F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
organized quite differently. Remembering a dental 
appointment for one of the children wasn’t part of 
my academic consciousness, and if I wasn’t careful 
to find some way of reminding myself that didn’t 
depend on memory, I might have well forgot it. My 
experiences uncovered radical differences between 
home and academy in how they were situated, and 
how they situated me, in the society. Home was 
organized around the particularities of my chil-
dren’s bodies, faces, movements, the sounds of 
their voices, the smell of their hair, the arguments, 
the play, the evening rituals of reading, the stress of 
getting them off to school in the morning, cooking, 
and serving meals, and the multitudes of the every-
day that cannot be enumerated, an intense, preoc-
cupying world of work that also cannot really be 
defined. My work at the university was quite differ-
ently articulated; the sociology I thought and taught 
was embedded in the texts that linked me into a 
discourse extending indefinitely into only very 
partially known networks of others, some just 
names of the dead; some the heroes and masters of 
the contemporary discipline; some just names on 
books or articles; and others known as teachers, 
colleagues, and contemporaries in graduate school. 
The administrative work done by faculty tied into 
the administration of the university, known at that 
time only vaguely as powers such as dean or presi-
dent or as offices such as the registrar, all of whom 
regulated the work we did with students. My first 
act on arriving in the department office, after greet-
ing the secretaries, was to open my mail and thus to 
enter a world of action in texts.
I knew a practice of subjectivity in the university 
that excluded the local and bodily from its field. 
Learning from the women’s movement to start from 
where I was as a woman, I began to attend to the 
university and my work there from the standpoint of 
“home” subjectivity. I started to notice what I had 
not seen before. How odd, as I am walking down 
the central mall of that university that opens up to 
the dark blue of the humped islands and the fur-
ther snowy mountains to the north, to see on my 
left a large hole where before there had been a 
building! In the mode of the everyday you can 
find the connections, though you may not always 
understand them. In a house with children and 
dogs and rabbits, the connection between the 
destruction of the spine of my copy of Mind, 
Self, and Society and that rabbit hanging around 
in my workspace was obvious. But the hole 
where once there’d been a building couldn’t be 
connected to any obvious agent. The peculiar 
consciousness I practiced in the university began 
to emerge for me as a puzzlingly strange form of 
organization. If I traced the provenance of that 
hole, I’d be climbing up into an order of rela-
tions linking administrative process with what-
ever construction company was actually 
responsible for the making of the hole; I’d be 
climbing into a web of budgets, administrative 
decisions, provincial and federal government 
funding, and so on and so on. I’d be climbing 
into that order of relations that institutional eth-
nographers call the “ruling relations.” These 
could be seen as relations that divorced the sub-
ject from the particularized settings and rela-
tionships of her life and work as mother and 
housewife. They created subject positions that 
elevated consciousness into a universalized 
mode, whether of the social relations mediated 
by money or of those organized as objectivity in 
academic or professional discourse. Practicing 
embodiment on the terrain of the disembodied 
of those relations brought them into view. I 
became aware of them as I became aware of 
their presence and power in the everyday, and, 
going beyond that hole in the ground, I also 
began to think of the sociology I practiced in the 
everyday working world of the university as an 
organization of discursive relations fully inte-
grated with them.
Introduction to The Everyday World as Problematic
In this reading taken from The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), Smith further eluci-
dates institutional ethnography using concrete examples from her own experience. As you 
will see, by starting from her own experience Smith does not mean that she engages only in 
a self-indulgent inner exploration with herself as sole focus and object. Rather, Smith means 
that she begins from her own original but tacit knowledge as well as from the acts by which 
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