Total Institutions and Reinvented Identities

Scott, Susie

doi:10.1057/9780230348608

Cited by 63 publications

(133 citation statements)

References 177 publications

(289 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

125

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This study advances the idea of the soft total institution, which Goffman never fully developed (Odrowaz‐Coates, ). First, we build on Scott's (, ) work by describing a soft total institution as one being constituted by voluntary participation and a lack of physical enforcement. Second, we elaborate on Odrowaz‐Coates () recent ethnographic study in which she described the soft total institution using the metaphor of a permeable gate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The question of how consumption materializes in (soft) total institutions has seldom been explored in prior scholarship (for a few exceptions, see studies by Susie Scott’s [, ] and Anna Odrowaz‐Coates [2015]). Moreover, while Goffman studied life inside a total institution, he did not assess, in any sufficient detail, the impact that a subject’s experience within a total institution had on her or his life upon returning to the outside world.…”

Section: Total Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Consumption within a soft total institution: Discursive inculcation in the Tablighi Jamaat

Rauf

Prasad

Razzaque

2018

Int J Consumer Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Erving Goffman’s concept of total institutions has been seldom explored in terms of how it restricts or promotes consumption practices. In an effort to redress the lacuna in the extant literature, this article draws on the findings of an ethnographic study of the Tablighi Jamaat, an orthodox religious organization originating in South Asia, whose participants undergo discursive inculcation in an environment that may be characterized as a soft total institution. We explore how consumption in such an environment entails processes of traditionalization under (late) modernity. Our findings show that consumption in a soft total institution requires subjects to monitor their own behavior discursively in order to attain certain intended, spiritual objectives. The study has implications for how consumption can be a means by which to either meet or inhibit life goals. In terms of theoretical contribution, this article begins to demarcate the boundary conditions between Goffman’s total institution and, what we are terming here, a soft total institution. Finally, we further Goffman’s original thesis by describing some of the subjects’ thoughts and experiences of their daily lives after their inculcation within the institutionalized setting.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Total Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consumption within a soft total institution: Discursive inculcation in the Tablighi Jamaat

Rauf

Prasad

Razzaque

2018

Int J Consumer Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Goffman’s work on total institutions has been criticized because it does not sufficiently problematize power and social control (Ritzer 2004; Scott 2011). Specifically, his conception of the prison as a total institution ignores subtler forms of power and discipline because he focuses on only brick and mortar aspects of the institution (Giddens 1991).…”

Section: Phase I Clinical Trials As Total Institutions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other words, Scott accounts for agency in her conception of these institutions while at the same time attending to the subtler forms of power to which individuals submit. Membership has the appearance of choice and freedom, yet often involves intensive surveillance and indirect forms of coercion (Scott 2010, 2011). …”

Section: Phase I Clinical Trials As Total Institutions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Captive to the Clinic: Phase I Clinical Trials as Temporal Total Institutions

Williams

Fisher

2018

Sociological Inquiry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article develops the concept of temporal total institutions to describe how and why individuals voluntarily submit to highly-controlled and often dehumanizing environments. We focus empirically on Phase I clinical trials, which offer compensation to healthy people in exchange for testing investigational pharmaceuticals. Analyzing the experiences of 67 U.S. healthy volunteers, we illustrate how comparisons between Phase I trials and prison are salient to participants as they reflect on their confinement in research facilities and their interactions with other participants and research staff. We argue that conditions of contemporary economic insecurity and/or poverty facilitate the existence of coercive temporal total institutions by undermining voluntariness. Phase I clinics take advantage of the steady supply of individuals who will submit to the organization’s demands out of hope that the income gained will be transformative for their lives.

show abstract

“…these critiques arguably fall short of Goffman's own detailed inquiry into the openness and closedness of total institutions, successive inmate stages and their "moral career" (pre-patient, in-patient, ex-patient phase; see also Goffman [1961Goffman [ ] 1991Scott 2011) and also inter-personal staff-inmate relationships, and hence are reductive of the original complexity in Goffman's Asylums. this view is not meant as a denunciation of studies done by either Baer and ravneberg or moran and co-workers; far from it, as these studies possess their own exciting conceptual manoeuvers and substantive inquiry drawn from across the globe.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Re‐discovering goffman: contemporary carceral geography, the “total” institution and notes on heterotopia

Schliehe¹

2016

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent conceptual debates within carceral geography about spaces of detention have largely dismissed Goffman's micro‐level analysis of closed spaces and interaction. As a response to Baer and Ravneberg's 2008 contribution to this journal on the inside/outside of prisons and the importance of indistinction, with its critical view on Goffman as a thinker/scholar of relevance to studying carceral geography, this article aims to re‐engage with Goffman's Asylums in order to establish its applicability in terms of both theoretical and substantive implications for this sub‐field. The concept of heterotopia, introduced by Baer and Ravneberg as a neo‐institutional alternative to Goffman's theory, will be addressed in its relevance to understanding spaces of confinement. The empirical material is part of a research project about young women's experiences of closed institutions in Scotland, specifically prison environments, secure care and closed psychiatric units. Their descriptions of being locked up and their emotional, symbolic and embodied ways of understanding and coping include entangled encounters with closed or “total” space that show elements of spatial semi‐permeability. This spatial state can be understood as partially open, allowing the passage of certain elements while acting as a barrier to others, and it can be found in Goffman's account of the total institution as well as in Baer and Ravneberg's experiences of prison. The semi‐permeable nature of space in a closed institution – including its dimensions of inside and outside – does not become any clearer by postulating an empirical and theoretical juxtaposition between distinction and indistinction. An in‐depth engagement with Goffman's insights into the micro world of a closed institution instead offers surprising contributions to the understanding of semi‐permeable insides and outsides.

show abstract

Total Institutions and Reinvented Identities

Cited by 63 publications

References 177 publications

Consumption within a soft total institution: Discursive inculcation in the Tablighi Jamaat

Consumption within a soft total institution: Discursive inculcation in the Tablighi Jamaat

Captive to the Clinic: Phase I Clinical Trials as Temporal Total Institutions

Re‐discovering goffman: contemporary carceral geography, the “total” institution and notes on heterotopia

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About