F eminist and g ender t heories

particularly careful where negative sanctions are 
more likely to be incurred. A description of the 
kind I have given is in this way transposed into a 
normative statement.
As a norm it is represented as governing the 
observed behavior. What is missing, however, is 
an account of the constitutive work that is going 
on. This account arises from a process of practi-
cal reasoning. How I walk my dog attends to and 
constitutes in an active way different forms of 
property as a locally realized organization. The 
normative analysis misses how this local course 
of action is articulated to social relations. Social 
relations here mean concerted sequences or 
courses of social action implicating more than 
SOURCE: Excerpts from The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology by Dorothy Smith. 
Copyright © University Press of New England, Lebanon, N.H. Reprinted with permission.
i
The more tender and civic-minded of my readers may like to know that two things have changed in my life since 
I wrote this. One is that I no longer have a dog of my own. I do, however, sometimes dog-sit my two sons’ dogs. 
The second is that we now have “poop ’n’ scoop” laws in Toronto, so I have learned to overcome my rural-bred 
tendencies to let the shit lie where it falls.

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330
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
one individual whose participants are not nec-
essarily present or known to one another. There 
are social relations that are not encompassed by 
the setting in which my dog is walked, but they 
nonetheless enter in and organize it. The exis-
tence of single-family dwellings, of rental units, 
and the like has reference to and depends upon 
the organization of the state at various levels, its 
local by-laws, zoning laws, and so forth deter-
mining the “real estate” character of the neigh-
borhood; it has reference to and depends upon 
the organization of a real estate market in 
houses and apartments, and the work of the 
legal profession and others; it has reference to 
and organizes the ways in which individual 
ownership is expressed in local practices that 
maintain the value of the property both in itself 
and as part of a respectable neighborhood. Thus 
this ordinary daily scene, doubtless enacted by 
many in various forms and settings, has an 
implicit organization tying each particular local 
setting to a larger generalized complex of social 
relations. . . . 
The language of the everyday world as it is 
incorporated into the description of that world is 
rooted in social relations beyond it and expresses 
relations not peculiar to the particular setting it 
describes. In my account of walking the dog, 
there are categories anchored in and depending 
for their meaning on a larger complex of social 
relations. The meaning of such terms as “single-
family residence” and “rental units,” for exam-
ple, resides in social relations organizing local 
settings but not fully present in them. The par-
ticularizing description gives access to that 
which is not particular since it is embedded in 
categories whose meaning reaches into the com-
plex of social relations our inquiry would expli-
cate. Ordinary descriptions, ordinary talk, trail 
along with them as a property of the meaning of 
their terms, the extended social relations they 
name as phenomena.
Thus taking the everyday world as problem-
atic does not confine us to particular descriptions 
of local settings without possibility of general-
ization. This has been seen to be the problem 
with sociological ethnographies, which, however 
fascinating as accounts of people’s lived worlds, 
cannot stand as general or typical statements 
about society and social relations. They have 
been seen in themselves as only a way station to 
the development of systematic research proce-
dures that would establish the level of generality 
or typicality of what has been observed of such-
and-such categories of persons. Or they may be 
read as instances of a general sociological prin-
ciple. This procedure has been turned on its head 
in an ingenious fashion in “grounded theory,” 
which proposes a method of distilling generaliz-
ing concepts from the social organization of the 
local setting observed whereupon the latter 
becomes an instance of the general principles 
distilled from it.
ii
The popularity of this device 
testifies to the extent to which the problem of 
generalizability is felt by sociologists. The single 
case has no significance unless it can in some 
way or another be extrapolated to some general 
statement either about society or some subgroup 
represented methodologically as a population of 
individuals, or connecting the local and particu-
lar with a generalizing concept of sociological 
discourse.
Beginning with the everyday world as prob-
lematic bypasses this issue. The relation of the 
local and particular to generalized social rela-
tions is not a conceptual or methodological issue, 
it is a property of social organization. The par-
ticular “case” is not particular in the aspects that 
are of concern to the inquirer. Indeed, it is not a 
“case” for it presents itself to us rather as a point 
of entry, the locus of an experiencing subject or 
subjects, into a larger social and economic pro-
cess. The problematic of the everyday world 
arises precisely at the juncture of particular expe-
rience, with generalizing and abstracted forms of 
social relations organizing a division of labor in 
society at large. . . . 
I am using the terms “institutional” and “insti-
tution” to identify a complex of relations form-
ing part of the ruling apparatus, organized around 
a distinctive function—education, health care, 
law, and the like. In contrast to such concepts as 
bureaucracy, “institution” does not identify a 
determinate form of social organization, but 
ii
Barney Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research 
(Chicago: Aldine Press, 1967).

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