Unequal bureaucracies in practice: analysing documents using Institutional Ethnography

Institutional life is full of digital and print documents – application forms, online systems, policy papers, books, manuals, guidelines – which we read, write and perform in our everyday lives as workers, clients, patients and students. Institutional Ethnography (IE) provides an interdisciplinary feminist approach to such institutional documents. In IE, such documents are conceptualised as ‘texts’, replicable material objects that carry messages across time and space, organising people into institutional chains of activity. This approach to document analysis focuses on how texts are used in practice and the unequal effects of seemingly neutral bureaucratic documents. It asks: how does this text organise me, the reader, other people and other texts? Drawing on a five-year IE of UK university audit processes, specifically a close analysis of the National Student Survey (a yearly undergraduate student satisfaction survey in the UK), the chapter explains one method of analysing bureaucratic documents within an IE.