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:
“For youth is a frail thing, not unafraid.
Firstly inclined to take what it is told.
Firstly inclined to lean. Greedy to give
Faith tidy and total. To a total God.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)