A total institution or residential institution is a residential facility 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. Privacy and civil liberties are limited or non-existent in total institutions, as all aspects of life including sleep, play, and work, are conducted in the same place. The concept is mostly associated with the work of sociologist Erving Goffman.

Etymology

The term is sometimes credited as having been coined and defined by Canadian 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. An expanded version appeared in Donald Cressey's collection, The Prison, and was reprinted in Goffman's 1961 collection, Asylums. Fine and Manning, however, note that Goffman heard the term in lectures by Everett Hughes (likely during the late-1940s seminar, "Work and Occupations"). Regardless of whether Goffman coined the term, he can be credited with popularizing it.

Typology

Total institutions are divided by Goffman into five different types: David Rothman states that "historians have confirmed the validity of Goffman's concept of 'total institutions' which minimizes the differences in formal mission to establish a unity of design and structure." In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discussed total institutions in the language of complete and austere institutions.

Nursing homes

According to S. Lammers and A. Verhey, some 80 percent of Americans will ultimately die not in their home, but in a total institution. In recent decade the nursing home industry has quickly extended, and particular regions of the country have become huge territorial nursing homes where we hide the aged and they hide from us. Long before their death, they are buried in the folds of the total institution, hidden, out of sight and out of mind. In the United States, dying in a total institution has become a common experience.

Tourism

Sociologists have pointed out that tourist venues such as cruise ships are acquiring many of the characteristics of total institutions. Tourists may not be aware that they are being controlled, even constrained, but the environment has been designed to subtly manipulate the behavior of patrons. These examples differ from the traditional examples in that the influence is short term.

Spaceship Earth

Sociologist Steffen Roth has demonstrated that, if realized, Spaceship Earth would epitomise the most total institution ever created in human history.