Total Institutions and Reinvented Identities (Hardcover)

Total institutions are places to which people are confined around the clock, in isolation from all other influences and social relationships. Hospitals, prisons and boarding schools create unique social worlds of rituals, routines and sanctions, which pervade every aspect of daily life and have a lasting effect upon their residents. This book revisits and updates Erving Goffman's pessimistic critique of the total institution, which had focused on the 'mortifying' effects of enforced identity erasure in austere and controlling environments. Susie Scott argues that a new organizational form has emerged in the culture of late modernity, which involves subtler mechanisms of social control and whose members cite more positive meanings and motivations.