The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Power

Derek Wilkinson is an associate professor of Sociology at Laurentian
University.

Dorothy Smith’s new book, The Conceptual Practices of Power is a
continuation and development of her earlier work describing the
viewpoints of women and of the state and of sociology. It fills in some
important gaps in her earlier opus.

The basic theme is that our society is governed by abstract concepts
and symbols. Those who participate in abstraction per se become part of
the apparatus of ruling. And sociologists have clearly been a part of
this process.

Going from the local, immediate, and particular to the abstract and
conceptual is not automatic. Rather it is a social process, an organized
everyday practice, a social process or practice that is more
recognizable for women because it is they who frequently are required to
perform the local work for those who partake in conceptual governing.

All knowledge comes from a standpoint. Knowledge that appears to be
objective comes from the standpoint of those participants in the
everyday practice who are involved in the relations of ruling. It is an
ideology. Sociology written from a standpoint outside experience
alienates and confuses those who adopt it. Any resistance to this can
come only from women’s experience—from experience in the local,
immediate, and particular locations that are ignored, denigrated, and
suppressed by the abstract and conceptual.

This general alienative process is augmented by a misunderstanding of
the role of texts. Texts appear to describe reality, so ordinary
realists believe what they read. In a diagram titled “The Social
Organization of Textual Reality,” Smith describes the two separate
processes of (1) creating a factual account based on a certain social
organization, and (2) reading factual accounts. Lived actuality is the
beginning process that is described by the social organization producing
the factual account. “What actually happened” is the end result of
the social organization of the reading of the account. Smith claims that
these are two different things. Since they are different, she maintains,
it behooves her and us to account for the role played in this difference
by the ruling organizations, hierarchies, ideology, and so on. In fact,
the influence of the ruling processes distorts the representations of
the processes accepted even by the participants. It is for this reason
that Smith describes reality as problematic.

In one sense, the title of Smith’s book says it all: power works
through concepts. Changing concepts changes the ways in which people who
record local events and practices actually do the recording. The
concepts they use change the actual experiences that occur.
Description—and, in particular, criticism—of this phenomon are then
required before there can be a reclaiming on the part of the victim, she
who is in the situation of her real experience.

This is an important and rewarding book, particularly for theorists,
feminists, and ethnomethodologists. It presents a systematic and
original perspective on the problematic interrelationship between local
and particular practices and “objective” knowledge.