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Paper short abstract:

Health policy ethnography requires conceptual and analytical preparation to inform ‘fruitful ways of looking’. This paper presents an interpretive framework to instil direction and purpose through the concepts of what policy makers ‘do, know, use and make’, and to impart meaning to routine practices

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic study of health policy makers and their institutional setting raise important questions about the appropriateness of the traditional anthropological toolkit to this non-traditional endeavour. This paper will present an outline of the interpretive framework I used in my 2018-19 doctoral fieldwork in an Australian Indigenous health policy department, and how it helped harness my ethnographic sensibilities to understand this setting as socio-cultural domain. With participant observation as overarching method, this framework provided me with direction and purpose, or ‘fruitful way of looking’ to structure data collection and the sense making that follows. I applied concepts from experienced ethnographers (Agar, Spradley, Atkinson) as a lens for observing 'what policy maker do', 'what they know' and 'what they make and use'.

I discuss how this framework assisted me to focus on the human experience and cultural behaviour (such as what happens in meetings), attend to cultural knowledge and expertise (such as executing work tasks), and to make sense of cultural artefacts (such as bureaucratic documents). Also, how this framework provided me a way to conceptually integrate social encounters and interpersonal interactions into my observations, to seek meaning in these, and emphasise how this policy world is experienced from within. Lastly, a rationale to focus on the practices of everyday life and the routines and rituals of policy making gave me justification to join meetings, to learn what happens during these structured conversations, and to take note of the content and flow of written information and documents that arise from these events.