system. Carried out by a team of practitioners, policies, and practices in a select institution are closely mapped to identify those ways individual workers are constrained by rules and regulations that define their roles and functions. This article describes the IA method, along with case examples to assist policymakers and practitioners in making systemic change for survivors of intimate violence and the workers who serve them.
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Pence, E. (2021). The Institutional Analysis: Matching What Institutions Do with What Works for People. In: Luken, P.C., Vaughan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_18
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