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According to Smith, texts have come to be integral to social organisation in so-called modern societies. IE is designed to reveal the organizing power of texts, making visible how local activities are coordinated and managed trans-locally (DeVault 2006:295). The term ‘textually- mediated social organisation’ refers to how people’s engagement with texts coordinates their actions (Campbell & Gregor 2002:29). Texts of various kinds such as school enrolment charts, bus tickets, project descriptions, medical journals, news articles, organisational rules and so forth are embedded in, and potentially shape what happens in the social relations we are part of. Smith uses the term text as material in a form that can be replicated such as print, film or electronic. This is important because the capacity to coordinate people’s actions across sites, depends on the text as a material thing (Smith 2005:228). The text itself however, does not have coordinating power, but if people handle and use it, they “activate” the text. This central notion is presented in the figure below. When introducing texts in institutional ethnographies researchers are

encouraged to hold on to this foundational model, but other than that explore the various ways in which texts are integrated in local, coordinated action (Smith 2006:87). During my own

fieldwork, I discovered different types of text, and in the analysis I attempt to show how they were embedded in the experience and actions of my informants.

Smith uses the concept ruling relations for the socially organised exercise of power that shape people’s actions through text and discourse. As explored above, sociological texts can create objectified forms of knowledge. Smith thus criticises conventional sociology as part of the ruling relations. However, ruling relations are more than imposition of rules or social facts, they rely on

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people knowing how to activate the texts and use them in the appropriate manner. Discourse then, according to Smith, is more than just texts and their inter-textual conversation. There is also a text-reader conversation, which includes the activities of people (Smith 2005:228). This notion of discourse never loses the presence of the subject who activates the text. People act

discursively as they carry out their everyday lives. Sometimes this ruling occurs through legally binding discourses, other times it is less explicit as people act on their own understanding of dominant discourses (Campbell & Gregor 2002:40). DeVault (2006:295) points out that life outside formal organizational sites, such as in households or families, is more diffusely and unevenly coordinated through texts and discourses.

Social organisation and ruling relations are not imposed as theoretical concept on social reality, where ethnographic data is selectively used as examples or illustrations. Rather, these notions are meant to guide the inquiry and remind the researcher to look beyond a single experience and map how it is coordinated with other people’s activities both locally and trans-locally. The accounts of different work knowledges are not to be reinterpreted in the analysis, they are fitted together so that the social organisation emerges (Smith 2005:159). This act of fitting pieces together brings us to another aspect of the study of the social within IE, namely that it does not claim universality. In contrast with grounded theory that aims at abstraction by creating concepts, categories and eventually theory based on so-called theoretical saturation (Bryman 2012:421), IE does not produce a uniform representation that supersedes diverging experiences (Smith

2005:62). It does not aim to generalise the individual experience. Rather, it is claimed that people are differently positioned and have different work knowledges of a social process (Smith

2005:159). In my setting, I learned that the adolescent girls have different experiences from the boys, and they in turn have different experiences than their parents. Additionally, teachers, government officials and development workers have their work knowledge. Even within these groups the experiences can vary widely, for instance among the girls. However, all the various work knowledges can be pieced together to discover how child marriage is socially organised and also how the practice changes at a certain time and place. To assemble a social process, as it is known by those who participate in it, does not displace the experiential knowledge. Campbell & Gregor (2002:89) explain that generalisability in IE relies instead on discovery of how ruling or institutional relations actually shape what happens across many local sites.

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On conclusion of this chapter, it is important to point out that IE does not refrain from drawing on the theoretical thinking of predecessors. It challenges how mainstream sociology clamps a theoretical and conceptual framework over any inquiry, and how this determines how the actual world will be attended to (Smith 2005:50). The point then, as I have come to understand it, is not to ban the use of concepts altogether. Rather, the aim of IE is to expose the conceptual to the discipline of the actualities. The researcher is encouraged to always check the conceptual against what she has learned and is learning from the actual world. Of course, there can be no guarantees that preconceptions will be exposed or that the implicit grounding of concepts in social relations will be uncovered, but there is a commitment to the actual rather than the conceptual (Smith 2005:57). The interest in analysis is thus materialist and empirical, not abstract:

The findings of an inquiry are in and of the same world that the inquiry investigates. Its discoveries and analyses depend, as maps do, on the actuality in which they originated. The project of an inquiry is the discovery of and learning from actualities (Smith 2005:52).

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