RIESGOS AMBIENTALES ENDOGENOS

Smith (2005:1) describes institutional ethnography as discovering how “the everyday world of experience is put together by relations that extend beyond the everyday”. The basis by which a researcher of institutional ethnography conducts such research is to engage with those people within the institution who are actively engaged with a social process (Campbell, 1998). Levinson, Sutton and Winstead (2009:776) state that the researcher then moves to consider:

…how institutional structures and practices, including policies become texts that help shape and organise everyday experience.

An objective of institutional ethnography is to uncover “how does it happen as it does” (Campbell and Gregor, 2002:7) or as Smith (1987:178) states:

…to disclose how matters come about as they do in their experience and to provide methods of making their working experience accountable to them…

The central research question of this study may be aligned with such an approach and Campbell’s (1998:62) description of what an institutional ethnographer does encapsulate similar objectives related to the institutional case study:

…to search out, come to understand and describe the connections among these sites of experience and social organisation. My sense-making is not just insightful interpretation. Nor am I looking for it to be an instance of theory. Rather, it is disciplined by the relations that organize or coordinate what actually happens among those involved…

This study adopts the research approach of involving those engaged in the implementation of AFI within the institution based on an ideographic conception of the policy process. The theoretical framework of this research moves beyond the rational-purposive model of policy and the consideration of policy as text towards the notion of policy as practice, which is in line with a growth of literature within education emphasising a socio-cultural analysis of policy (Ball, 1997 , Ball, Maguire and Braun, 2011 , Gerrard and Farrell, 2013 , Heimans, 2012 , Levinson et al., 2009 , Trowler, 2008 , Trowler and Knight, 2002). Ideographic policy and institutional

ethnography both consider policy as the dynamic practice of implementers, with institutional ethnography focusing on the “…jurisdictional relationships and inter-site contexts that characterises educational policy production and practice” (Gerrard and Farrell, 2013:3). Institutional ethnography as with ideographic notions of policy reject rationalistic models and it seeks to unravel the ways by which the power of social dynamics “…construct the ground of local experience” (Levinson et al., 2009:775). The emphasis, however, is not to explain findings at a local level through a macro level theory but rather to explore the macro level ethnographically as opposed to theoretically (Smith, 2005).

Institutional ethnography’s sociology of knowledge centres the account of the “subordinate” to provide insight into the social relations and structures within institutions which can include those of excluded groups (Levinson et al., 2009:776, Smith, 1987). This study, however, does not view participants from the perspective of subordinates or indeed excluded groups. It does, nonetheless, attempt to ensure that the perspectives of participants are preserved within the findings, which is aligned with the notion of empowerment in institutional ethnography (Nichols and Griffith, 2009). Furthermore, this study does not attempt to invalidate one participant account of his/her experience with that of another’s so that we argue “...truthfully or faithfully” (Smith, 1987:122) for one particular account of implementation. This issue reflects a fundamental disjuncture between an institutional ethnography approach and the theoretical framework and epistemological framework of this study. Texts play an important part in institutional ethnography as they do in ideographic notions of policy. Within institutional ethnography they are used to consider how power is exercised and embedded within organisations, as they are viewed as an embodiment of institutional authority or as “special coordinators of people’s activities” (Smith, 2006:65). These ruling relations are textual venues where power is formed and exercised across the institutions, textual venues can be considered in

terms of management, administrations, policy groups etc. (Wright, 2003). Texts or textual representations take many forms within institutions and include i.e. emails, forms, memos, minutes of meetings, templates, web, pages, systems etc. Texts can be replicated and reproduced and it is through this reproduction that the ruling relations hold power to effect and manage the experiences of those on the ground, without in many cases being known by the same (Campbell, 1998 , Campbell and Gregor, 2002). This study is broadly situated within a research focus identified by Smith (2006:68) as following text in action or the ways in which text or policy is engaged with through action. This is achieved in this study through the analysis of participants on various levels of the implementation staircase and also the implementation gap, by considering the canonical versus non-canonical practices of implementers i.e. differences between official policy text and local practices.

The implementation gap is similar to what Smith (1987:49) sees as the “line of fault” or where gaps occur between policy texts and their implementation and the management of participant experiences. Furthermore, through the analysis of the context, transition and operation of implementation the study embraces not only the production of the final texts defining AFI, but also previous versions of texts. These texts identified and linked to the contexts of implementation (identified by participants) and they formed the basis for the current textual representations of policy. AFI was the major teaching and learning policy initiative to happen within the university and substantial amounts of textual data were available to the researcher to construct both internal and external contexts by which to frame AFI. Interviews with those directly involved in the construction of texts associated with AFI provided an opportunity for the researcher to explore the constructions of implementers based on the events and event waves identified by participants. Furthermore, data from these interviews provided what Nichols and Griffith (2009:244) as an “analytical entry point” into the process of implementation and wider university processes. This

study differs from institutional ethnography’s consideration of power in terms of inter-textual hierarchy (Gerrard and Farrell, 2013). Politics and power are considered in terms of Pettigrew’s (1985b , 1985c) conceptualisation that policy implementation brings about tension in the organisation, threatening the position of some actors whilst providing opportunities to others within the context. Power and politics are emphasised within this study from the agentic perspective within the findings, as opposed to the analysis from discovering the overarching or underling structural forces or ruling relations within the university which perpetrates across all functions (Smith, 2006).

A singular analysis of ruling relations is considered overtly simplistic to engage with the complexity of social settings. This study’s theoretical framework similarly respects the complexity of social relations and as such incorporates understandings of policy from an ideographic basis. This study is not concerned with establishing the ruling forces within the organisation that transcend AFI but does seek to uncover through the constructed accounts of participants the complexity of the process of implementation within the university within social contexts. Gerrard and Farrell (2013) identify salient methodological issues for an institutional ethnographer, one of which is the issue of access to meanings, understandings and indeed actions within an implementation environment. A significant feature of this research is that the researcher held a complete membership role within the institution (Adler and Adler, 1987 , Brannick and Coghlan, 2007) and was facilitated to engage with this study as institutional research. Issues relating to access and insider research a discussed further in this chapter but support by the institution to complete this research increased the credibility and trustworthiness of the researcher undertaken this study. Methodologically within this study the analysis is concentrated on participant data and as such it is sorted and coded based on Dawson’s (2003a) framework to produce the case narrative. The emphasis within the method differentiates from

institutional ethnography which usually adopts an inductive approach to identify patterns from participant data from multiple sites. The researcher then extrapolates from these to uncover social relations and ultimately align to the wider social organisation (Campbell and Gregor, 2002). The remainder of the chapter sets out the study’s design and considers the principal methods implemented in to engage with a socio-cultural based analysis of policy implementation.