Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Power

by Dorothy E. Smith

Sociologists generate idology instead of knowledge - particularly where women are concerned. By starting with the theoretical formulations of their discipline and then interpreting people's activities as expressions of those ideas, sociologists both participate in and perpetuate society's traditional power relations. So argues Dorothy E. Smith in this provocative study of her own discipline and its relationship to women's lives. While acknowledging that social science is ideological, Smith argues that for sociologists idology affects methods of inquiry and transforms what actually happens in people's lives into a formalized picture that lacks subjectiveness. She explicates the need for an alternative sociology that better explores everyday experience, suggesting a Marxist materialist ideology, and emphasizing that ideology is not content but practice. Smith is especially concerned with the application of sociological ideology to the human service bureaucracy and the way institutions of mental health reconstruct women's lives. She provides meticulous accounts of the ways in with police reports, governments statistics, hospital records, and psychiatric files and ideologically interpreted, transforming a person's life history in the process. In a reveatory chapter on biographer Quentin Bell's exploration of Virginia Woolf's suicide, Smith demonstrates once again how the professional who claims to report an event acurrately also shapes it. Highly critical of current sociological practice, she also hopes that alternative appraoches will change the discipline.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Sociology

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Dorothy Edith Smith CM (born July 6, 1926) is a Canadian sociologist with research interests in a variety of disciplines, including women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies, as well as in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. Smith founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.

Reviews

[Waris Ahmad Faizi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Analytical!

The book critiques dominant forms of sociological knowledge by showing how institutional and academic practices often reproduce relations of power while obscuring everyday lived experiences, especially those of women. Dorothy E. Smith develops a feminist sociology grounded in standpoint theory, arguing that social inquiry should begin from people’s actual activities and experiences rather than abstract conceptual systems detached from everyday life. The book is an influential contribution to feminist sociology, institutional ethnography, and critiques of knowledge production.