A total institution is a place of work and residence where a great number of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. The term was coined and defined by American sociologist Erving Goffman in his paper "On the Characteristics of Total Institutions" presented in April 1957 at the Walter Reed Institute's Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry, with an expanded version appearing in Donald Cressey's collection The Prison and reprinted in Goffman's 1961 collection Asylums. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discussed total institutions in the language of complete and austere institutions.
Read more about Total Institution: Typology of Total Institutions, Facts, Tourism and The Total Institution, Estimations, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words total and/or institution:
“The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.”
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan (20th century)