F eminist and g ender t heories

Feminist and Gender Theories  
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rather the intersection and coordination of more 
than one relational mode of the ruling apparatus. 
Characteristically, state agencies are tied in with 
professional forms of organization, and both are 
interpenetrated by relations of discourse of 
more than one order. We might imagine institu-
tions as nodes or knots in the relations of the 
ruling apparatus to class, coordinating multiple 
strands of action into a functional complex. 
Integral to the coordinating process are ideolo-
gies systematically developed to provide cate-
gories and concepts expressing the relation of 
local courses of action to the institutional func-
tion (a point to be elaborated later), providing a 
currency or currencies enabling interchange 
between different specialized parts of the com-
plex and a common conceptual organization 
coordinating its diverse sites. The notion of 
ethnography is introduced to commit us to an 
exploration, description, and analysis of such a 
complex of relations, not conceived in the 
abstract but from the entry point of some par-
ticular person or persons whose everyday world 
of working is organized thereby. . . . 
Institutional ethnography explores the social 
relations individuals bring into being in and 
through their actual practices. Its methods, 
whether of observation, interviewing, recollec-
tion of work experience, use of archives, textual 
analysis, or other, are constrained by the practi-
calities of investigation of social relations as 
actual practices. Note however that the institu-
tional ethnography as a way of investigating the 
problematic of the everyday world does not 
involve substituting the analysis, the perspectives 
and views of subjects, for the investigation by the 
sociologist. Though women are indeed the expert 
practitioners of their everyday worlds, the notion 
of the everyday world as problematic assumes 
that disclosure of the extralocal determinations of 
our experience does not lie within the scope of 
everyday practices. We can see only so much 
without specialized investigation, and the latter 
should be the sociologist’s special business.
Ideology, Institutions, and the Concept of 
Work as Ethnographic Ground
The coordination of institutional processes is 
mediated ideologically. The categories and con-
cepts of ideology express the relation of mem-
bers’ actual practices—their work—to the 
institutional function. Ethnomethodology has 
developed the notion of accountability to iden-
tify members’ methods accomplishing the order-
liness and sense of local processes.
iii
Members 
themselves and for themselves constitute the 
observability and reportability of what has hap-
pened or is going on, in how they take it up as a 
matter for anyone to find and recognize. 
Members make use of categories and concepts 
to analyze settings for features thus made 
observable. The apparently referential operation 
of locally applied categories and concepts is 
constitutive of the reference itself.
iv
When 
applied to the institutional context, the notion of 
accountability locates practices tying local set-
tings to the nonlocal organization of the ruling 
apparatus. Indeed, the institutional process itself 
can be seen as a dialectic between what mem-
bers do intending the categories and concepts of 
institutional ideology and the analytic and 
descriptive practices of those categories and 
concepts deployed in accomplishing the observ-
ability of what is done, has happened, is going 
on, and so forth. Thus local practices in their 
historical particularity and irreversibility are 
made accountable in terms of categories and 
concepts expressing the function of the institu-
tion. Members’ interpretive practices analyzing 
the work processes that bring the institutional 
process into being in actuality constitute those 
work processes as institutional courses of 
action.
v
Institutional ideologies are acquired by mem-
bers as methods of analyzing experiences located 
in the work process of the institution. Professional 
training in particular teaches people how to 
recycle the actualities of their experience into the 
iii
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
iv
D.L. Wieder, Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code (The Hague: Moulton, 1974).
v
Dorothy E. Smith, “No one commits suicide: Textual analyses of ideological practices,” Human Studies 6 
(1983): 309–359.

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