Total Institutions: A Reconstruction

1968 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-26
Author(s):  
William S. Jose
Keyword(s):  
Total Institutions

scholarly journals ‘We have become prisoners of our own age’: from a continuing care retirement community to a total institution in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liat Ayalon ◽  
Sharon Avidor
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Retirement Community ◽  
Retirement Communities ◽  
Continuing Care ◽  
Total Institution ◽  
Continuing Care Retirement Communities ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Total Institutions ◽  
Design And Methods ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract Background and objectives during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Israel, people residing in continuing care retirement communities (CCRC) found themselves under strict instructions to self-isolate, imposed by the CCRC managements before, during and after the nationwide lockdown. The present study explored the personal experiences of CCRC residents during the lockdown. Research design and methods in-depth interviews were conducted with 24 CCRC residents from 13 different CCRCs. Authors performed a thematic analysis of interview transcripts, using constant comparisons and contrasts. Results three major themes were identified: (i) ‘Us vs. them: Others are worse off’. Older residents engaged in constant attempts to compare their situation to that of others. The overall message behind these downward comparisons was that the situation is not so bad, as others are in a worse predicament; (ii) ‘Us vs. them: Power imbalance’. This comparison emphasised the unbalanced power-relations between older adults and the staff and management in the setting and (iii) ‘We have become prisoners of our own age’. Interviewees described strong emotions of despair, depression and anger, which were intensified when the rest of society returned back to a new routine, whilst they were still under lockdown. Discussion and implications the measures imposed on residents by managements of CCRCs during the lockdown, and the emotional responses of distress among some of the residents, revealed that CCRCs have components of total institutions, not normally evident. This underscores the hidden emotional costs of the lockdown among those whose autonomy was compromised.

Boundaries in the Making: Transformations in Erving Goffman’s Total Institution through the Case of a Female Benedictine Monastery

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852110115
Author(s):  
Anna Clot-Garrell
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Total Institution ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Total Institutions ◽  
Late Modern

Total institutions have undergone profound changes since Erving Goffman published his seminal work Asylums in 1961. This article explores the persistence and transformation of total institutions under late-modern conditions. Based upon empirical research conducted in a female Benedictine monastery, I analyse changes in the physically bounded structure of a total institution. Specifically, I address the trend towards greater permeability and flexibility of enclosed total spaces. Inspired by Georg Simmel’s spatial insights, I examine how boundaries are historically reshaped through changing relations of distance and proximity to wider society, and how these shifts alter the material expression and configuration of power that originally characterised the monastery’s totality. This article claims the ongoing relevance of Goffman’s conceptualisation to accommodate such modifications and illustrates how, in certain cases, adaptations of total institutions to contemporary conditions can be understood as involving the reconfiguration, rather than the dismantling, of totality.

The Technology of Confinement

Metamorphosis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Dimensions ◽  
The Self ◽  
Technical Mastery ◽  
Total Institutions ◽  
Jacques Ellul

This chapter considers how prison technology is especially one-sided and imposed because it is not shared. Philosopher Jacques Ellul has argued that technical mastery (technopoly) can narrow thought and make it less sensitive to human dimensions and needs. Criminologists call this level of total technological imposition “a habitus of subjection.” In “total institutions,” prison theorists agree that current modes of technical use have led to “mortification of the self.” The bad aspects of prison technology are indeed bad. The United States has so many people in prison and jail and many more under legal surveillance because technology has made it possible.

scholarly journals Geoepistemology of the “dangerous individual”: Spaces of incarceration as dispositives

Sociologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 730-749 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dusan Marinkovic ◽  
Dusan Ristic
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Technologies ◽  
Total Institutions

The main hypothesis of this paper is that spaces of incarceration are dispositives of the historical and social appearance of the ?dangerous individual?. We assume that spaces of incarceration historically precede the appearance of medicalization and other social technologies of power/knowledge. These spaces geoepistemology in which space is a dispositive for articulation of the technologies and practices of power/knowledge through medicalization, pathologization, psychiatrization, criminalization, hospitalization or sexualization of the ?dangerous individual?. Geoepistemology as the analytics of space, relies heavily on the works of Michel Foucault, from whom came the impulse towards the research of the spaces for incarceration of Others - ?dangerous individuals?. Along with the interpretations of Foucault?s heterotopias, we consider Gofman?s notion of total institutions as the complementary concept. We conclude that spaces of incarceration were not just physical conditions, barriers or the background scenery, but the key dispositives for the genesis and development of the social technologies of power/knowledge - in the first instance medical and corrective.

On The Characteristics of Total Institutions 1

Asylums ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 1-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erving Goffman ◽  
William B. Helmreich
Keyword(s):  
Total Institutions

Goffman's Model of Mental Illness

1971 ◽  
Vol 119 (551) ◽  
pp. 419-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Siegler ◽  
Humphry Osmond
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Total Institutions

In a well-known, very influential and frequently quoted paper, ‘On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,’ Goffman (1961) calls attention to ideological disputes which are centred on total institutions. As he puts it: ‘It is widely appreciated that total institutions typically fall considerably short of their official aims. It is less well appreciated that each of these official goals or charters seems admirably suited to provide a key of meaning—a language of explanation that the staff, and sometimes the inmates, can bring to every crevice of action in the institution. Thus, a medical frame of reference is not merely a perspective through which a decision concerning dosage can be determined and made meaningful; it is a perspective ready to account for all manner of decisions, such as the hours when hospital meals are served or the manner in which hospital linen is folded…. Paradoxically, then, while total institutions seem the least intellectual of places, it is nevertheless here, at least recently, that concern about words and verbalized perspectives has come to play a central and often feverish role.’ (pp. 83–84.)

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