Erving Goffman

A total institution takes a person apart on admission and assembles an inmate, and the procedures that do it look like paperwork.

The mechanism, and why it is recognizable

Goffman did fieldwork inside a psychiatric hospital and described the total institution: an organization where people sleep, work and play in one place, under one authority, on one schedule.

Admission is where the work happens. Clothes and possessions removed and replaced with standard issue. A number. A file. A requirement to account for yourself to strangers who already have the answers written down. Each step is administratively sensible. Together they dismantle the props a person's self was standing on.

He calls what follows the moral career of the inmate: a sequence of adjustments through which someone learns what they now are.

The underlife

The other half of the finding is what inmates keep back: small evasions, private jokes, workarounds, unofficial trades. Goffman's point is that this underlife is part of the system rather than a failure of it. Every institution runs on violations of its own rules, and the staff know.

That is the honest complication of both Foucault and Illich: people inside these machines are not simply produced by them.

Why he is the easiest test

Foucault gives you the prison and the clinic across two centuries. Goffman gives you something you can check tomorrow, against a school, a hospital ward, a barracks, an office onboarding process, or an airport.

Serious objections

• The concept stretches. Once a boarding school, a monastery and an office all qualify, the category stops discriminating and the argument loses force.
• The fieldwork was covert, at one hospital, in one country, in the 1950s, and generalization from it is doing a great deal of work.
• Goffman describes brilliantly and explains sparingly. There is little account of why institutions take this form, which is where Foucault is stronger.