Transnational Institutional Ethnography: Tracing Text and Talk beyond State Boundaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: In this article I provide a rich account of how I utilized and critically applied the research strategy of institutional ethnography to investigate transnational processes of legislative standardization. The text at the center of this inquiry is a model law that was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to create omnibus HIV/AIDS laws across West and Central Africa (2005-2010). Expanding upon the sociological approach of institutional ethnography, my research method is best understood as a transnational institutional ethnography (TIE). This article provides a case study of TIE for those interested in ethnographically exploring transnational processes across diverse institutional settings. Design/Methodology/Approach: The complex legislative process being investigated was made visible through the use of participant observation, archival research, textual analysis, and informant interviews with national and international stakeholders (n=32). This research strategy involved ethnographic data collection in Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, and Senegal (2010-2011). Findings: In this article a methodological discussion is offered focusing upon the everyday actualities of conducting transnational research in diverse environments, including cafes, conferences, courtrooms, and activist gatherings. I provide an account of (a) the complex institutional sites from which a research problematic may emerge; (b) challenges and opportunities when conducting interviews and identifying informants; (c) the importance of accounting for matters of geography and interview location in one's study design; and (d) the work of knowing where to look, what to read, and who to talk with during the iterative process of research and discovery. Originality/Value: Moving beyond state-based organizational relations, a focus which is predominant in most institutional ethnographies, in this article I explicate the research process undertaken to ethnographically interrogate complex processes of transnational social organization and translocal text-mediated relations. Methodological insights and lessons learned regarding the experience of conducting transnational ethnographic research are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".