Leaving the comfort zone: utilizing institutional ethnography in sport for development and peace research

This paper examines the promise of institutional ethnography (IE) as a methodological and theoretical approach in sport for development research. Dorothy Smith, a feminist sociologist, developed IE as an alternative method of inquiry to the dominant forms practised in sociology. Research that utilizes IE is particularly focused on the underpinning processes involved in establishing ruling relations and the role of text in organizing work, and offers researchers a method that has potential to trace and explore the social relations organizing sport for development and peace (SDP) across local-global levels. We would like to propose the use of IE as a methodological approach that can add to the growing field of SDP. In this paper, we discuss how this approach offers a unique way to understand contemporary issues and debates in SDP by providing examples of how we used it in our own research and why it should be considered further by other SDP researchers. Highlighting the process and benefits of conducting research using an IE approach may open up the way that qualitative researchers within sport approach methodology and builds on new ways to analyze particular social contexts while acknowledging the broader institutional setting that research and people’s daily lives take place in.