TY - JOUR A1 - Prodinger, Birgit A1 - Turner, S. M. T1 - Using institutional ethnography to explore how social policies infiltrate into daily life JF - Journal of Occupational Science N2 - The paper demonstrates how institutional ethnography provides a way forward for occupational scientists to understand how social policies shape and infiltrate people's daily lives and work. Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that starts in individual's experiences and from there traces how their experiences are coordinated to and become shaped within particular organizational processes and social relations. In this paper, we are specifically interested in how social policies, as higher order texts, shape the organizational processes and service agents' work at Labor Market Offices, and enter into the organization of people's everyday activities. We want to make visible how particular policies enter into the organization of the daily lives of women with rheumatoid arthritis who apply for unemployment benefits and ‘regulate’ what they can or may have to do, even though higher order policy texts are not immediately visible or actively referred to in the setting. We learn from the experiences of two women, who are of employable age, have been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and live in a mid-sized city in Austria. KW - Ruling relations KW - Textual analysis KW - Occupational science KW - Employment KW - Labor market office Y1 - 2013 UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2013.808728 VL - 20 IS - 4 SP - 357 EP - 369 ER -