BECKER - The Politics of Presentation - Goffman and Total Institutions

Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26, Number 4, pages 659–669, ISSN 0195-6086; online ISSN 1533-8665.© 2003 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved.Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

Direct all correspondence to Howard S. Becker, 884 Lombard St., San Francisco, CA 94133; e-mail:[email protected].

The Politics of Presentation:Goffman and Total Institutions

Howard S. Becker

Erving Goffman’s essay on total institutions exemplifies his solution to amajor problem in the presentation of social science thinking and results:how can we describe concrete social phenomena without using thedescriptive terms already in use in the organization studied? Existing termi-nology embodies the perspectives of participants in the organization andso accepts all of those people’s conventional judgments. This makes itimpossible to isolate a class of similar social objects about which generali-zations can be made. Goffman avoided this trap by creating a neutral butspecific technical language and by a rigorously comparative analysis.

I knew Goffman quite well early in his sociological career. We were graduate studentstogether at the University of Chicago and finished our dissertations within a few yearsof each other. We saw a good deal of each other in that close-knit academic commu-nity. We even walked our babies together down the neighborhood streets. We kept inclose touch for some time after we left Chicago, he eventually to St. Elizabeth’s Hospi-tal in Washington, D.C., where he did the fieldwork that produced Asylums, and I toKansas City, where my colleagues and I did the fieldwork that produced Boys in White.

Two features of Goffman’s sociological orientation deserve attention, and I men-tion them as they contrast with my own way of thinking about sociological work.The first is that although he later identified himself as a student of Everett C.Hughes and indeed his sociological work clearly reflected the influence of Hughes,his lineage was a little different from Hughes’s other students, such as me. The pureHughes lineage could be said to start with Georg Simmel, and to go from there toSimmel’s student Robert E. Park, and from Park to his student Hughes, and thenceto me and many others. Goffman’s lineage, in contrast, begins with Emile Durkheim,and goes from there to pioneer social anthropologist A. R. Brown, from him to hisstudent W. Lloyd Warner (who was responsible directly or indirectly for many ofthe famous American community studies of the 1930s and 1940s), and from Warnerto Goffman, who worked very closely with him.

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I don’t want to exaggerate these differences, because many of Hughes’s students(I was one, and there were others) worked closely with Warner and many people(e.g., Eliot Freidson) were more closely linked to Warner than to Hughes. But theanthropological influence might account for an emphasis on the self and its socialconstitution that had a different flavor from the analysis of that connection found inthe work of others from that period in Chicago. Their approach to the self was morein line with Herbert Blumer’s interpretation of the thinking of George HerbertMead.

The second interesting feature of Goffman’s orientation that deserves mention ishis disinterest in questions of method. I don’t remember, though I haven’t made anexhaustive search through his works to verify this, Goffman ever writing about anyof the standard questions that inevitably arise in doing field research, such ques-tions as access to research sites, relations with the people studied, ways of recordingor analyzing data, problems of reliability. All of these were much discussed at thetime, and many of us (I was among them) wrote about them, in an effort to clarifyfor ourselves what we were doing. Goffman never did.

This was a principled refusal, which he and I discussed a number of times. He feltvery strongly that you could not elaborate any useful rules of procedure for doingfield research and that if you attempted to do that, people would misinterpret whatyou had written, do it (whatever it was) wrong, and then blame you for the resultingmess. He refused to accept responsibility for such unfortunate possibilities.

Keep these two aspects of his perspective—the strong anthropological influenceand the refusal to create or accept methodological principles—in mind. They are ofa piece, I think, with a fundamental aspect of his sociology, which is the strong em-phasis on human freedom and especially on the freedom of the researcher fromconventional thought. This was something he and I shared at a kind of unspokenlevel—we did not discuss it that I can remember—and it appears in some of hischaracteristic procedures.

THE PROBLEM OF CONVENTIONAL CATEGORIES

Goffman’s essay “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions” (1961) is a classic ex-ample of the relation between methods of presenting research and scholarship andtheir political content. This connection, never simple and direct, exemplifies Goff-man’s presentational solution to a problem that has always plagued social sciencewriting and research: how to avoid the analytic flaws and failures that arise fromour unthinking acceptance of the constraints of conventional thinking.

When social scientists study something—a community, an organization, an ethnicgroup—they are never the first to have arrived on the scene, newcomers to an un-peopled landscape who can name its features as they like. Every topic they writeabout is part of the experience of many other kinds of people, all of whom havetheir own ways of speaking about it, specialized words for the objects and eventsand people involved in that area of social life. Those special words are never neutral

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objective signifiers. Rather, they express the perspective and situation of the partic-ular kinds of people who use them. The natives are already there and everything inthat terrain has a name, more likely many names.

If we choose to name what we study with words the people involved already use,we acquire, with the words, the attitudes and perspectives the words imply. Sincemany kinds of people are involved in any social activity, choosing words from any oftheir vocabularies thus commits us to one or another of the perspectives already inuse by one or another of the groups there. Those perspectives invariably take muchfor granted, making assumptions about what might better be treated, social scientif-ically, as problematic.

Take the topic of marijuana. People who use it have a language for talking aboutit. They speak of “getting high.” They have many synonyms for marijuana, speakingof it, for instance, as “grass.” They might speak of the person they buy marijuanafrom as a “connection.” Other people whose worlds also contain marijuana—physi-cians, lawyers, police—will have other words for the same things, perhaps speakingof “addiction” and “cannabis” and “pushers.” The language of users suggests thatuse is voluntary, pleasurable, innocent; the language of some others suggests that itis involuntary, harmful, evil.

What things are called almost always reflects relations of power. People in powercall things what they want to, and others have to adjust to that, perhaps using otherwords of their own in private but accepting in public what they cannot escape.Whatever my friends and I might think, marijuana is called a narcotic drug bypeople who can make that name and the perspective associated with it stick.

The social scientist’s problem, simply, is what to call the things we study. If Istudy marijuana, do I speak of “marijuana addiction” or, as I chose to do years ago,in a minor linguistic variation that connoted a serious shift in perspective, of “mari-juana use?” Do we speak of “getting high on,” of “being intoxicated by,” or of “beingunder the influence of” this substance?

If I choose the terms used by the people who “own” the territory, and thereforechoose the perspectives associated with those terms, I let my analysis be shaped byconventional social arrangements and the distribution of power and privilege theycreate. This has both technical and moral consequences.

The technical consequence is that the class of phenomena I want to generalizeabout is made up of things that have in common only the moral attitudes towardthem of powerful people and groups in the society, and the actions that have beentaken toward them in consequence. This makes it difficult to find anything generalto say about the phenomena, other than things associated with those moral atti-tudes. You can talk about the results of being thought about that way—-that’s whatthe labeling theory of deviance did. But you can’t find anything to say about howpeople get that way, underlying causes, or similar matters, because there is nothingrelated to those matters that all the cases in the class have in common. You can’tmake science if you can’t find anything to generalize about.

The moral consequence of adopting existing language and perspectives toward


the phenomena we study is that we accept, intentionally or not, all the assumptionsabout right and wrong contained in those words and ideas. We accept, in the case ofdrugs, the idea that addicts are people who have lost control of themselves andtherefore cannot help doing inherently bad things.

How to avoid accepting such conventional assumptions was Goffman’s problemas he began to write about the mental hospital he had studied. The existing lan-guage for discussing the people confined in such institutions embodied the perspec-tives of the people who were able to confine others in them—the professional staffwho ran them, the legal professionals who assigned people to them, the familieswho had solved their problem with an unruly family member, the police for whomthey were what is sometimes called a public nuisance. How could he avoid taking suchcategories as “mental illness” and the perspectives associated with them for granted?

THE LINGUISTIC SOLUTION

To make clear how Goffman found a workable solution to the problem of conven-tional categories, I’ll begin with a simple observation. No reader of Goffman’s essayon total institutions can be unaware of the considerable disparity between the socialreality he is talking about and the way he talks about it. He describes and analyzesquite common social practices, whose existence and character are known to mostadults, if not through their personal experience, then through the experience ofothers they know and through secondhand descriptions in the press, films, drama,and fiction. He describes and analyzes organized social practices of incarcerationand degradation that repel and even disgust many readers, and that arouse feelingsof shame in us for living in a society in which such things have happened and con-tinue to happen. His detailed and comprehensive descriptions make it impossible toignore the continued existence of these organized, socially accepted activities andmay have, on occasion, helped to instigate attempts at their reform.

The disparity I mentioned exists, first, in the descriptive language he uses, in hispenchant for inventing concepts, for giving names to things, for creating categoriesand subcategories and classifications. Every page reveals a set of distinctions: threekinds of this and four kinds of that and they all have names.

Unlike some other theorists (such as Talcott Parsons, who wrote many of hismost influential works during the period in which Goffman wrote), Goffman’s con-cepts have names that come from the common language. He did not coin newwords based on Latin or Greek roots. Instead, he used words from the common lan-guage of life, perhaps not everyday household life, but words that were not esoteric(for instance, “house rules,” or “echelon management”).

He names the phenomena he observed in this kind of language so often and soconsistently that it might seem an affectation or mannerism, a stylistic tic designedto call attention to the author’s cleverness. You might even think that he is doingsomething social scientists are often accused of—making up fancy names for com-monplace things that already have names.


You can’t criticize Goffman that way. The way he named social phenomena liesat the heart of his approach, and, when we consider this characteristic feature ofhis writing, we uncover some methodological principles he followed but did notspeak of.

To begin with, many of the things he gives names to are well known to us, hisreaders. We recognize them immediately; they are familiar experiences we have hador events we have witnessed. But, and this is a very important but, we don’t havenames for these experiences and events. Goffman appropriates common languageto name things previously unnamed. We have all, for instance, participated in whathe calls “face work,” in the ritual gestures by which we help people who have re-vealed themselves to not be quite what they had claimed to be to recover their com-posure, to regain their sense of being, after all, competent adult participants in nor-mal adult interaction. Having participated in these collective attempts to repair thesocial harm that people do to themselves and that we, and the organizations inwhich we act, do to them, we know such a situation when it happens. We “instinc-tively” feel the obligation to deliver this service, to help others “save face,” just aswe feel the right to expect that service from others. And when Goffman points to suchoccurrences we know just what he means and are grateful for the word, which nowallows us to talk about it. We feel that we have always known it but, until Goffmangave it to us, did not know its name. Much of what goes on in social life is like that.

Other things for which Goffman coined new terms already had names, but thesenames were euphemistic and misleading, designed to hide some aspects, we mighteven say the true nature, of what is actually going on. Thus, in a usage Goffmanliked, Dwight MacDonald spoke of mental hospitals as places in which unwantedpeople, particularly older people, were systematically and routinely killed. Mac-Donald did not call these places “mental hospitals.” He called them “death camps,”arguing that “mental hospital” was a euphemistic way of talking about the killing ofold people, which could easily be seen to be the real function of such places—easilyseen when one looked at the actual facts about how many people entered them andhow they left.

I said above that when Goffman gives us a word for some until now unnamedand therefore undiscussable phenomenon, we feel grateful. But that is only partlytrue. In fact, though he intended to write about these matters in a neutral (eventechnical) way, reading Goffman is frequently a morally uncomfortable experience.

Goffman was more original than Dwight MacDonald. Despite the repellent na-ture of many of the activities he describes, he did not call mental hospitals deathcamps. No. He called them “total institutions.” Most readers think it obvious that hedisliked the authoritarian organizations he encompassed in that term, but he didnot use openly judgmental language. Nor did he use adjectives and adverbs that be-tray a negative assessment of these organizations (although he occasionally comesclose, as when he describes “total institutions” as “forcing houses for changing per-sons”). Goffman did not express his dislike as social scientists often do, by a tough,direct, harsh denunciation. He did not call people or organizations bad names. He


did not even, in the style of the great iconoclast Thorstein Veblen, do it in an elabo-rate scholarly sarcasm.

Instead, he used a neutral, technical language. When he talked about mental hos-pitals and prisons, he used language that might just as well be used to describe ananthill or a beehive as to describe a common form of social institution that treatssome people (never forget, with the complicity of the rest of society, and that doesmean us) in such a way that their lives resemble those of insects: regimented in aninflexible and humiliating caste system without regard for their feelings or wishes.His detailed description of what we might find in such places brings us to the sort ofconclusion the language I have just used expresses, although he doesn’t say any-thing quite like that himself.

Here are some of the ways Goffman used language to avoid built-in judgments.He used the word “echelon” (instead of, for instance, “domination”) to describe thetypical authority system of a total institution: “any member of the staff class has cer-tain rights to discipline any member of the inmate class, thereby markedly increasingthe probability of sanction” (p. 42). The word “echelon” is neutral. Since we do notcommonly use it to name the phenomenon Goffman points to, it does not have theimmediately negative connotations a term like “domination” would have. Echelonsimply describes one way among many of organizing authority relations, just asWeber’s distinction between charismatic, bureaucratic, and traditional describesthree other ways.

I will note, without providing argument or examples, that it is far easier to findexamples of “echelon control” than of “domination.” The former simply requiresdemonstration of an observable fact—who gives orders to whom—while the latterincludes, scarcely beneath the surface, a judgment as to the moral suitability of theorder-giving arrangement, which is always more arguable.

Some further examples of this kind of neutral language Goffman used to describematters many readers would probably have strong negative feelings about are:

“role dispossession,” to describe how new recruits are prevented from beingwho they were in the world they previously inhabited;

“trimming” and “programming,” to describe how “the new arrival allows him-self to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the adminis-trative machinery of the establishment, to be worked on smoothly by rou-tine operations” (p. 16);

“identity kit,” to indicate the paraphernalia people ordinarily have with whichto indicate who they are but which is routinely denied inmates in total insti-tutions;

“contaminative exposure,” to indicate ways inmates are humiliated and morti-fied in public;

“looping,” to indicate how an inmate’s attempt to fight mortification leads tomore mortification;

“privilege system,” to indicate the way withheld ordinary rights become privi-leges used to coerce conformity;


“secondary adjustments,” to refer to “practices that do not directly challengestaff but allow inmates to obtain forbidden satisfactions or to obtain per-mitted ones by forbidden means” (p. 54);

a variety of “personal adjustments,” such as “situational withdrawal,” which(he notes) psychiatrists might call “regression.”

He also used words that have negative overtones, but he used them in a neutral way,so that they lose their negative charge. For instance, he spoke of new recruits being“mortified,” but examples of this include officer candidates in military organizations.

He discussed institutional staff by treating what they do as a kind of work (thusshowing himself the student of Hughes he often claimed to be), to be seen as part ofa class that includes many other kinds of work. He emphasized that the work of atotal institution’s staff deals with people, rather than inanimate stuff, and that thiscreates distinctive problems.

The multiplicity of ways in which inmates must be considered ends in them-selves, and the large number of inmates, forces upon the staff some of the classicdilemmas that must be faced by those who govern men. Since a total institutionfunctions somewhat as a state, its staff suffers somewhat from the tribulationsthat beset governors. (P. 77)

Here too he used the linguistic devices I have discussed, speaking “objectively” ofstaff work as dealing with “human objects” or “human material.”

THE COMPARATIVE SOLUTION

The disparity I spoke of—between the reality Goffman talks about and the way hetalks about it—also exists in the comparative procedure he used to arrive at theideal type of the total institution. He created this type, remember, by comparing avariety of organizations found in modern societies that have an important distin-guishing characteristic and abstracting from them their common features.

He first defined the general class of “social establishments” as consisting of“places such as rooms, suites of rooms, buildings or plants in which activity of a par-ticular kind regularly goes on,” and spoke of the difficulty of classifying members ofthis class. Nothing could be more “neutral” or “scientific.” He then classified estab-lishments, roughly, by their relations to the lives of the individuals who participatein them. Some institutions will not accept people of certain kinds at all. Many insti-tutions have a changing population of customers or workers. Others, like families,change their personnel less frequently. Some institutions house activities their par-ticipants take seriously; others are for more frivolous activities.

This dispassionate sorting of social organizations in the essay’s first paragraph—treating families, leisure time activities, and workplaces as equal, simply establish-ments that vary along one or more dimensions—warns us that Goffman will not beengaging in social science as usual. Ordinary social science, unlike Goffman, typi-cally uses as classificatory categories the words, and their associated judgments of


moral and social worth, common in the organizations being analyzed. The distinc-tion, for instance, between “deviant” and “normal” activities contains just such judg-ments, common in the legal and therapeutic organizations that deal with the mattersconventionally so classified. So do classifications of organizations and activities as“functional” or, more clearly, “dysfunctional.” And these categories intend to bescientific and dispassionate. The judgmental character of social science categories isclearer yet in more politically and ethically engaged research and writing, whichroutinely use terms like “repressive” or “corrupt” to describe the phenomena theyanalyze.

Goffman treated theories in social science and related areas as raw material,whose analysis would reveal the basic character of the institutions that use them,rather than as “science,” as in his offhand discussion of psychiatric thinking:

Mental hospitals stand out here because the staff pointedly establish themselvesas specialists in the knowledge of human nature, who diagnose and prescribe onthe basis of this intelligence. Hence in the standard psychiatric textbooks thereare chapters on “psychodynamics” and “psychopathology” which provide charm-ingly explicit formulations of the “nature” of human nature. (P. 89)

Needless to say, he explained that the purpose of these theories is to validate themethods used to accomplish the end of managing large numbers of people underthe conditions of a total institution.

Having defined social establishments, Goffman immediately proposed yet an-other principle for their classification, one that would separate out a group whose“members appear to have so much in common[,] . . . that to learn about one of[them] we would be well advised to look at the others.” He then isolates the defin-ing characteristic of this class this way:

Every institution captures something of the time and interest of its membersand provides something of a world for them; in brief, every institution has en-compassing tendencies. When we review the different institutions in our West-ern society, we find that some are encompassing to a degree discontinuouslygreater than the ones next in line. Their encompassing or total character issymbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to depar-ture that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, highwalls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors. These establishments I amcalling total institutions, and it is their general characteristics I want to explore.(P. 4)

So: institutions take up varying amounts of the time and interest of the peoplewho participate in them, from a little to a lot. Some take up so much of their partic-ipants’ time and lives that they are “discontinuous” with others in this array. Theyare “total institutions.” He distinguished among the institutions with this single cri-terion, which categorizes them according to whether people are confined in thembecause they cannot take care of themselves, because they are a danger to others, orboth, or whether they are so isolated in order to better accomplish some importantwork or as a retreat from the world for religious or similar purposes. His analysis


then looked for the other features that commonly accompany this sort of total con-trol over the lives of institutional participants, who he soon starts calling “inmates,”thus adopting for the whole class (including nuns, priests, soldiers, and others notusually thought of as being incarcerated) the demeaning term typically used inmental hospitals.

Goffman’s analytic tack emphasized the disparity between the kind of place hetalked about and the way he talked about it. Although he discusses, through most ofthe essay, places about which we routinely make strongly negative judgments—mental hospitals, concentration camps, prisons—he treated them as members of thesame class, as organizations about which we usually make no such simple negativejudgments—military establishments, ships at sea, or religious retreats. This tack createswhat seems to be a moral confusion at the heart of his method, for we are con-fronted with a classification that combines and treats as equivalent things that, asmorally competent members of our society, class, and profession, we “know” aremorally quite disparate. We may be antimilitarist, but most of us do not think thatarmy camps are concentration camps. We may have little sympathy for organizedreligion, yet not be ready to say that monasteries or convents are prisons.

The comparative method works by establishing, as we have seen, a common di-mension along which a variety of cases can be ranged. So there is a dimension ofhow much of the person’s time an establishment controls, and organizations varywidely in this respect. Some—a tennis club that one belongs to, for instance—controlvery little, while others—a family—control more. There is a general problem orquestion of how people’s time is divided among the groups they participate in, andthe total institution takes its place as providing one of the many possible resolutionsof this question. The total institution no longer stands out as aberrant—as thoughthe social world was divided into institutions and practices that are “ordinary” or“normal” and do not ask for an abnormal commitment from a person, and thenthere is this strange one, completely different, which requires total control. Nolonger different and strange, it is now just a different reading on a dial, another ofthe possible positions on this scale. This is not a trivial result.

An example. Goffman describes how three classes of total institutions give dif-fering rationales for “assaults on the self”: religious institutions say such assaults aregood for people, assisting them to reach a goal they aspire to; prisons and concen-tration camps do it for the sake of mortification itself; others excuse themselves onthe grounds that it is necessary for some other important purpose to be achieved (e.g.,military readiness or security). Then he says that in all three classes these rationales arerationalizations “generated by efforts to manage the daily activity of a large numberof persons in a restricted space with a small expenditure of resources” (pp. 46–47).

THE TECHNICAL AND MORAL RESULT

The avoidance of built-in judgment is not evidence of a moral confusion on Goff-man’s part. He was not a moral dope (to adapt Garfinkel’s famous description of


the homunculus in most sociological theorizing as a “cultural dope”). Far from it.Any careful reader feels, beneath the cool, unemotional language of Goffman’s essaysin Asylums, the beating heart of a passionate civil libertarian. By adopting thismethod, which entailed both antiseptic “scientific” language and a nonjudgmentalcomparison of cases, Goffman found a solution to the problem of the assumptionsbuilt in to conventional thinking.

If you accept the conventional categorizations built in to ordinary language andthe ordinary way that institutions and practices are sorted out in conventionalthought, if you unthinkingly refer to people who drink a lot of alcohol as alcoholics,if you refer to people who smoke marijuana as addicts, then you accept the ideasthat those words more or less oblige you to accept, ideas built in to the words them-selves and in to the perspectives associated with them. If a person who smokes mar-ijuana is an “addict,” then that person will smoke it uncontrollably, will be a “slave”to the practice, will engage in crimes in order to pay for the drug, and so on. If you usethese words to define the class you are studying, as I have argued above, you will notfind empirical regularities to make scientific generalizations about.

By constructing a neutral language to discuss total institutions, Goffman isolatesa class of social objects which have well-defined characteristics in common, charac-teristics that are empirically observable and can be connected to one another in ver-ifiable patterns. He can make science.

Some readers may wonder why I speak so insistently of “making science.” It isnot often appreciated to what degree Goffman was a serious empiricist, even per-haps what might be called (in some meaning of the term) a positivist. (In this he re-sembled, I might say in passing, Margaret Mead.) He believed that there was anempirical reality and was wary of anything that smacked of the supernormal, couldnot be verified empirically, or was overly speculative.

Perhaps I will be permitted another personal reminiscence here. Many years ago,when he was teaching at Berkeley, Goffman asked me to come to his seminar tohear a student, Marvin Scott, present his research on horse racing. This excellent re-search dealt with the way the social organization of what he called “the racinggame” (Scott 1968) made it reasonable for some trainers, owners, and jockeys towant their horse to lose, rather than win. However, in the course of his presenta-tion, Scott suggested in passing that gamblers, including horse players, sometimeshad “winning streaks” or “losing streaks.” Goffman, who had been listening apprecia-tively until that point, interrupted to say that of course Scott meant that they thoughtthey had such streaks of good or bad luck. But Scott said no, these were observable“facts.” Goffman, unwilling to accept such supernatural talk, persisted, appealing tothe laws of probability to assure Scott that such “streaks” were natural occurrences inany long run of tries in such a game as blackjack or craps. And he finally exploded inanger at Scott’s “unscientific” insistence on luck as a natural phenomenon.

Goffman used his linguistic inventiveness to name things in ways that evadedconventional moral judgments and thereby to make scientific work possible. In-stead of pointing with scorn at the “inhuman practices” of mental hospitals, or


defending their workers as honest professionals doing the best they could with adifficult job, he situated their activities in a context of organizational necessity theyshared with other organizations with widely varying degrees of moral repute. Theresulting generalizations made possible a deeper understanding of these phenom-ena than either denunciation or defense ever had.

His generalizations about total institutions simultaneously made possible a farmore serious moral evaluation of those practices, since the judgment was nowbased on a more than superficial understanding of the moral choices actors actuallyhad to make. This judgment leads, inevitably, to blaming organizations rather thanindividuals, and not even to blaming the organizations for doing what they have todo under the circumstances in which they exist. It is never easy to assign blame forwhat a whole society, in all its parts, is responsible for. As Goffman explains:

I have defined total institutions denotatively by listing them and then have triedto suggest some of their common characteristics. . . . [T]he similarities obtrude soglaringly and persistently that we have a right to suspect that there are goodfunctional reasons for these features being present and that it will be possible tofit these features together and grasp them by means of a functional explanation.When we have done this, I feel we will give less praise and blame to particularsuperintendents, commandants, wardens, and abbots, and tend more to under-stand the social problems and issues in total institutions by appealing to the un-derlying structural design common to them all. (Pp. 123–24)

REFERENCES

Goffman, Erving. 1961. “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions.” Pp. 3–124 in his Asylums:Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: AnchorBooks.

Scott, Marvin B. 1968. The Racing Game. Chicago: Aldine.

BECKER - The Politics of Presentation - Goffman and Total Institutions

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