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W est and Zimmerman's (1975) early investigations of gender in interaction were particularly valuable in contributing to the visibili y of how we (women) might be inadvertently participating in our own silencing in interactions with men. I have also appreciated West and Fenstermaker's insistence on understanding difference as in and of peo ple's doings. However, I disagree with how the political categories of race, class, and gender are translated into the objects of social scientific inves tigation as interaction and as "doing difference." "Doing Gender" began as an ethnomethodological investigation based in uncovering distinctive patterns of talk among women and men (West and Zimmerman 1975). The theoretical generalization of this investigation into the formulation of doing difference (West and Fenstermaker 1995) confounds political cate gories with the actualities of the social relations out of which movements for change and hence issues of gender, class, and racial inequality arise. I learned from Marx not to take categories and concepts such as race, class, and gender as givens (Smith 2004) in social scientific inquiry. Social science must, in his thinking, go beyond such concepts to discover actual people active in the social relations that the categories express and reflect but do not make observable. It is my view that the social relations reflected or expressed in each of these categories diverge so deeply that they cannot be subsumed under a single theoretical model such as doing gender or doing difference. Start with the term gender West and colleagues (West and Fenstermaker 1995; West and Zimmerman 1987) prefer it to sex. It entered feminist currency to suppress reference to biology as determinative of women's infe riority. Dropping sex and adopting gender buried biology. Although legiti mate as a political move, it has left us with no way of recognizing just how biology enters into relations among women, men, and children. I think of my bodily experience, particularly as a mother, and I am powerfully aware of how biological fundamentals entered into that experience-not just in sex and childbirth but also in the profoundly physical pleasure of suckling a

L'importance de 1'ideologie dans les processus qui resultent dans l'arrangement des relations sociales est un attribut distinctif de ce genre de societe. Tant historiquement que dans le present les femmes ont ete exclues de la production des formes de pensee, des images et des symboles dans lesquels leur experience et leur relations sociales sont exprimees et organisees. La notion d'ideologie telle qu'originalement formulee par Marx et Engels oriente l'attention sur le controle de la creation ideologique par une classe dirigeante, et sur la facon dont les idees et images sont imposees sur d'autres dont les perspectives, interets, et experiences ne sont pas representes. Ce sont presqu'exclusivement des hommes qui occupent les positions d'ou les ideologies sont produites et controlees. Ce sont par consequent leurs perspectives et interets qui sont representes. Une serie de situations historiques de repression illustrent la facon dont les femmes ont ete activement, et parfois brutalement exclues. Des donnees sur la situation actuelle des femmes dans le systeme d'education au Canada offrent une description de pratiques institutionalisees par lesquelles les femmes sont exclues des positions d'influence et de controle dans les structures ideologiques. En plus, des etudes revelent que dans l'ensemble on donne autoritea ce que les hommes disent et on deprecie ce que les femmes disent. La metaphore du ‘cercle’ sert a decrire le controle du developpement ideologique en restreignant la participation aux personnes dument autorisees. Les femmes comme categories sociales ne s'y trouvent pas. Ceci s'observe au niveau de l'interaction directe. Des etudes decrivent des modeles distinctifs de conversations ou la part des femmes dans l'evolution des sujets est restreinte. La consequence de ces exclusions est que les connaissances et les modes de pensees etablies considerent les femmes comme des objets. La perspective des hommes est devenue, dans le contexte academique, institutionalisee comme le ‘domaine’ ou la ‘discipline.’ Ceci est vrai pour la sociologie comme pour d'autres entreprises intellectuelles. On propose en conclusion que les disciplines academiques requierent une critique majeure et doivent etre repensees. Pour la sociologie ceci implique la construction d'une sociologie pour plutot que de la femme et de la position des femmes dans la societe. A distinctive feature of this form of society is the significance of ideology in the processes of ordering its social relations. Women have historically and in the present been excluded from the production of the forms of thought, images, and symbols in which their experience and social relations are expressed and ordered. Marx and Engels' original account of ideology is used to focus on the control of ideological production by a ruling class, and on how ideas and images are thus imposed on others whose perspectives, interests and experience are not represented. Those who occupy the positions from which ideologies are produced and controlled are almost exclusively men. It is therefore their perspectives and interests which are represented. A series of historical instances of repression illustrate how women's exclusion has been an active and sometimes brutal process. For contemporary Canada, data on the position of women in the educational system describe institutionalized practices which exclude women from positions of influence and control in ideological structures. Further, studies are cited showing a general pattern which constitutes what men say as authoritative and depreciates what women say. The metaphor of a ‘circle’ is used to describe the control of ideological development through restricting participation to properly authorized persons. Women as a social category are not among them. This is observable at the level of face-to-face interaction. Studies describe distinctive patterns of interpersonal talk which restrict women's part in the development of topics. The consequence of these exclusions is that the established knowledges and modes of thinking constitute women as objects. The perspective of men has become in the academic context institutionalized as the ‘field’ or ‘discipline.’ This is true of sociology as of other intellectual enterprises. The conclusion proposes that a major critique and rethinking of academic disciplines is needed. In sociology this means constructing a sociology for rather than of women and from the position of women in society.

L'A. s'interroge sur la scolarisation en tant que l'institution qui produit des inegalites sociales et denonce l'ordre institutionnel

I HAVE WRITTEN THIS grudgingly. Susan Hekman's (in this issue) interpretation of my work is so systematically out to lunch that it is difficult to write a response that does not involve a replication of what I have already said, at length and in various versions, elsewhere. But that would interest neither me nor readers. So I have asked myself: Apart from lack of care and thought, what is she doing that leads to her systematic misreading? And what might be systematic about other mistakes such as the chronology of "standpoint theory"'s development (a work published in 1979 is attributed to the decade following, 1983), or that its roots were in Marxism (Where's the women's movement?), or that it is less used and interesting currently (speak for your own discipline, Susan; in sociology it flourishes), or that feminist standpoint theory has become identified with "object-relations" theory (news to me). A major problem is the reification of "feminist standpoint theory." Feminist standpoint theory, as a general class of theory in feminism, was brought into being by Sandra Harding (1986), not to create a new theoretical enclave but to analyze the merits and problems of feminist theoretical work that sought a radical break with existing disciplines through locating knowledge or inquiry in women's standpoint or in women's experience. Those she identified had been working independently of one another and have continued to do so. In a sense, Harding created us. I do not think there was much interchange among us. As standpoint theorists, we became identifiable as a group through Harding's study. And as a construct of Harding's text, we appeared as isolated from the intellectual and political discourses with which our work was in active dialogue. I cannot speak here for Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, or others mentioned in Hekman's article, but, for myself, I am very much aware of being engaged with the debates and innovations of the many feminist experiments in sociology that, like mine, were exploring experience as a method of discovering the social from the standpoint of women's experience. But Hekman goes beyond Harding to constitute us as a common theoretical position, indeed as a foundationalist theory justifying feminist theory as knowledge. A coherence is invented for us: "Despite their significant differences, all of these accounts share the conviction that the feminist standpoint is rooted in a 'reality' that is the opposite of the ab

Responses are usually requested where the subjects may want to defend themselves. But I'm pretty comfortable with what Susan Mann and Lori Kelley have written about my work (although I do have the sense that what Patricia Hill Collins and I are doing are really very different kinds of projects and I'm not sure this comes through). I'm just going to make a couple of points, more perhaps to elaborate than to dissent.

The power of attendants at state mental hospitals to influence policy has often been noted. This paper suggests that the distribution of power in the state mental hospital fails to conform to Michels's "iron law of oligarchy." From an analysis of the ward system, three main characteristics are derived. These are then stated as the formal characteristics of a front-line type of organization in which power tends to be distributed to peripheral units rather than to centralized positions of leadership. It is suggested finally that a front-line type of organization presents special problems of control and hence will tend to develop characteristic structures and processes of control as solutions. Dorothy E. Smith is lecturer, Department of Sociology, and assistant research sociologist, Institute of Human Development, University of California at Berkeley.