F eminist and g ender t heories

of ruling as including not only forms such as “bureaucracy, administration, management, 
professional organization and media,” but also “the complex of discourses, scientific, tech-
nical, and cultural, that intersect, interpenetrate, and coordinate” them. Smith (1987:4) 
maintains that behind and within the “apparently neutral and impersonal rationality of the 
ruling apparatus” is concealed a “male subtext.” Women are “excluded from the practices 
of power within textually mediated relations of ruling” (ibid.). Thus, for instance, official 
psychiatric evaluations replace the individual’s actual lived experience with a means for 
interpreting it; the individual becomes a case history, a type, a disease, a syndrome, and a 
treatment possibility (Seidman 1994:216).
Smith goes on to suggest that because sociology too relies on these same kinds of texts, 
it too is part and parcel of the relations of ruling. The subject matter and topics of sociology 
are those of the ruling powers. Sociological knowledge receives its shape less from actuali-
ties and the lived experiences of real individuals than from the interests in control and regu-
lation, by the state, professional associations, and bureaucratization (ibid.:216).
Most important, Smith does not just criticize modern, “masculinist” sociology; she pro-
vides an alternative to it. Inspired by Marx’s historical realism but also drawing on ethno-
methodology—which, as discussed in Chapter 6, considers that practical activities, practical 
circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning must not be taken for granted but rather 
6
See Edles and Appelrouth (2005/2010:323–15).

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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
be topics of empirical study (Garfinkel 1967:1)—Smith advocates a “sociology for women” 
that begins “where women are situated”: in the “particularities of an actual, everyday world” 
(Smith 1987:109). Smith’s sociology for women aims not to “transform people into objects” 
but to “preserve their presence as subjects” (ibid.:151). Smith (ibid.:143) argues that the 
“only route to a faithful telling that does not privilege the perspectives arising in the sites of 
her sociological project and her participation in a sociological discourse is to commit herself 
to an inquiry that is ontologically faithful, faithful to the presence and activity of her sub-
jects and faithful to the actualities of the world that arises for her, for them, for all of us, in 
the ongoing co-ordering of our actual practices.”
7
Smith calls her particular approach institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography 
is a method of elucidating and examining the relationship between everyday activities and 
experiences and larger institutional imperatives. Interestingly, the very term “institutional 
ethnography” explicitly couples an emphasis on structures of power (“institutions”) with the 
microlevel practices that make up everyday life (“ethnography”). Smith’s point, of course, is 
that it is in microlevel, everyday practices at the level of the individual that collective, hierar-
chical patterns of social structure are experienced, shaped, and reaffirmed. For instance, in one 
passage you will read, Smith explains how the seemingly benign, everyday act of walking her 
dog actually reaffirms the class system. As Smith “keeps an eye on her dog” so that it does its 
business on some lawns as opposed to others, she is, in fact, “observing some of the niceties 
of different forms of property ownership” (renters versus owners) (Smith 1987:155); she is