A total institution is a place of work
and residence where a great number of
similarly situated people, cut off from
the wider community for a considerable
time, together lead an enclosed,
formally administered round of life.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel
Foucault discussed total institutions in
the language of complete and austere
institutions.
Term origins
The term is sometimes credited as having
been coined and defined by Canadian
sociologist Erving Goffman in his paper
"On the Characteristics of Total
Institutions", presented in April 1957
at the Walter Reed Institute's Symposium
on Preventive and Social Psychiatry. An
expanded version appeared in Donald
Cressey's collection, The Prison, and
was reprinted in Goffman's 1961
collection, Asylums. Fine and Manning,
however, note that Goffman heard the
term in lectures by Everett Hughes.
Regardless of whether Goffman coined the
term, he can be credited with
popularizing it.
Typology of total institutions
Total institutions are divided by
Goffman into five different types:
institutions established to care for
people felt to be both harmless and
incapable: orphanages, poor houses and
nursing homes.
places established to care for people
felt to be incapable of looking after
themselves and a threat to the
community, albeit an unintended one:
leprosariums, mental hospitals, and
tuberculosis sanitariums.
institutions organised to protect the
community against what are felt to be
intentional dangers to it, with the
welfare of the people thus sequestered
not the immediate issue: concentration
camps, P.O.W. camps, penitentiaries, and
jails.
institutions purportedly established to
better pursue some worklike tasks and
justifying themselves only on these
instrumental grounds: colonial
compounds, work camps, boarding schools,
ships, army barracks, and large mansions
from the point of view of those who live
in the servants' quarters.
establishments designed as retreats from
the world even while often serving also
as training stations for the religious;
examples are convents, abbeys,
monasteries, and other cloisters.
Facts
According to S. Lammers and A. Verhey,
some 80 percent of Americans will
ultimately die not in their home, but in
a total institution.
Tourism and the total institution
Sociologists have pointed out that
tourist venues such as cruise ships are
acquiring many of the characteristics of
total institutions. Tourists may not be
aware that they are being controlled,
even constrained, but the environment
has been designed to subtly manipulate
the behavior of patrons. These examples
differ from the traditional examples in
that the influence is short term.
Estimations
David Rothman states that "historians
have confirmed the validity of Goffman's
concept of 'total institutions' which
minimizes the differences in formal
mission to establish a unity of design
and structure."
See also
Disciplinary institution
Totalitarianism
Mental asylum
Psychiatric institution
Psych ward
References
Further reading
Wallace, Samuel. Total Institutions.
Transaction Publishers. ISBN
88-464-5358-1.
