Dorothy Smith: making the ontological shift

Dorothy E. Smith (1926–2022) was a feminist sociologist from Northallerton, England, who received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963 before spending much of her academic career at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. She is one of the major sociological thinkers of the past century and developed an innovative approach to research, Institutional Ethnography, which continues to be a thriving interdisciplinary field of scholarship. This chapter provides a brief overview of Dorothy Smith's life and body of work, with a particular focus on Institutional Ethnography and its legacy. The final section identifies interpretive threads in Smith's work that could provide fruitful dialogue between practitioners of Institutional Ethnography and other interpretive approaches.