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Dorothy E. Smith (born 1926) was born in England, and has lived and worked in Canada for most of her adult life as a sociologist. She comes from a notable line of activists who have participated in feminist movements from Quakerism through to the women’s suffrage movement. This lineage has been described as a productive force in facilitating her to envision a feminist standpoint theory (Smythe, 2009)23_{. Smith has been pronounced “a} world-renowned Marxist feminist scholar and activist and a formidable intellect” (Carroll, 2010, p. 9).

The second-wave of the contemporary women’s movement, during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, resulted in various scholars developing feminist perspectives in the context of “diverse struggles for social justice” (Naples, 2003, p. 13), including race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Dorothy Smith, like other feminist scholars in the 1970s, was challenged to find new approaches to knowledge production that would result in more democratic social relations. Conventional social sciences were considered to

23_{Dorothy Smith’s genealogy can be traced back to Margaret Fell (later Margaret Fox), a founder of}

the 17th _{century Quaker movement, an early feminist leader popularly known as the ‘mother of}

Quakerism’. Fell sought greater equality for women and wrote on the right of women to teach and preach scripture (D. E. Smith, 1978). She was imprisoned for her beliefs and pacifist activism. Both Smith’s grandmother, Lucy Ellison Abraham (nee Golding), and mother, Dorothy Foster Place (nee Abraham), were actively involved in the women’s suffrage movement in England (Smythe, 2009). Both were members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by the Pankhurst family in 1903, a militant movement with the slogan “Deeds not Words”. Like Fell, Smith’s mother was held in prison for her participation in militant demonstrations.

80 turn the “chaotic and confusing experiences of everyday life into categories of people in society” (Harding & Norberg, 2005, p. 2009). In turn, those causal accounts of who people were, how they behaved, what they did, enabled institutions to textually govern people’s everyday lives, meeting the needs of the institutions, rather than the needs of those most vulnerable groups. The social sciences were complicit in the exercise of power to control relations, including between men and women, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on.

During the 1970s while working at the University of British Columbia, Smith began articulating her feminist standpoint theory. As both a sociologist and single parent, Smith experienced a disjuncture, or what she described as a “bifurcation of consciousness” (Smith, 1987, p. 6), where her experience as a woman was being conceptualised from a masculine standpoint of ruling and privilege. She was “barred from inhabiting the taken-for-granted” places that men doing sociology inhabited (de Montigny, 2017, p. 337). She found this alienating and untenable. On the one hand she was a sociologist, participating in the masquerade of universality24_{, while on the other she was experiencing everyday life at home} with children. She stated:

[T]he division I experienced in my working life was one that was replicated and reinforced in the sociology I practiced. I could not escape it; I could not find how to reassemble myself as a woman without changing it. I had to find a sociological practice that could begin in the actualities of people’s lives so that I could explore the social from there on, as it is brought into being in the same actuality. (Smith, 2005, p. 22)

In order to reconstruct how she connected with the world both as a woman and as an intellectual, Smith began “the process of unravelling the intellectual nets that trapped [her]”

24 _{Smith references the term from Joan Landes who discusses how masculine speech is aligned with}

truth, objectivity, and reason. Hence the male [in Smith’s case being a sociologist in an androcentric institution] can “masquerade … behind the veil of the universal” (Landes, 1998, p. 143).

81 (Smith, 2005, p. 21). Here the foundations were laid for the development of IE as an alternative sociology.

Her early publications, The Ideological Practice of Sociology (Smith, 1974a), A Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology (Smith, 1974b), and A Peculiar Eclipsing: Women’s Exclusion from Man’s Culture (Smith, 1978), explored the social world from a woman’s perspective, challenging the dominant ideologies of society and sociology. Following her move to the University of Toronto, where she established the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education with Roxanna Ng, Smith authored a range of ground- breaking texts. These included The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987); Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (Smith, 1990b); The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990a); and Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations (1999). In her 2005 book Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005), Smith updated her terminology from a sociology for women to that of a sociology for people, clearly signalling that we must begin our understanding of the social world from the experiences or standpoint of people as they go about their everyday lives. Smith continues to work and publish (Griffith & Smith, 2014a,b; Smith, 2006c; Smith & Turner, 2014a), as an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto.

Institutional ethnography as a sociology is proposed to be both an ontology and epistemology for social science inquiry. Smith (2005) defined ontology as a “theory of reality… of how the social is real… of how the social exists” (p. 52). Social reality exists in people’s actual everyday activities and experiences. Indeed, it is those relations and interactions between people that establish the social world, both how we know it, and how we live in it (Campbell & Gregor, 2004). Reality can only be discovered from the actualities of people’s lives.

82 However, the focus of IE is on the social, and not the individual. Individuals’ everyday lives and actions are coordinated with others by the institutional ruling relations. The coordination is achieved by the replication of texts which reach across multiple similar, though geographically separated, local situations. In the local setting, individuals engage with those texts and in so doing are connected or hooked up into the ruling relations. People’s everyday experiences and actions, often termed work, are being similarly organised or controlled. Smith intended the ontology of IE to provide a theory that helped social inquiry by guiding us as to what we might be observing, listening for, recording, and analysing (Smith, 2005).

As an epistemology, IE provides an approach to inquiry to learn and gain knowledge about our social world. Knowledge of how the world works begins from the experiences and actions of people in the local situation, and by exploring how these experiences and actions are being coordinated by the institutional ruling relations. Texts emanating from the ruling relations enter into the local situation and organise, coordinate, or control, people’s everyday activities. Hence the aim of the inquiry is to make visible how we are connected with the ruling relations through those texts, and how we are ‘hooked up’ into the practices of ruling (Smith, 2005). In this process, the connections between people’s experiences and the extended relations of ruling are mapped and explicated.