The Ontario Review Board (ORB) makes and reviews dispositions that limit the freedoms of individuals found not criminally responsible (NCR) due to a “mental disorder.” Their dispositions must be responsive to the risk NCR individuals pose to the public. To assess how risk is measured, the authors studied twenty-six publicly accessible court files pertaining to the appeal of ORB dispositions. The authors studied hospital reports, the ORB’s dispositions, and transcripts of ORB hearings found in the court files. In this paper, the authors draw on institutional ethnography and critical legal theories of jurisdiction to analyze how certain citational practices—namely citation of closely related statutes and the ORB’s procedures—participate in structuring the ORB’s analysis of risk. The authors argue that risk becomes legible to participants in the NCR process through the intertextual mediation of these citations, which legitimize and naturalize the NCR individuals’ dependence on forensic institutions.

This article reports on institutional ethnographic research into how texts and talk were mobilized in social relations leading to the Government of Saskatchewan's enactment of the Trespass to Property Amendment Act, 2019. The act, proclaimed January 1, 2022, requires First Nations people to get advance permission from rural landowners before exercising their Indigenous and treaty rights to hunt and fish on land deemed private property. Findings (1) connect the 2018 acquittal of Gerald Stanley for the 2016 killing of Colten Boushie to political developments that paved the way for the new legislation and (2) trace how the advance permission requirement at the heart of the new legislation tramples on Indigenous and treaty rights, making it even more difficult for First Nations people to access their traditional territories for purposes such as hunting and fishing.

Organisational priorities for health care focus on efficiency as the health and care needs of populations increase. But evidence suggests that excessive planning can be counterproductive, leading to resistance from staff and patients, particularly those living with cognitive impairment. The current paper adds to this debate reporting an Institutional Ethnography of staff delivering care for older patients with cognitive impairment on acute orthopaedic wards in three National Health Service hospitals in the United Kingdom. A key problematic identified in this study is the point of disjuncture seen between the actualities of staff experience and intentions of protocols and policies. We identified three forms of disjuncture typified as: ‘disruptions’, where sequenced care was interrupted by patient events; ‘discontinuities’, where divisions in professional culture, space or time interrupted sequenced tasks; and ‘dispersions’, where displaced objects or people interrupted sequenced care flow. Arguably disruption is an integral characteristic of care work; it follows that to enable staff to flourish, organisations need to confer staff the autonomy to address systemic disruptions rather than attempt to eradicate them. Ultimately, organisational representations of ‘good practice’ as readily joined up, impose a care standard ‘stereotype’ that obscures rather than clarifies the interactional problems encountered by staff.

Older adults benefit greatly from being physically active yet they are the least active generation. To appeal to older consumers, to reduce barriers older adults experience to becoming physically active and to increase the number of physically active older adults, the exercise market has been divided into mainstream fitness and age-segregated programming that specifically targets older adults. This research employed an institutional ethnography approach to understand better the social discourses and material practices that shape socially (in/ex)clusive physical cultures for older exercisers in both mainstream and older-adult group exercise classes. Textual analyses, interviews and field observations revealed that the material and discursive work practices intended to promote inclusivity in group exercise physical cultures actually engendered age-exclusive markets. Herein, we discuss how the guidelines and policies put forth by these certifying bodies, and the training curricula they publish, govern group exercise practices in a manner that tends to align with dominant ideological discourses conflating age and ability. We conclude by arguing that in order to create more inclusive physical cultures, mainstream fitness providers need to embrace options that appeal to potential group exercise consumers of all abilities, regardless of age.

Family care-givers are increasingly expected to find, understand and use information to meet the complex needs of older adults in their care. A significant number of studies, however, continue to report that care-givers’ information needs are unmet. Following Arksey and O'Malley's scoping review framework, I examined 72 articles for the range and extent of available research on the information work done by family care-givers of community-dwelling older adults living with dementia. To untangle the complex relationship between information and care, this scoping review maps out (a) the ways scholarly literature conceptualises the informational components of family care-givers’ work and (b) the degree to which scholarly research acknowledges these components as work. An institutional ethnography inflection enhanced the scoping review framework, enabling the privileging of lived experiences, questioning of assumptions of language used, attending to authors’ positioning and highlighting care-givers’ information work made invisible throughout the processes of academic research.