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This chapter proposes incorporating into institutional ethnographies the authorized language of institutional texts as people use its words. Institutional words generalize, lack definite referents, but define and authorize definite sequences of action. Gillian Walker shows how the concept of family violence established in government displaced the women’s movement organized expression of women’s experience of male violence; Gerald de Montigny describes his use of institutional words looking for evidence relevant to securing custody for the child whose suffering he is currently experiencing; George Smith shows how undercover police tell their story to fit the legal terms that will enable charges to be laid against gay men enjoying sex in a bathhouse. The conclusion stresses the ethnographic value of the generalizing capacities of institutional language in defining actual and particular actions as institutional.

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.

The article argues that Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history and that this critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer of class status to class consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus, the historical rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations.

This paper reconnects the major texts, Rigoberta Menchu's autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchu (Menchu & Debray, 1984) and David Stoll's Rigoberta Menchu and the story of all poor Guatemalans (Stoll, 1999) with the historical contexts and continuities in which they have been and are active. Its interest is in examining them in the connections between popular on-the-ground struggles in Guatemala and the textual representations entered into in ideological struggles in North America. The writer does not dissociate herself from the latter. She takes up her position on the progressive side, recognizing Menchu's story, with all its problems, as speaking from native peoples' experiences of repression and struggles in the highlands of Guatemala. Her interest is in how Stoll's text goes to work on Menchu's, in the implicit historicity of his study that is submerged by his claim to an objective empiricism, and in how his "findings" have been progressively attenuated as they pass through media versions to simplified...

This final keynote address focuses on how to make work visible. Drawing on the methodology of institutional ethnography, the author advocates a mode of inquiry that starts in people's everyday lives, examining the relations, organizations and forms of power that intersect with and organize the everyday world and relate us to others in ways we do not easily see or appreciate. This approach makes visible a whole range of activities that do not usually appear as work: waiting in lines, gathering the materials needed to begin work, the thinking and planning that makes work appear to happen effortlessly. It makes visible the complex organization of social relations that results, for example, in the downloading of work from paid to unpaid (e.g. bagging our own groceries, doing our own bank deposits, assigning postal codes to letters). People's relations to others change imperceptibly. Our social world is reorganized, yet much of the complex organization of work remains invisible. The very process of us...

This paper examines the problem of how institutions and the phenomena called formal or large-scale organization exist—the problem of the ontology of organizations and institutions. It addresses this problem using an approach that has been developed as part of a sociology exploring the social from women's standpoint, from which standpoint the extra-locality and objectification of these forms of organization are problematized. For the most part, sociology formulates the phenomena of organizations and institutions in lexical forms of organization, institution, information, communication and the like, which suppress the presence of subjects and the local practices that produce the extra-local and objective. This paper argues that texts (or documents) are essential to the objectification of organizations and institutions and to how they exist as such. It suggests that exploring how texts mediate, regulate and authorize people's activities expands the scope of ethnographic method beyond the limits of observatio...

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

used to devise ways of "seeing" social organization in the speech and graffiti in which the ideology of "fag" is realized in schools. His conception of the dialogic explicates the relationship between researcher and informants, as well as the dialogues internal to informants' narratives. Excerpts from their stories create windows into the local practices of the ideology of "fag" as they experienced it and made available the social organization of their everyday school lives. Analysis focuses on how speech, whether as verbal abuse or homophobic graffiti, concerts antigay activities, articulating to the wider organization of gender and the school as a regime. Informants' stories describe how "fag" as a stigmatized object is constituted in "gossip." Aspects of youths' appearance are interpreted with reference to "fag" as an underlying pattern. Everyday practices of "fag-baiting", such as poking fun, teasing, name calling, scrawling graffiti on lockers, insulting and harassing someone, produce the "fag" as a social object. The language intends a course of action isolating the gay student and inciting to physical violence. Verbal abuse both is and initiates attack. As a form of public speech, graffiti constitute a depersonalized form of threat and harassment. Whether a gay student is identified as "fag" or not, he acquires a gay identity/ consciousness through the practices of the ideology of "fag." What the article describes is a normal part of school organization. The social relations of heterosexuality and patriarchy dominate its public space. Being gay is never spoken of positively (in these informants' experience). Teachers are reported as being generally complicit by their silence if not actively participating in the ideology. Attacks on and ostracism of gay students are taken for granted. The heterosexism of the regime makes "fag" the stigmatized other and, reflexively, "fag" as stigmatized other feeds into the regime's heterosexism. Thus, the gay students' stories show the school's complicity in the everyday cruelties of the enforcement of heterosexist/homophobic hegemony. Gay and lesbian youth attend schools throughout the nation .... These students-from every ethnic and racial background, in urban, suburban, and rural schools-have sat

The social sciences are systematically developed forms of knowledge that are in and of the ruling relations and conform to its objectifying order. This paper proposes the creation of a sociology th...

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

This paper explores the complex of objectified social relations that organize and regulate our lives in contemporary society. Its inquiry is driven by experiences in the women's movement of a dual ...

The concerns of this paper come from an attempt to develop sociological inquiry from women's standpoint and to create a sociology for people. It is a project that must rely on the possibility of “telling the truth.” The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of representation and reference creates a fundamental problem for this project. It challenges the very possibility of a sociology committed to inquiry into the actualities of the social as people live them. The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of the unitary subject of modernity is central. It is argued that the subject and subject-object relations are inescapably in and of discourse and language. Both subject and object are discursively constituted and there is no beyond to which reference can be made in establishing the truth of statements. Rather subjects are constituted only in discourse and are fragmented, multiple, diverse. This paper argues that, though the unitary subject is rejected, an individuated subject survives though multiplied and that a central failure of poststructuralism/postmodernism is to come to grips with the social as actual socially organized practices. Using the theories of George Herbert Mead and Mikhail Bakhtin, the paper goes on to offer an alternative understanding of referring and “telling the truth.” Observations of sequences in which people are identifying an object for one another are described to demonstrate the radically and ineluctably social character of the process. The argument is then extrapolated with further examples to offer an alternative account of referring. A description of using a street map in an actual context of “finding our way” exemplifies how a science might be inserted into a local practice. Telling the truth, it is argued, is always and only in just such actual sequences of dialogue among people directly present to one another or indirectly present in the texts they have produced. My own and others' observations are used to reconceptualize “referring” in general as integral to a social act of finding and recognizing an object as a local performance. In conclusion, I suggest that the example of a map offers to sociology a model that does not displace and subordinate people's experience but can be used by them to expand their knowledge beyond it.

My work and thinking as a feminist sociologist have been profoundly influenced by the understanding I developed of the materialist method, as it was first formulated in Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology. The interpretation of Marx’s method explored in this chapter originated in my interest in finding a method of inquiry other than those in which I had been trained, which replicated the objectifying androcentrism of the ruling relations.1 In this chapter I present a reading of this aspect of Marx’s epistemology that differs substantially from how it is generally viewed. Though my reading has been close and carefully repeated and renewed over the years, it is still one that examines Marx’s thinking dialogically, being focused on what he can teach me of his method of inquiry, rather than on an explication of his theory.

The differences between Patricia Clough and I are very deep. Not that I reject the kind of analysis of discourse that Clough recommends. On the contrary. I've valued what I've learned from feminist and literary cultural theory and analysis. I have disagreements, of course. These have been sharpened by my encounter with Clough's critique of my work. A central and quite fundamental difference is that I propose a point d'appui for sociological inquiry in the actualities of people's lives. I'm talking about a place to begin, not a topic, nor a subject-matter, nor an object. From this beginning, we can, I hold, discover something at least of how this leviathan we live in is put together in the concerting and coordinating of people's ongoing activities, including those of discourse. Clough however can't imagine a subject outside discourse, in life, or conceive of a project of investigation and discovery of a world beyond and encompassing discourse. She is committed and can see no alternative to a standpoint within discourse having discourse as its object. I learned in the early years of the women's movement that there was indeed a site beyond and inclusive of the text-mediated, text-based discourses of professional sociology and academia. Or of the media, popular culture, or high culture. You might describe it as where we live. As particular individuals, embodied, in particular actual places with particular actual others, at the time it is right now. Basic stuff. Me sitting here writing, drinking a little wine, hearing the radio downstairs, and the obscure sound of water running which probably means that the toilet has jammed again. This privileged place of being, this little island for writing. I understand that sociology is discourse; I understand that our business as sociologists is to write society, the ongoing concerting and coordinating of people's activities, into the texts of that discourse. I understand therefore a place for the reader and knower outside the text has to be held in the text and have taken the concept of standpoint to operate as that discursive function. There is a big difference between a sociology writing a knowledge of people coordinated with the relations of ruling and their order, and a knowledge that recognizes that it too is itself in life, may be read, and used, and may extend people's ordinary good knowledge (embedded in their practices) mapping relations beyond the reach of the immediately known. The notion of a standpoint outside discourse holds a place in discourse for she who has not yet spoken, not yet declared herself, not yet disinterred her buried life.

This article describes the “Standard North American Family” or SNAF as an ideological code. An ideological code is analogous to a genetic code, reproducing its characteristic forms and order in multiple and various discursive settings. Its operation in two settings is explored. The first is the writer's experience (shared with Alison Griffith) of designing and carrying out a study of the work that women do as mothers in relation to their children's schooling. Although the researchers were committed to feminist methods and to a critical perspective, SNAF reproduced itself in their conceptualization, their interview practices, and in how women responded to them. The second is William Julius Wilson's consideration of the Black family in his study The Truly Disadvantaged. An analysis of his text demonstrates its SNAF-governed order and how its representational credibility is sustained by the SNAF-generated statistics of government agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Census. It is suggested that such ideological codes may have a significant political effect by importing representational order even into the texts of those who are overtly opposed to the representations they generate.

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.

This collection of essays, written by Dorothy Smith over the past eight years, is a long-awaited treasure by one of the world's foremost social thinkers. In it, Smith turns her wit and common sense on the prevailing discourses of sociology, political economy, philosophy, and popular culture, at the same time developing her own sociological and feminist practice in unexpected and remarkable directions. Shedding the idiom of the sociologist, Smith inquires directly into the actualities of peoples' lives. Her critical investigations of postmodernism, political correctness, university politics, and SNAF (the Standard North American Family) draw on metaphors and examples from a stimulating range of autobiographical, theoretical, historical, political, and humorous resources. Out of an abstract encounter with Bakhtin, for example, comes an analysis of a child learning to name a bird, and a new way of seeing the story of Helen Keller. In introducing a radically innovative approach to the sociology of discourse, even the most difficult points are addressed through ordinary scenes of mothers, cats, and birds, as well as scientists, pulsars, and cell microscopes. Smith's engaged, rebel sociology throws light on a remarkable range of issues and authors, forever changing the way the reader experiences the world. This, her signature work, will delight a wide and varied audience, and enliven university courses for years to come.

Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, emerged during the 1980s as the most interesting new field among West German historians and, more recently, their East German colleagues. Partly in reaction to the modernisation theory pervading West German social history in the 1970s, practitioners of alltagsgeschichte stressed the complexities of popular experience, paying particular attention, for instance, to the relationship of the German working class to Nazism. Now the first English translation of a key volume of essays ("Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen") presents this approach and shows how it cuts across the boundaries of established disciplines. Introduced by Alf Ludtke, the volume includes two empirical essays, one by Lutz Niethammer on life courses of East Germans after 1945 and one by Ludtke on modes of accepting fascism among German workers. The remaining five essays are theoretical: Hans Medick writes on ethnological ways of knowledge as a challenge to social history; Peter Schottler, on mentalities, ideologies, and discourses and alltagsgeschichte; Dorothee Wierling, on gender relations and alltagsgeschichte; Wolfgang

The discussion of my work by Pat Hill Collins, Bob Connell, and Charles Lemert is generous and very much appreciated. My difficulty in responding is that each develops a critique from a very different theoretical stance.' Lemert brings to bear his interest in what he describes as the sociological dilemma of the subject-object relation, and the postmodernist critique of modernity and its unitary subject. Pat Hill Collins draws on the tradition of critical theory, strikingly informed by her experience of and commitment to recovering the suppressed feminist thought of black women. Connell works within a Marxist tradition and with specific concerns about the relation of sociology to political practice. Also, each constructs her or his own straw Smith. Lemert reads the project of an inquiry beginning from women's experience as a sociology of women's subjective experience. Collins reads into my project her objective of creating a transformative knowledge. Connell confounds beginning from experience with individualism, and interprets my rather careful (and critical) explications of the conceptual practices of power as an abhorrence of abstractions in general. In response I will clarify how I've understood and worked for a sociology beginning from women's experience. It is not, I insist, a totalizing theory. Rather it is a method of inquiry, always ongoing, opening things up, discovering. In addition, to reemphasize its character as inquiry relevant to the politics and practice of progressive struggle, whether of women or of other oppressed groups, this essay refers to some of the work being done from this approach.