Continuities in the Study of Total and Nontotal Institutions

According to Erving Goffman's seminal essays, total institutions are organizations that serve as places residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life (1961: xiii). The idea that the oft-studied and criticized mental hospitals of the 1950s (e.g. Stanton & Schwartz 1954; Belknap 1956; Greenblatt et al 1957; Caudill 1958; Dunham & Weinberg 1960) share many characteristics with prisons, armies, slave plantations, monasteries, old-age homes, military schools, tuberculosis sanitaria, and general hospitals has struck a chord that continues to resonate among sociologists concerned with the study of these and other organizations. Although the total-institution concept is commonly-but often looselyused, neither it nor Goffman's original comparative analysis has stimulated the expected rich inter-institutional comparison of organizations. Even though a field focused on the comparative study of organizations (Etzioni 1975) emerged at the same time as Goffman's comparative study, organizational research remains fragmented two decades later; each total institution' lies within the province of a distinct subfield of the