The Everyday World as Problematic

Introduction

Dorothy E. Smith, a British-born sociologist who taught in Canada, collected and reworked essays from the 1970s and 1980s in this book of 1987. She starts from a “line of fault” she experienced as a single mother working at a university: the concepts of sociology belonged to the world of administration and the professions, while women’s everyday work – caring for children, running a household – remained invisible in them. Sociology should therefore begin from the standpoint of people in their everyday lives and treat that world as “problematic”: it should ask how what happens there is organised by “relations of ruling” elsewhere, through texts, forms and institutional procedures. This programme became institutional ethnography, which Smith set out systematically in 2005.