Dorothy Smith’s Sociology for People: Theory for Discovery

Origins of a Sociology for Women

Smith grew up in Yorkshire, England. As a young woman, she was active in the labor movement and deeply moved by the time she spent as a social worker. She cared about people, and throughout her life, she was committed to developing a sociology that could speak not only to theorists but also to the difficulties of people whose lives often went unnoticed. Put simply, Smith’s “sociology for women” is meant to begin with everyday puzzles in women’s (or people’s) lives. That standpoint offers a disjuncture, or line of fault, where an official understanding of things is at odds with women’s own experiencing. Seeing that line of fault is only a beginning, however; the work of the sociologist is to investigate and “open up” just how the “ruling” version of things is put together, in a kind of inquiry Smith labeled “institutional ethnography” (IE).

The phrases I quoted previously, from Smith’s (1992) “Reaffirmation,” suggest several important points. First, Smith offers not only theory but a full sociology—a sociology she envisioned as a more satisfying alternative to the one in which she was educated. In the 1992 symposium, she called it a “method of inquiry,” but she would soon begin to bristle at those who labeled the approach a “feminist method.” It was more than method, she would insist; it was a sociology with a foundational ontology in which a distinctive theory and method combined to carry forward an investigation of the unseen social relations that organize people’s everyday lives. It was not only about women, or even only for women, but it offered a way forward from feminist critique.

Furthermore, the goal was not theory building, at least in the established institutional/disciplinary sense. Smith wanted to “open things up” so that her sociology would produce something useful for people in the way a road map is useful—and I think she would argue that road maps are very useful despite the ubiquity now of GPS navigation; more on that later. The kind of investigational practice Smith recommends did not always fit well with the enterprise of professional theorizing—it was not designed to explicate, test, or synthesize theoretical practices. However, as Smith and others worked with her sociology, they began to see and experience a particular kind of discovery associated with the approach. Working from different standpoints, they could find points of connection among their projects. Insights about the difficulties of single parents, for example, could be linked to troubles of classroom teaching and to the work of educational finance. Scholars who were conducting IE studies were not offering accounts of mothers, teachers, or school administrators as isolated workers; rather, they were investigating regimes of “ruling” and how people were connected through their activities in those regimes. These analyses did not depend on abstractions such as power, structure, homophobia, internalized oppression, and the like as causal factors; rather, they produced maps of how people—through their embodied activities—were actually producing institutional action and thereby exercising and participating in the powers of governance (Smith 1987, 2005; for my summary, see DeVault 1999:chapter 3 or DeVault 2006).

Smith’s interests and ideas were of her time, but she mined and combined them in a distinctive way. Patricia Hill Collins, R. W. Connell, and Charles Lemert, who wrote about Smith in the 1992 symposium, appreciated Smith’s project. They shared with her, and with many others, insights into the locatedness of all thought, an appreciation for introducing varied standpoints into sociological theory, and confidence that doing scholarship differently would produce sturdier knowledge of the social. They applauded the breadth of her project and her skillful and creative borrowings from ethnomethodological practices, George Herbert Mead, and the fundamentals of Marxist method (without the abstraction that had come to characterize Marxist theories of the time). It is noteworthy that in 1992, the commentators needed to emphasize her history of work in the field, her number of publications, and her education and position, apparently to make clear that this well-known feminist scholar was a legitimate sociological theorist.

The commentators worried, in various ways, that working from “the standpoint of women” leads to an individualistic approach, although Lemert (1992:65, emphasis in original) appreciated Smith’s approach to subjectivity, noting that “she uses the first person in a way that goes quite beyond herself,” moving “into her own subjective experience in the world, through that experience to the subjective experience of other women, and thus to the world as such”—a formulation that could perhaps serve as a sketch of the method of feminist consciousness raising. Collins and Connell wanted to see Smith theorizing from the thought and circumstances of groups. Collins’s (1992) critique calls to mind her own groundbreaking project of articulating Black feminist thought gathered from the submerged cultural productions of Black women; she asks how such excluded knowledge can be understood through Smith’s method of putting the texts of “ruling” under scrutiny. Such questions still arise in the conversations of those pursuing Smith’s sociology, especially as the approach is taken up in parts of the world where governance is perhaps not so thoroughly conducted through the medium of textual materials. In 1992, Smith’s reply was simply that she and Collins were engaged in different projects; however, she has also insisted that the textual mediation of experience is always an empirical finding and that one might well discover other kinds of coordination—through the built environment, hands-on know-how, ritual and routine, or algorithmic processes, for example—that are more important, or at least part of the picture, in particular investigations.

Language and Text in Smith’s Sociology

All the writers in the 1992 symposium, including Smith, were committed to some version of the linguistic/discursive turn in the social sciences and, more broadly, the new theorizing of language and discourse that was rooted in the humanities and spilling over into fields such as anthropology and sociology (DeVault and Gross 2006:185–86). Lemert’s (1992) article raised profound poststructuralist/postmodern challenges, questioning the stability of any identity and the suspicion of essentialism in any approach grounded in a fixed “standpoint.” I believe such challenges motivated Smith to work out a full response in one of her most brilliant essays, “Telling the Truth after Postmodernism” (first published in 1996 in Studies in Social Interaction and later as chapter 6 in Writing the Social; Smith 1999).

Smith read widely in social and, to some extent, literary and linguistic theory, and she deeply enjoyed the challenges of working out her ideas. She wrote “Telling the Truth” over the course of several years—I know, because we would chat about her progress when we met at conferences—and I was charmed when she told me that finishing the piece was bittersweet, that she missed it as one would miss a companion who has gone away. The project gave her an opportunity to dive deeply into poststructuralist theories of language and discourse and to find theoretical resources (in Mead and the Russian linguists Bakhtin and Vološinov) that could help her develop a thoroughly social (as she saw it) theory of knowledge, grounded in people’s activities. Like the poststructuralists, she could see the powers of language and discourse and the constructedness of identities that were often fragmented and malleable. Smith (Smith and Turner 2014:6) emphasized the “magic” of inscription and textualization. But she wanted to establish that beneath the “flying carpet” of the textual (Smith 1992:92), there is still a world of embodied existence.

In “Telling the Truth,” Smith (1999) locates the actual by developing an account of “referring.” Words are activated, she argues, in social interaction; there is a speaker and a listener, and both are orienting to a world in common. Her model is a mother introducing language to a child, pointing to something in the world (a bird, a fish) and labeling it so the two can look together and come to see a world around them, together. Referring, then, is a concerting of consciousness; language becomes “a kind of zipper among people” (Cameron and McCoy 2022). That simple kind of referring is direct and accountable. Referring through textual material and discourse is more complex and contingent. “However many precise instructions the text includes, the writer may not be able to anticipate comprehensively the contingencies of finding and recognition in particular local settings” (Smith 1999:119–20); the users of texts must know something about how they are to be used. Here, Smith turns to Bakhtin’s notion of “speech genres,” associated with the activities of particular groups, drawing examples from science studies and cases of professional practice. Scientists, for example, learn to find and see cells or pulsars; social workers learn to see child neglect or mental illness. As in the simple case of referring, it is people who take up these specialized discourses and operate them; their activities are coordinated by the words and concepts they share, so they can act on “the sensory ground which human organisms share” (Smith 1999:128). People provide the motor of textually mediated social organization, although it is “easy to forget” (Smith 1999:121) they are active in the process.

Textually Mediated Social Organization

Smith’s sociology for women was developed as a mode of inquiry that could illuminate the unseen, extra-local activities that led to puzzles and difficulties in women’s everyday lives. It was clear already in The Everyday World as Problematic (Smith 1987) that such illumination would come from investigation of ruling concepts and discourses, as they were deployed through institutional practices. In my view, Smith’s most distinctive contributions to sociological theory (with great potential for further development) lie in the theoretical foundation and methodological resources she developed for empirically grounded studies of textually mediated social organization.

In much of her earliest work, Smith (1990) was investigating the “conceptual practices of power.” Often, these investigations were sparked by a disjuncture between a person’s lived experience and how that person was understood officially. For example, a mother sits without speaking in a darkened room for many hours; she is diagnosed as “mentally ill.” The women’s movement had not yet coalesced, but it was beginning: Some women (like Smith) were able to take up the perspective of an anonymous woman sitting in the dark and see her in another way. And they could link that incomplete view of so many anonymous women to the controlling powers of psychiatry and the mental-health regime of the time.

These early studies of conceptual practices were grounded in ethnomethodological studies similarly concerned with facticity and the social construction of ostensibly objective knowledge; the point was to understand how that social process happened. Smith, however, aimed to move further into the institutions of governance, or ruling, as she called it. She wanted to examine how socially constructed facts coordinated the activities of those acting within organizations—always keeping in mind the consequences for ordinary people. The work that followed, developing IE as a method of inquiry, was focused on understanding textual mediation in a context of institutional power.

In Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People, Smith (2005) introduced the idea of a “text-reader conversation” as a way of considering how people encounter and use textual materials. The concept was meant to keep the readers of a text in view and to highlight what they intend to do with a text or document, how the text becomes part of an extended course of action. When people fill out applications, follow guidelines, consult policy documents, and so on, they put in motion the activities of people working in institutions of all sorts. People gather to pass laws, develop mission statements, and negotiate international agreements, and in doing so, they establish standards and set the terms for policies and guidelines. The people engaged in these activities rely on what ethnomethodologists call “members’ knowledge”—the kind of knowledge, in everyday conversation, that allows people to respond appropriately to a question such as “How are you?” (Garfinkel 1967). Smith insists that all these kinds of text-reader conversations can be opened to ethnographic study. In a 2014 collection, Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies, Smith and her coeditor, Susan Turner, discuss the operation and significance of numerous kinds of texts and offer exemplary analyses. Texts, they explain, have an “extraordinary and powerful magic; they create expressive bridges across space and time” (Smith and Turner 2014:6). Texts connect people and organize people to act; to see how they work, the researcher must look for texts in action, for people taking up texts and using them, perhaps working on them, and passing them on to others.

It is tempting (and very useful) to read A Sociology for People (Smith 2005) as a book about method. I see more clearly now that it is also a theoretical statement about how the social is put together and how to “open it up.” Language and text are key to institutional power in most contemporary settings (that is an empirical finding), but Smith insists that people activate language and text. People are always present, always active, and it is people using textual materials that give texts their “magic.” This principle lies at the foundation of Smith’s ontological commitments. In a 2001 article on the ontology of organizations and institutions, Smith (2001:159) pursues “a problem that has scarcely been raised in sociology, that of how institutions and the phenomena called formal or large-scale organization exist.” Texts, she argues, should not be seen simply as information about the things we call organizations; rather, texts are essential to the existence of organizations. Interactions among the people who inhabit institutional spaces are fleeting, ephemeral moments that come into being and then recede into the past. Texts and documents, taken up skillfully by institutional actors who are accountable to others, create the stability of institutional processes. The material, replicable text holds in place one side of multiple text-reader conversations, coordinating the activities of people in one place with those located elsewhere. Smith argues that too much sociology “floats” above the actualities of a world that people hold in common. That kind of “floating sociology” creates a universe of discursive objects, nominalizing what is actually happening; organizational theory is full of nominalizations that grant agency to abstract entities. By contrast, Smith (2001:192, emphasis in original) provides a way of “discovering rather than presupposing organization and institution.”

Smith also argues that “floating sociology” can become ontologically incoherent. Analyses that may seem beautifully sharp and elegant cannot easily be connected, limiting their power. By contrast, in Smith’s approach, investigation is always focused on coordination within ruling institutions, that is, on how people in myriad, interconnected institutional positions operate a regime, whether they are “rulers” in positions of power, workers within an organization, or people who participate in (or resist) the regime as customers or clients. This focus on ruling regimes, brought into being by people acting together, allows investigators to build on the findings of those looking at another node in an extended course of action. Understanding the organization of a 911 call for domestic violence, for example, and how it is reported helps illuminate how the case will be taken up much later by a probation officer (see e.g., Pence 2001). Similarly, nonprofit community organizations in disability and youth services, computer literacy, and refugee resettlement likely confront similar funding regimes that reflect management strategies of the moment (Janz et al. 2014; and more broadly, Griffith and Smith 2014). Ontological coherence arises from a shared focus on mapping the actual, historically located institutional complexes that make up the ruling relations (Smith 1999:chapter 5, 2005:215–22).

As Connell noted in the 1992 forum, the cases and examples Smith discusses are often only “sketches” (Connell 1992:85); in this symposium, Sweet (2023) refers to that quality, I think, as a kind of “provincializing.” Despite the impressive body of Smith’s writing since then, what she offers still only scratches the surface of the terrain she opened—although it has produced analyses that are now filled out more intriguingly and that offer many more lines of additional work to be pursued. Given the vast scope and scale of ruling institutions and their ever-changing character, perhaps one can always only provide a sketch; still, Smith’s sociology promises a map (even if always provisional) that can help people see power more clearly. Both Connell and Sweet are correct, in my view, to note Smith’s focus on specificity as opposed to any grand narrative, but it is clear to me she wanted the broader view as well. She aimed to map the terrain that is in focus in each investigation but also to keep filling in the territory that surrounds it.

Directions for the Future

One strength of IE as a method of inquiry is that it focuses on institutional processes as they are happening; the method highlights change in the ruling regimes that organize social life, whether locally, regionally, or globally (Griffith and Smith 2014). The maps, or “sketches,” that IE researchers produce explore territories that are changing as we follow new tracks. Just as the development of modern bureaucratic practices depended on new forms of documentary organization (Smith 1999:chapter 5), new communication technologies and electronic data processing are producing forms of social organization that scholars are only beginning to explore. Some sociologists have begun to conduct cyber-ethnographies, looking into lives and interactions conducted online; Earles and Crawley (2019) suggest IE may be useful for studies in that realm, and I agree. But I am more interested in new forms of surveillance, tracking, and coordination operating behind the scenes of the face-to-face world where people still live.

Smith’s (2005:228) conception of text (unlike some theorists’) insists on “a form that enables replication (paper/print, film, electronic, and so on) of what is written, drawn, or otherwise reproduced.” The replicability of texts is key because their translocal coordinative power depends on “being able to turn up in identical form wherever the reader, hearer, watcher may be in her or his bodily being” (Smith 2005:228). I would very much like to see sociologists and others take up Smith’s approach to examine electronic modes of social organization—the text-reader conversations that are now conducted on screens. It is clear that more and more of people’s daily interactions are now organized through devices—quite visibly in settlings such as the medical visit, where the patient and provider still sit face to face but are also linked through medical-record software (and in many cases, I suppose it is almost a misnomer to call the interaction face to face because the provider’s gaze is so often directed toward a screen); less visibly, but perhaps even more powerfully, as tech workers’ marketing algorithms that respond to our clicks begin to shape new reporting and media practices (Hastings 2022). There is already a strong line of IE research on electronic health records and how they are shaping nurses’ work in hospitals, arising from a groundbreaking study of Canadian health care reform by nurse-researchers Rankin and Campbell (2006). Their continuing studies and those of their students provide fascinating accounts of on-the-ground implementation of these new technologies and models for keeping people in view while investigating these new forms of social relations. I have been fascinated to learn from their studies and those of other IE scholars about the ways bed-management software organizes hospital discharge routines (Rankin and Campbell 2006), for example, how information systems tighten administrative surveillance of teachers and students (Kerr 2014), and how emergency dispatch systems are organized to limit the discretion of call-takers and minimize organizational risk (Corman 2017). As scholars learn more about the particulars of these systems, they fill in more of the new territories of social life that are organized through algorithms (Aneesh 2009).

Smith’s ideas about textually mediated social relations have traveled widely. As the work on electronic medical records suggests, they have traveled beyond the disciplinary bounds of sociology and been taken up by educators, social workers, nurses and other health care workers, occupational therapists, nutritionists, and environmentalists. It is instructive to consider the use of IE in these “applied” fields that are sometimes overlooked by academic sociologists. Those working in text-drenched fields such as education and social work easily and urgently understand the significance of textual organization in the coordination of their practice. They are already puzzled by the Alice-in-Wonderland character of institutional power, and they feel the constraints of policies made elsewhere, of rules and records that do not fit the face-to-face realities of their workplaces. Too often, students of academic sociology, steeped in what Smith (2005) called the “blob-ontology” of abstract theory, must struggle to feel that puzzlement and thus to begin a close, fruitful examination of institutional practice.

More generally, I would argue that Smith’s writing challenges sociologists to consider what social inquiry can be and do for people. She has suggested that the knowledge produced by her approach is something like a map, and the map-like character of that knowledge gives it credibility and connects it to people’s different experiences in the world. Smith (1999:129) explains that “the text of a map never stands alone; it is always waiting for its connection to the actualities it intends.” When people use a map, they work back and forth from the text to what they can find and locate in an embodied, sensory world. People can start from different locations, finding their places in a larger map, and navigate through the territories that connect them with others. Because the process is one of referring, of coordinating with others in relation to the actualities of the world, a map can be continually revised and corrected. The metaphor of mapping thus points toward “a form of knowledge of the social that shows relations between various and differentiated local sites of experience without subsuming or displacing them” (Smith 1999:130). I would add, too, that using a map encompassing a broad terrain is not like the experience of being directed by a GPS navigation system. Traveling with GPS can be very convenient, but it may also be a disorienting experience. Experts have suggested that with the rise of navigation software, humans could begin to lose the wayfinding skills that served us in the past. I can easily imagine arriving somewhere now without really knowing where I am. And perhaps the same could be true for social theorizing that is not anchored in an actual world.