F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
forms in which it is recognizable within institu-
tional discourse. For example, when teachers are 
in training they learn a vocabulary and analytic 
procedures that accomplish the classroom in the 
institutional mode. They learn to analyze and 
name the behavior of students as “appropriate” 
or “inappropriate” and to analyze and name their 
own (and others’) responses. In responding to 
“inappropriate” behavior, they have been taught 
to avoid “undermining the student’s ego” and 
hence to avoid such practices as “sarcasm.” They 
should, rather, be “supportive.” This ideological 
package provides a procedure for subsuming 
what goes on in the classroom under professional 
educational discourse, making classroom pro-
cesses observable-reportable within an institu-
tional order.
vi
In this way the work and practical 
reasoning of individuals and the locally accom-
plished order that is their product become an 
expression of the non-local relations of the pro-
fessional and bureaucratic discourse of the ruling 
apparatus.
The accountability procedures of institutions 
make some things visible, while others as much 
a part of the overall work organization that per-
forms the institution do not come into view at all 
or as other than themselves. Local practices 
glossed by the categories of the discourse are 
provided with boundaries of observability 
beneath which a subterranean life continues. 
What is observable does not appear as the work 
of individuals, and not all the work and practices 
of individuals become observable. When my son 
was in elementary school, his homework one day 
was to write up an experiment he had done in 
science class that day. He asked me how to do it 
and I replied (not very helpfully), “Well, just 
write down everything you did.” He told me not 
to be so stupid. “Of course,” he said, “they don’t 
mean you write about everything, like about fill-
ing the jar with water from the tap and taking it 
to the bench.” Clearly there were things done 
around the doing of an experiment that were 
essential to, but not entered into or made account-
able within, the “experimental procedure.” Its 
boundaries were organized conceptually to select 
from a locally indivisible work process, some 
aspects to be taken as part of the experiment and 
others to be discounted. All were done. All were 
necessary. But only some were to be made 
observable-reportable within the textual mode of 
the teaching of science. In like ways, institu-
tional ideologies analyze local settings, drawing 
boundaries and the like. They provide analytic 
procedures for those settings that attend selec-
tively to work processes, thus making only selec-
tive aspects of them accountable within the 
institutional order.
vi
See Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology.
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p
atricia
h
ill
c
ollins
(1948– ): a B
ioGraphical
s
ketch
Patricia Hill Collins was born in 1948 and grew up in a working-class family in Philadelphia. 
She earned her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1969 and her M.A.T. from Harvard 
University in 1970. Collins worked as a schoolteacher and curriculum specialist before 
returning to graduate school and receiving her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University 
in 1984. It was in teaching a course called “The Black Woman” to middle-school girls in 
1970 that Collins realized not only the dearth of teaching materials by and about black 
women, but also the significance of this dearth. The exclusion of black women from intel-
lectual discourses became the subject of her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, 
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), which won the Jessie Bernard 
Award of the American Sociological Association for significant scholarship in gender as 
well as the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In this 
highly acclaimed book (excerpts from which you will read below), Collins illuminates the 
rich, self-defined intellectual tradition of black women, which, she argues, has persisted 

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