Total Institutions

Erving Goffman created the concept of total institution in his essay “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions” published in 1961 in Asylums. Total institutions are social hybrids, part residential community and part formal organization intended for the bureaucratic management of large groups of people. Goffman (1961) offers this definition:

Goffman provides this taxonomy of the five groups of total institutions:

Supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, Goffman spent a year from 1955 to 1956 conducting fieldwork in a mental hospital, St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. He developed this analysis drawing on eclectic evidence from the sociological literature on prisons and organizations and from ethnographies, novels, autobiographies, and theology. Despite the breadth of this scholarship, the formal concept of total institution focuses primarily on psychiatric institutions, and his intention was to explore the social world of the patient and the subjective, lived experiences of inmates.

Total institutions are distinguished by their varying degrees of closure or separation from the outside world. All activities of the daily round occur in the same place, under a single authority, and in the immediate company of a large batch of others. Total institutions create the rationalization of life through tight scheduling, regimentation, and bureaucratic rules that foster the disciplinary control of inmates. Thus, the bureaucratic management of inmates and batch living promote the rational plan or official purpose of the institution (Burns 1992).

Goffman identifies the radical split between the inmate world and the staff world as a critical feature of these institutions. He offers a detailed discussion of the moral career of mental patients, documenting the systematic stripping of their socially constructed conventional identity in the outside home world by the denigrations, mortifications, and humiliations of the admissions process. Through welcoming ceremonies, staff members take a life history, photograph, weigh, fingerprint, assign numbers, search, list personal possessions for storage, undress, bathe, disinfect, cut hair, and issue institutional clothing. Without access to civilian clothing, towels, soap, shaving kits, and bathing facilities, inmates are stripped of their usual appearance and suffer a personal defacement. Through obedience tests and abusive welcome rituals, inmates come to understand their powerlessness. Inmates may be required to hold their body in a humiliating stance and provide humiliating verbal responses to staff members as part of the enforced deference pattern of total institutions.

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