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Abstract
Institutional ethnographers and occupational scientists share a common interest in studying what people do in their daily lives. Institutional ethnographers start inquiry at the standpoint of people as they are situated in the actualities of everyday life and then turn their gaze from the individual to the social. We aim to outline in this paper some key tenets of institutional ethnography to argue its relevance for studying human occupation. More specifically, we posit that institutional ethnography provides a promising social theory and method to further understandings of the situated nature of human occupation.
Notes
1. In this paper we use the term activity to refer to anything that people do in their daily lives.
2. The term standpoint is used in the singular in this paper. We do not intend to point to a unitary standpoint, but rather to underscore that by taking a standpoint the point from which to start is in the actualities of an individual that is situated in an actual context at a point in time.
3. Smith started by offering a sociology for women that starts from women's standpoint and opened it up into a sociology for people that is inclusive of any person in society (Smith, Citation2003).