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Critical Book Review: The Everyday World as Problematic
The everyday world is problematic. Sociology has objectified and ignored women, categorizing them as the ‘other.’ The experiences of women are productive grounds for feminist knowledge. Sociologists can ask questions by grounding sociological work in the everyday experiences of women. Until everyone considers the everyday experiences of workers, women, and any other marginalized group, the world will continue having sociology reflecting the standpoint of males and ruling relations. Sociologists are entitled to developing sociology with the potential of expounding for society members the social structure of their world of experiences. The Everyday World as Problematic is a collection of essays in which Dorothy Smith creates a technique of evaluating how people view modern society from a particular gendered viewpoint. Smith knows how social relations, including their underlying theories, should express the concrete geographical and social meanings of everyday lives. This book’s main thesis is that sociologists should use institutional ethnography to explore the mechanism of intersection between personal experiences and generalized relations in society. Particularly, this intersection between the institution (the general) and the personal experience (the local) is what Smith refers to as problematic every day.
Smith supports this thesis by first giving an illustrative example showing that social relations control how a person walks his/her dog in the neighborhood. In this example, she states that social relations are basically patterns of observed behaviors that regularly associate different people. However, these behavior patterns may, at times, be present or known to each other. Further, she writes on social relations to support her thesis by insisting that these relations eventually collect together and spawn into institutions (Smith 117). In this context, institutions are clusters of relations collected together to form a portion of the ruling instruments. These institutions have a specific function to coordinate information flow between the generalized institution and personal experiences. Institutions can be compared to knots that coordinate various action strands into an operational complex. In this article, Smith follows the transformation from personalized to generalize. In this conversion, she addresses the best way of exploring it. In her compliment on sociological ethnographies, Smith says that it is interesting reading them. However, she points out that they are unable to form generalized statements concerning social relations and society. Smith also mentions the grounded theory. She claims that it splits the generalization of concepts from the social planning of the local concept. Therefore, through this method, it isn’t easy to generalize.
The major theoretical perspective represented in this book is institutional ethnography. Smith uses this framework in examining the problem in the everyday world because it does not necessarily involve investigating sociologists to substitute the analysis, the views of subjects, and the perspectives. Hence, sociologists have the opportunity of bypassing the problem of being unable to generalize. Smith formulated this theoretical perspective as Marxist feminist sociology for people and women. Still, researchers in education, social sciences, policy research, and human services use it today in mapping local relations coordinating the activities of people within institutions (Smith 152). In my view from this article, institutional ethnography can be an effective means of studying how social relations shape our individual lives, the role of institutions in peoples’ local behavior, and the behavior of individuals around each other. Institutional ethnography is another strategy that sociologists use to understand social nature; it is like alternative sociology. It evaluates all social interactions that structure the everyday lives of people. It does this by particularly looking at how people interact in the context of social institutions such as work, school, and marriage, and understanding the institutionalization of these interactions. We can best understand institutional ethnography as the ethnography of institutions that have already been institutionalized instead of an ethnography of particular organizations, employment sectors, or companies, which could be viewed as the sociology of work or industrial sociology.
I did not see any biasness in Smith’s The Everyday World as Problematic, although I came across certain weaknesses. For instance, Smith failed to say something regarding the unobservable behavior that people in the public arena do not see and its link to the concept of accountability. The term accountability here means the way people police one another and themselves for doing their gender rightfully.
There are many strengths in this book. First, institutional ethnography contributes to the construction of accounts from the viewpoint for whom or with whom the researcher decides to work with. Starting from the experience of people being rulers, this ethnography’s practices could be explicated in various accounts of research. It is a social analysis approach that stresses that we all need to look at all or any features of a society where we are embodied, located, particularities of peoples’ lived worlds, and in the local historicity. The other strength of The Everyday World as Problematic lies in Smith’s research from a specific location. Since it is not confined to inquiry into women’s lives, this feature assumes a world that is socially organized where the experience of everyone is innately liked to their role in bringing into being the world as they relate to it. Besides, her materialist technique applies the experiential basis in creating dependable illustrations about how things work.
Yes, this book makes a significant contribution to the field of sociology. Particularly, the author has an influential link to various theorists, including Alfred Schutz and Karl Marx. She builds upon the Marxist theory by evolving alienation into capitalism that is gender-stratified. Through this, she explains how women’s oppression depends on objective political, social, and economic relations. The book adds on Schutz by developing on his concept of mitwelt and umwelt relations. The author explains these two relations of male-centeredness by claiming that women’s work masks to men the real and concrete forms on which their work relies on. Also, the ideas of this book are important in successive lies of inquiry throughout the decades to come.
On my personal reflection, I think that this book is amazing. Indeed, I would recommend it to other readers. By reading this book, a reader will learn different sociological methods through the principles of feminism. Besides, Smith helped in pioneering the standpoint theory of feminism. She authored the book at a period where positivist methods dominated sociology. In this case, positivism described the view that sociology should resemble the scientific processes of natural science. Therefore, readers will enhance their sociological perception by learning that objectivity is defined by the detachment from the groups discussed in this book.
Work Cited
Smith, Dorothy E. The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. University of Toronto Press, 1987.