Dorothy Smith’s Legacy of Social Theorizing: Introduction

Thirty years ago, Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne (1992) organized a symposium in Sociological Theory with the aim of tearing down a “wall of silence” between feminist theory and the mainstream of sociological theorizing. ¹ For help, the editors turned to the work of Dorothy E. Smith, who over the preceding two decades had established herself as a renowned theoretician and methodologist, having published writings that spanned intellectual traditions from ethnomethodology and phenomenology to literary theory and Marxist materialism. The esteemed panel of commentators—Raewyn Connell, Patricia Hill Collins, and Charles Lemert—warned that sociology overlooked Smith and feminist theory more generally at its own expense.

Today, Smith’s theorizing carries even greater appeal, having expanded from a sociology for women to a sociology for people. This wider scope never sacrifices her project’s theoretical versatility, nimbleness, and disdain for abstraction. Smith’s view of the social is at once interpretivist (stressing historical standpoints but spurning Weberian ideal types; see Smith 1997), structuralist (emphasizing how experiences emerge from specific historical and social conditions but are not determined by fixed categories; see Mann and Kelley 1997), and anti-essentialist (rejecting postmodernism’s denial of the subject in favor of a view of people as “agentic, active—but not volitional”; Crawley, Whitlock, and Earles 2021:128). Yet at the heart of Smith’s sociology is a commitment to beginning with the concrete experiences of people (“small heroes,” she called them) in the work we do. This means Smith’s (1987:820) “theory” of the social world is more accurately “a skill, a how-to, rather than a content.” In offering a critical tribute to Smith, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 95, the present symposium invited three scholars—Paige Sweet, Rebecca Lund, and Marjorie DeVault—to share new reflections on the legacy of Smith’s powerful mode of inquiry.

Dorothy Edith Smith grew up in rural northern England in the years leading up to World War II. At the close of the war, Smith worked in a factory and in the election campaign for a Labour Party candidate, which presaged her later interests in Marxism, socialism, and support for workers’ rights (Carroll 2010). Witnessing how politicized the British working-class was at the time became the “first real shift” in her life, as she recalled (Carroll 2010:11). With this growing political consciousness, Smith gravitated toward sociology as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics. She completed her PhD in sociology at the University of California-Berkeley in 1963. ² At Berkeley, Smith took transformative courses with Tamotsu Shibutani (which led her to phenomenology, the subject of Paige Sweet’s article in this symposium), but she remembered her academic training as mostly “fundamentally at odds with” ³ the sociology she pledged to build after graduate school, one that begins with “the local actuality of people’s lives” (Smith 1994:54).

Smith’s notion of a “bifurcated consciousness” grew out of her dissonant experiences in graduate school: of being pressured to conform to the institutional rules of university life while also being a mother raising two children. ⁴ What Smith observed as the “lines of fault” among home, family, and work—and the crisscrossing fractures between women’s experiences and the ruling relations—would serve as modes of inquiry for Smith’s feminist sociology. After joining the faculty at the University of British Columbia in 1968, Smith organized a consciousness-raising group with female graduate students that drew on the energy of the emerging women’s movement. In an interview shortly before her death, Smith reflected on the “transformation” in this period of her life. “Essentially what I was doing,” Smith said, “was actually dumping all that had been built into my mind that took for granted the authority of men” (Cameron and McCoy 2022). Smith’s early work examined how men’s authority structured “extralocal, objectified relations of ruling” (what Smith would call the “institutional imaginary”; Smith 1990a:65; see also Smith 1994). Through the 1970s, Smith developed a sociology for women that deeply engaged Marxism: both to show how women and families were essential to the exploitative productive enterprise of a new corporate capitalism (Smith 1975) and to develop more broadly a manner of thinking about social relations that resonated with Marx and Engel’s view of ontology from The German Ideology, of “the inseparability of consciousness and individual” (Smith 1987:123, emphasis in the original).

Smith published a trio of influential books—The Everyday World as Problematic (Smith 1987); Texts, Facts, and Femininity (Smith 1990b); and The Conceptual Practices of Power (Smith 1990a)—that served as the basis for the 1992 symposium in Sociological Theory. ⁵ Among the major foci of the symposium was the distinctiveness of Smith’s understanding of standpoint epistemology, and Smith’s exchange with the three panelists helped clarify her positions in relation to major theoretical debates that would swell in significance that decade and beyond. ⁶ In her comment for the 1992 symposium, Patricia Hill Collins observes in Smith’s project a powerful critique of sociology’s inner circle. ⁷ But Collins (1992:79) wonders: What happens when marginalized others enter the inner circle and take part “in the very relations of ruling which Smith abhors”? Smith’s view resonates with a core principle of Collins’s (1986) notion of an “outsider-within”—that people’s intimate experiences are embedded in historically processual, extralocal forms—but she says Collins and others ascribe incorrectly an oppositional stance to Smith’s view of marginalized insiders.

In her comment, Connell (1992) lauded Smith’s “meta-analysis” of the core assumptions of sociological theorizing. Connell, however, wonders if Smith’s critique is more “anarchist” than Marxist in nature and sees Smith as prioritizing individualism above the collective in the production of knowledge. Smith asserts that Connell confuses individualism for Smith’s preferred site of human experience. Standpoints for Smith—and in the symposium, she expresses frustration that no better term than “standpoint” is available—are not necessarily vantage points on the operation of power, ones that privilege any single knower, “woman” or otherwise (Smith 1992). They are not given, fixed locations, but an achievement where there is the possibility, although no guarantee, of “politicizing such knowledge in communities of other knowers” (Sweet 2018:229) and of collective resistance.

In his 1992 comment, Charles Lemert muses that Smith’s idea of a standpoint pushes “subjectivity to its limit.” Yet Lemert (1992:71) questions if it is possible to locate “Smith’s null point of subjective experience” amid the reality of people’s many, fragmented identities. Smith (1992:90) responds that “anyone’s,” and not just women’s, experience could “become a beginning-place inquiry.” She next asks why sociologists like Lemert are so quick to default to categories (in this case, fractured identities) within ideology. Smith (1992:91) expresses skepticism over how poststructuralism locates standpoints within “text-mediated discourse” (see also Smith 1993). She had earlier called Foucault’s rendering of power and knowledge a “mystical conjunction,” where both are ascribed an ontology separate from the materiality of people’s lives (Smith 1990a:79). Actual people should never go missing or be positioned as subjects assumed to be “automatically renewable” within ideology (Bannerji 2022:6). Crucially, Smith’s (1992:91) method of inquiry “begins one step back before the Cartesian shift that forgets the body,” an insight that would become foundational to work on embodiment (e.g., Pitts-Taylor 2015).

But poststructuralism—or even opposing accounts of the social such as realism and positivism, of which Smith was also suspicious—was not Smith’s primary target. Rather, Smith (1997:820) was frustrated more generally with empirical inquiry that begins within “a particular theoretical enclave” and what she saw as a tendency to make proprietary claims to theoretical frameworks for their own sake. Obsessive attachments to such enclaves resulted in the defense and reification of concepts (capital, structure, interaction, discourse, and more), in a process Smith (2005) termed “blob ontology.” So when ethnomethodologists expanded the influential framework of “doing gender” to “doing difference” (West and Fenstermaker 1995), Smith took aim at the blob ontology of categorization. According to Smith (2009:79), the leap from one category (of gender) to many others under the rubric of difference only thingified categories as “discrete phenomena.” However, when scholars at the turn of the century identified Smith as an architect of the “new feminist epistemologies” that blend modernist (and structural) accounts with postmodernist (and poststructural) insights (Mann and Kelley 1997), Smith did not disagree with the association. Instead, so long as sociologists remain open to how people actually live their lives, then for Smith (1997), discourses, ideologies, and a “whole slew” of other concepts (Bannerji 2022:6) could be pulled down into explaining the social organization of human activity. This resulting interpretive-materialist orientation “radically links the discursive to the material” in human lives always in motion (Crawley 2022:384).

Researchers have adapted Smith’s ideas and taken them in exciting directions. Many have drawn inspiration from Smith’s thinking on subject-object relations and standpoints, ranging from the immersive study of the hyper-surveillance of Black and Latino youth (Rios 2011) to writing on how a subaltern epistemology challenges Eurocentric social theorizing (Go 2016) to reflections on capturing the irrational “ghostly matters” of social life (Gordon 2008). Sweet (2018) draws on Smith’s insights on difference and embodiment to smooth out discrepancies between feminist standpoint theory—with its deep epistemological concerns—and critical realism—with its more abiding interests in ontology. Crawley et al. (2021) found Smith’s project useful for sociologists frustrated with poststructuralism’s dismissal of empirical and other traditional scientific methods. These scholars see in Smith’s anti-essentialist view of the social a method of “queering” the normativity of social relations: a way of avoiding territorial disputes between the material and the discursive and seeing practical people as always on the move—abstract metaphors be damned. And while Smith (1992) herself was skeptical of Connell’s suggestion that participatory action research (PAR) could open up new vistas for Smith’s theorizing, practitioners have since found in Smith’s work a guide for an engaged, activist ethnography in the spirit of PAR (Jordan and Kapoor 2016) and other modes of community-based research (Mykhalovskiy and McCoy 2002).

Since the 1992 symposium, no area of Smith’s work has resonated as widely as her framework for institutional ethnography (IE). The trailblazing 2005 volume Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (Smith 2005) amplified the statement she made in her 1992 reply that sociology was for “anyone” (see Rebecca Lund’s article in this symposium). The book brought together Smith’s various insights, dating back to early in her career, into how “textual realities” consolidate the ruling relations of institutions under contemporary capitalism (Smith 1990a; see also Marjorie DeVault’s article in this symposium). These insights proved invaluable to early writings on gendered organizations and labor (Acker 1990), but Smith’s method stressed a more expansive understanding of what counts as (and how people themselves understand) “work.” The empirical objective of IE, then, is to consider how people’s “everyday/everynight” experiences are linked in textually mediated, “institutional circuits” in larger capitalist relations. At the end of her life, Smith remained committed to making IE and sociology as accessible as possible. As the title of her final book—published with the late Allison I. Griffith—announced, IE was “simply” and most profoundly, a way to bear witness to “the social as actually happening among people” (Smith and Griffith 2022:xiv). Smith’s legacy of a sociology for people was an insistence that sociologists—from all theoretical enclaves—never lose sight of those people.

Thirty years after Laslett and Thorne’s edited symposium, the wall between sociological theory and feminist theory has cracked. Our symposium invites readers to consider how Smith’s writings can help us understand and overcome the lines of fault that remain. ⁸ In the first article, Paige Sweet observes that Smith used the 1992 symposium to “provincialize” her ideas, grounding them in her political commitments from the start of her career in the making of an anti-essentialist view of human experience. As Sweet points out, Smith’s overlooked phenomenological contributions provide leverage for understanding the historical relations between subjects and structures, a generative perspective overshadowed by other concepts in the field (e.g., habitus). In the next article, Rebecca Lund agrees with the view of Smith as an eclectic thinker but directs us to Smith’s Marxist-inspired materialism. This reorientation toward a feminist Marxism, in Lund’s view, can move past certain tendencies in feminist social theory associated with New Materialism and anti-categorical applications of intersectionality. In the final article, Marjorie DeVault returns to the heart of Smith’s project. For the late Canadian sociologist, the practice of sociology was less about building theory in a systematic way and more about “opening things up” and making sociology useful for all people. As DeVault writes, Smith’s sociology remains as relevant as ever for pushing us to understand how people activate and are shaped by the texts and language of institutional life. Just as important, Smith modeled a sociology that never lost its sense of wonder.