Dorothy E. Smith

Dorothy E. Smith was a Canadian sociologist who developed feminist standpoint theory and the method of inquiry known as institutional ethnography. Beginning from women's everyday experience as a standpoint from which to critique conventional sociology, she argued in works such as The Everyday World as Problematic (1987) that mainstream sociological method had reproduced a distinctively male, managerial view of the social world, and she proposed institutional ethnography as a way to trace how the concrete, everyday activities of individuals are coordinated by the abstract, textually mediated relations of larger institutions. Her work became a foundational contribution to feminist sociology and to the sociology of knowledge.