Bio: (1926-2022) British-Canadian sociologist and gender theorist. After completing her undergraduate studies in Britain, Dorothy Smith went to study for her Ph.d. at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught briefly after obtaining her doctorate. After that, she taught at the University of Essex for several years and then continued her career in Canada, where she taught at the universities of Vancouver and Toronto. Her theoretical positions, in works created in the early 1970s, were most influenced by symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and the socialist critique of capitalism. In these works, she mostly deals with the relationship between psychiatry and women, and sociology as a discipline. She researched, with an ethnomethodological approach, how psychiatric institutions and experts create control over events and people and shape the individual experience of patients.

Studying the ways of acquiring knowledge about society, she concluded that, although official sociology is presented as a rational and objective science, sociology, at the same time, excludes the experience of women and thus provides a distorted picture of social relations. Sociological knowledge is gained from the positions and views of men and creates, as the author calls them, "relations of ruling", which are a set of organized practices and discourses of the state, companies, and professional and educational organizations, which permeate multiple locations of power. Sociology overlooked both the female experience of everyday life and the female position within the macro context of capitalist society.

Smith believes that patriarchy is a dominantly organized structure of modern capitalism that exists at both the institutional and discourse levels. Although there are multiple places of power, power is always concentrated in specific institutions and practices that maintain the capitalist social order. Discourse and text mediate power in a subtle and hidden way - the state retains power through tax refunds, social security forms, and the like. Smith sees sociology as an ideological project that marginalizes the concept of gender order in order to maintain the patriarchal nature of society.

She proposed an alternative, a sociology based on the positions and views of women (standpoint of women). This sociology takes into account the everyday life of women, but also the innate relations of ruling that are maintained through institutions and shape that everyday life. In the context of this view of sociology, Smith developed the concept of "institutional ethnography", which represents a methodological strategy for the sociological research of women. Although her theory shares some of the ideas of postmodernism, she criticizes the postmodernist rejection of the search for scientific truth.     

Main works

Women Look at Psychiatry (1975);

Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin, a Way to Go (1977);

The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987);

The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (1990);

Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (1990);

Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations (1999);

Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005).