286 Mary Jo Neitz
feminist theory is in its proposal for a method of inquiry that calls us to a different way
of doing sociology. In what follows, I present Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins
as proponents of a feminist epistemological shift.
Dorothy Smith: Institutional Ethnography and the Relations of Ruling
Dorothy Smith began publishing her project, the developing “sociology for women” in
the mid-1970s. Although sometimes difficult to read, this evolving body of work speaks
to an increasing number of second- and third-wave feminist sociologists, women and
men.^10 Trained in ethnomethodology and Marxism, Smith critiqued the positivist
assumptions of mainstream sociology and advocated for an “interested sociology,” a
sociology that began from women’s experience. In early writings, Smith described her
own foundational experience as a graduate student, in which the theories and concepts
of sociology constituted a separate cognitive domain from the experience she had as
an adult woman, a mother. She did not experience the two different cognitive domains
simply as “alternatives” but rather as a “bifurcated consciousness” (1987: 17–43; 45–
104).
Smith came to understand her own experiences as a woman and a sociologist in
the context of the women’s liberation movement. She writes:
Beginning in women’s experience told in women’s words was and is a vital political
moment in the women’s movement. Experience is a method of speaking that is not
preappropriated by the discourses of the relations of ruling. This is where women
began to speak from as the women’s movement of our time came into being....In
this political context the category of “women” is peculiarly non-exclusive since it
was then and has remained open-ended, such that the boundaries established at
any one point are subject to the disruptions of women who enter speaking from a
different experience, as well as an experience of difference. (1997: 394)In recent years, as students have taken up her approach to understand “how things
happen” to other groups, Smith has come to call her project a “people’s sociology”
(1999: 5). Although earlier discussions have tended to frame the contribution of Smith,
as well as Collins and others, in terms of “standpoint theory,” that term is used in
widely varying ways by different authors, and Smith now rejects it for herself.^11 I focus
my discussion here on Smith’s method of inquiry, institutional ethnography. In con-
junction with her students, Smith has continued to develop institutional ethnography
as a way of studying structures of power beginning in the location of particular people
living their everyday lives (DeVault 1998; Campbell and Manicom 1995). Smith and
her students intend that information uncovered through such investigations will be
useful for those working for social change.
(^10) Smith writes of the importance of her continuing dialogs, especially with students, for her
efforts to “to make plain just what it is which differentiates this way of doing sociology”
(1999: 4).
(^11) In her influential book,The Science Question in Feminism(1986) Sandra Harding classified three
different types of feminist methodologies, and grouped together a number of writers who had
used the term “standpoint,” including Smith. Within Harding’s broad purview, these scholars’
positions did indeed have something in common relative to the others Harding surveyed
(whom she types “feminist empiricists” and “feminist postmodernists”). Yet their positions
remain distinct from one another. See the debate inSigns(1997) 22: 341–402.