Resisting the ruling relations: Discovering everyday resistance with Institutional Ethnography

Resistance is a concept that may seem out of place in studies of Nordic welfare societies. However, several studies depict how people in these societies act in ways that, whether explicitly or not, question the current state of affairs in ways that may be understood as resistance. This chapter explores how insights developed within the field of everyday resistance studies can inform institutional ethnography (IE) studies in the Nordic countries in ways that sensitise us to discover acts of resistance. With reference to two empirical studies, we argue that resistance can be traced in oppositional or critical talk, in tacit acts of non-compliance or in the “twisting and bending” of regulations, as well as in acts that are explicitly aimed at opposing ruling