F eminist and g ender t heories

Significant Others

---

318

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
 
d
orothy
e. s
mith
(1926– ): a B
ioGraphical
s
ketch
Dorothy E. Smith was born in the north of England in 1926. She worked at a variety of jobs 
and was a secretary at a publishing company before she decided to enhance her employment 
prospects by attaining a college degree. She began college at the London School of 
Economics in 1951, and received her bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1955. She and her 
husband then decided to both go on to graduate school at the University of California, 
Berkeley. Smith maintains that, although her years at Berkeley were in many ways the 
unhappiest of her life, she learned a lot, both inside and outside the classroom (University 
of California n.d.). Through “the experience of marriage, of immigration closely following 
marriage, . . . of the arrival of children, of the departure of a husband rather early one morn-
ing, of the jobs that became available” she learned about the discrepancy between social 
scientific description and lived experience (Smith 1987:65). Through courses in survey 
methods and mathematical sociology, she learned a type of sociological methodology that 
she would come to reject, but with which she would come to formulate her own opposing 
methodology. Through a wonderful course taught by Tamotsu Shibutani, she gained a deep 
appreciation for George Herbert Mead, which “laid the groundwork for a later deep involve-
ment with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (Institutional Ethnography n.d.).
After completing her doctorate in sociology in 1963, Smith worked as a research soci-
ologist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. At times, she was the only 
woman in the university’s department of sociology. Deeply moved by the newly emerging 
women’s movement, Smith organized a session for graduate students to “tell their stories” 
about gender inequities in academia (of which “there were many”) (ibid.).
By the late 1960s, Smith’s marriage had fallen apart, and, lacking daycare and family 
support, she returned home to England to raise her children and teach. She became a lecturer 
in sociology at the University of Essex, Colchester. Several years later, Smith accepted a 
full-time position at the University of British Columbia, and it was here that Smith’s femi-
nist transformation, which had begun in Berkeley, deepened. Smith taught one of the first 
women’s studies courses; the lack of existing materials gave her impetus to “go from the 
kind of deep changes in my psyche that accompanied the women’s movement to writing 
those changes into the social” (ibid.). Smith also helped create a women’s action group that 
worked to improve the status of women “at all levels of the university”; she was involved 
in establishing a women’s research center in Vancouver outside the university that would 
provide action-relevant research to women’s organizations (ibid.). Smith also edited a vol-
ume providing a feminist critique of psychiatry (Women Look at Psychiatry: I’m Not Mad, 
I’m Angry, 1975) and began to reread Marx and integrate Marxist ideas into her work, as is 
reflected in her pamphlet Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin, a Way to Go (1977).
3
In 1977, Smith became a professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies 
in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. 
Here Smith published the works for which she is most well known, including The Everyday 
World as Problematic (1987), The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990), Texts, Facts, and 
Femininity (1990), Writing the Social (1999), and, most recently, Institutional Ethnography: 
A Sociology for People (2005). In these works, Smith exhorts a powerful feminist theory of 
what she calls relations of ruling, and she sets out her own approach, which she calls insti-
tutional ethnography, as a means for building knowledge as to how the relations of ruling 
operate from the standpoints of the people participating in them. These pivotal ideas will be 
discussed further below.
3
Interestingly, Smith (1977:9) maintains that, although she worked as a socialist when she was a young 
woman in England, it was not until she reread Marx in the 1970s that she came to really understand 
what Marx meant.

---