Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The idea of a total institution (TI) captured what many learned observers had noted about organizations that processed people as things. The essential feature of the total institution is the effort, via regimes, tight supervision, and routinization of the movements of large groups of cohorts, to socialize inmates to the culture of the institution in part so that they might return. These are of course contradictory aims, and empirically those that confine permanently or semi-permanently — assisted living centers (once called “old folks homes”), prisons, mental hospitals, once common specialized hospitals for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy, those that train for other purposes (boarding schools, academies, and “boot camps”), and retreats associated with religious purposes or recovery — present a range of variation in underlying functions, contradictions, and modes of entry and exit. These matters, even the basic normative grounds of compliance noted by Etzioni (1962) , have not been explored as fully as they might be. This is in part because Erving Goffman's classic essay (1961) , an extraordinary performance focused on changes in the inmate self, set an almost impossibly high analytic standard. The concept of total institutions came into the sociological canon in the early 1960s with the publication of Goffman's collection of four essays, Asylums (1961) ... log in or subscribe to read full text