Institutions—clinics, schools, bureaucracies—often appear monolithic, governed by rigid rules and impersonal structures. Yet their logics are most vividly revealed in micro-moments: a hesitant joke between a nurse and a doctor, a teacher quietly bending a rule to accommodate a student, a police officer sighing while completing paperwork they know is pointless. These fleeting interactions are not peripheral to institutional life; they are the sites where authority is enacted, norms are negotiated, and contradictions become visible. These routine and sometimes unexpected moments show how institutional logics are reproduced, resisted, and made flexible.
This lesson focuses on how to capture such moments in ethnographic writing, reframing institutions not as abstract systems but as living, contested processes. It draws on a core ethnographic sensibility: moving inductively from the particular to the conceptual. Ethnographers often begin not with generalized theories of power or order, but with something specific—an overheard comment, a brief pause, a subtle gesture—and ask what broader institutional patterns such particulars might index.
Social scientists have long emphasized that institutions are not merely imposed from above but are continually enacted through everyday interactions. Social life unfolds through gestures, rituals, and tacit negotiations. A nurse’s exaggerated politeness toward a dismissive doctor may reveal an unspoken hierarchy. A student’s hesitation before speaking may embody years of schooling that taught them their voice carries less weight. Such micro-moments also illuminate subtle forms of subversion—what de Certeau calls “tactics.” For instance, a platform worker toggling an app on and off to outmaneuver an algorithm exemplifies quiet resistance to institutional constraints.
Noticing and rendering these moments in writing takes practice. Several techniques can support this. One approach is to zoom in on a single interaction and render it in rich detail. Consider a janitor in a hospital who pauses to comfort a crying visitor, defying expectations to “stay in their role.” A compelling ethnographic account might note the janitor’s glance to check for supervisors, the quiet tone of their voice, the visitor’s trembling hands—details that expose the permeability of institutional boundaries.
Another technique is to juxtapose a micro-moment with institutional rules. For example, if a teacher accepts late homework with a muttered “Just this once,” despite a strict no-late policy in the syllabus, the contrast between official policy and everyday discretion reveals how rules are flexed in practice—and who has the power to bend them.
Sometimes the most telling moments are those that are meant to go unnoticed. An officer rolling their eyes at a colleague’s overly formal report may seem trivial, but the gesture critiques bureaucratic performativity. Attending to such unspoken actions can reveal the informal norms that shape institutional life.
Dialogue is another tool. Consider:
“Sign here and here,” the social worker says, sliding a form across the table. The client exhales, hesitates, and picks up the pen.
Here, the brief, peremptory language and the client’s silence render visible the coercive choreography of bureaucratic encounters.
Micro-moments do more than illustrate institutional dynamics—they constitute them. Ethnographic writing, when attentive to such interactions, shows not just what an institution is, but how it is lived. By observing and writing these details with care and precision, you can illuminate the tensions, accommodations, and acts of resistance that animate institutional life. In this mode, detail is not embellishment—it is the substance of analysis.
Focus
How small events, acts, and moments reveal the structure, logics, and contradictions of institutions.
Learning Goals
- Learn to frame bureaucracies, clinics, or schools through embodied scenes.
- Analyze how institutional logics are reproduced or disrupted in moments of friction.
Activities
- Think about and identify a small act or a micro-moment that you have observed or experienced at school or workplace and map the institutional systems it touches.
- Write a short scene (150 words max) where a small disruption reveals something about how power works.
- Discuss: When do small acts and micro-moments clarify structure? When do they obscure it?