Institutional ethnography (IE) originated as a feminist alternative to sociologies defining people as the objects of study. Instead, IE explores the social relations that dominate the life of the particular subject in focus. Simply Institutional Ethnography is written by two pioneers in the field and grounded in decades of ground-breaking work. Dorothy Smith and Alison Griffith lay out the basics of how institutional ethnography proceeds as a sociology. The book introduces the concepts - Discourse, Work, Text - that institutional ethnographers have found to be key ideas used to organize what they learn from the study of people's experience. Simply Institutional Ethnography builds an ethnography that makes this material visible as coordinated sequences of social relations that reach beyond the particularities of local experience. In explicating the foundations of IE and its principal concepts, Simply Institutional Ethnography reflects on the ways in which the field may move forward.

The institutional ethnographies collected in Under New Public Management explore how new managerial governance practices coordinate the work of people doing front-line work in public sectors such as health, education, social services, and international development, and people management in the private sector.

In these fields, organizations have increasingly adopted private-sector management techniques, such as standardized and quantitative measures of performance and an obsession with cost reductions and efficiency. These practices of "new public management" are changing the ways in which front-line workers engage with their clients, students, or patients.

Using research drawn from Canada, the United States, Australia, and Denmark, the contributors expose how standardized managerial requirements are created and applied, and how they affect the practicalities of working with people whose lives and experiences are complex and unique.