Undergraduate Module Descriptor

SOC2062: How Organisations Work: Ethnography in Institutions

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

How this Module is Assessed

In the tables below, you will see reference to 'ILO's. An ILO is an Intended Learning Outcome - see Aims and Learning Outcomes for details of the ILOs for this module.

Formative Assessment

A formative assessment is designed to give you feedback on your understanding of the module content but it will not count towards your mark for the module.

Form of assessmentSize of the assessment (eg length / duration)ILOs assessedFeedback method
Oral Presentation10 minutes1-8Oral and written

Summative Assessment

A summative assessment counts towards your mark for the module. The table below tells you what percentage of your mark will come from which type of assessment.

CourseworkWritten examsPractical exams
10000

...and this table provides further details on the summative assessments for this module.

Form of assessment% of creditSize of the assessment (eg length / duration)ILOs assessedFeedback method
Ethics Assessment301000 words1-7Written
Research Report702500 words1-8Written

Re-assessment

Re-assessment takes place when the summative assessment has not been completed by the original deadline, and the student has been allowed to refer or defer it to a later date (this only happens following certain criteria and is always subject to exam board approval). For obvious reasons, re-assessments cannot be the same as the original assessment and so these alternatives are set. In cases where the form of assessment is the same, the content will nevertheless be different.

Original form of assessmentForm of re-assessmentILOs re-assessedTimescale for re-assessment
Ethics AssessmentEthics Assessment (1000 words)1-7August / September reassessment period
Research ReportResearch Report (2500 words)1-8August / September reassessment period

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Smith, Dorothy. 2005. Institutional Ethnography. Altamira.

Borges, J.L. 1969. ‘The Ethnographer’. Penguin

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’. Writing Culture, Marcus and Clifford, eds. University of California Press.

Marcus, George. 1995. ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’. Annual Review of Anthropology.

Nader, Laura. 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained From Studying Up’. Reinventing Anthropology, D. Hymes, ed. Pantheon.

Briggs, Charles. 1986. ‘Introduction’. Learning How to Ask. Cambridge

Hull, Matthew. 2010. ‘Democratic Technologies of Speech’. Linguistic Anthropology.

Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference. University of Chicago Press

Lewis-Krauss, Gideon. 2016. ‘The Trials of Alice Goffman’. New York Times

Deloria, Philip. 1998. Playing Indian. Yale University Press.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’. American Behavioural Scientist.

Latour, Bruno. 1990. ‘Technology is Society Made Durable’. The Sociological Review.

Hull, Matthew. 2003. ‘The file: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy’. Language and Communication.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. ‘Good Organizational Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinical Records’. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Polity.

Porter, Theodore. 1995. Trust in Numbers. Princeton University Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’. The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press.

Ortner, Sherry. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’ Comparative Studies in Society and History.