Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography

Paul C. Luken is Associate Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of West Georgia, USA, where he taught graduate-level courses on institutional ethnography (IE). He has helped to draw together IE scholars in multiple contexts, from special issues of journals such as The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, to the co-founding of the Institutional Ethnography Division of the Society for Study of Social Problems and the ISA Working Group on Institutional Ethnography of the International Sociological Association. He is the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (Palgrave Macmillan 2021). Suzanne Vaughan is Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, USA, where she taught undergraduate and graduate classes in institutional ethnography. She is a co-founder and past Secretary-Treasurer of the Working Group on Institutional Ethnography of the ISA. She has co-authored numerous journal articles on the institutional ethnography of housing, including in the journals Social Problems and Social Forces, and has co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. She is the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).