Total Institutions And Reinvented Identities

Why do people enter total institutions – places that confine and control them around the clock – and how does the experience change them? This book updates Goffman's classic model by introducing the Re-inventive Institution, where members voluntarily commit themselves to pursue regimes of self-improvement.

Identity is never just an individual matter; it is intricately shaped by our experiences of social life. Taking a Symbolic Interactionist approach, and drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, Susie Scott explores the micro-social processes of interaction through which identities are created, maintained, challenged and reinvented. With a focus on empirical studies as illustrations, classic sociological theory is applied to contemporary examples. Each chapter focuses on a key dimension of how identities are negotiated in the drama of everyday life, from politeness and face-saving rituals to secrecy, lies and deception. Goffman’s ideas are explored in relation to self-presentation, role-making, group interaction and public behaviour, while language and discourse are shown to help people to give credible identity performances and to frame social situations. The book reveals how social selves change over the life course through stigma, labelling and deviant careers, and how life in a total institution can radically transform its members' identities. Through all of these processes, self and society are shown to be intertwined. This insightful approach will appeal to students taking a range of courses in the sociology of the self, identity, interaction and everyday life

Total institutions are defined in this reader not as a separate class of social establishments that exercise complete or nearly complete control over their population, but rather as specific institutions which exhibit to an intense degree certain characteristics found in all institutions. The issue therefore is not which institutions are total and which are not, but rather how much totality does each of our institutions display? Representing an important new approach to problems of social control, this book concentrates on dynamics-how institutions change in the extent or nature of their totality over time and how they display totality in different ways-rather than the mere enumeration of common traits.

What do we mean when we call any group a cult? Definingthat term is a slippery proposition – the word cult is provocative and arguably pejorative. Does it necessarily refer to a religious group? A group with a charismatic leader? Or something darker and more sinister? Because beliefs and practices surrounding food often inspire religious and political fervor, as well as function to unite people into insular groups, it is inevitable that "food cults" would emerge. Studying the extreme beliefs and practices of such food cults allows us to see the ways in which food serves as a nexus for religious beliefs, sexuality, death anxiety, preoccupation with the body, asceticism, and hedonism, to name a few. In contrast to religious and political cults, food cults have the added dimension of mediating cultural trends in nutrition and diet through their membership. Should we then consider raw foodists, many of whom believe that cooked food is poison, a type of food cult? What about paleo diet adherents or those who follow a restricted calorie diet for longevity? Food Cults explores these questions by looking at domestic and international, contemporary and historic food communities characterized by extreme nutritional beliefs or viewed as "fringe" movements by mainstream culture. While there are a variety of accounts of such food communities across disciplines, this collection pulls together these works and explains why we gravitate toward such groups and the social and psychological functions they serve. This volume describes how contemporary and historic food communities come together and foment fanaticism, judgment, charisma, dogma, passion, longevity, condemnation and exaltation.

Canadian Multiculturalism @50 offers a critically-informed overview of Canada’s official multiculturalism against a half-century of successes and failures, benefits and costs, contradictions and consensus, and criticism and praise. Admittedly, not a perfect governance model, but one demonstrably better than other models.

Tamsin Barber addresses the experience of the British-born Vietnamese as an overlooked minority population in 'super-diverse' London, exploring the emergence of the pan-ethnic 'Oriental' category as a new form of collective consciousness and identity in Britain.

We all play games at work – but have you ever wondered how your identity becomes bound up with game playing? This book is about employees in the Higher Education workplace and it provides an interpretation of why people act the way they do at work as an expression of game playing. It offers an insight into how people try to adapt and fit in at work by looking at how value is attached to certain identities through the lens of class and gender. The figure of the 'chav', the 'emotional woman', 'The Grafter', and 'Mrs. Bucket', are explored in detail as representations of what kinds of people are permitted, or not, to fit in at work. These identities are topical, and may even be familiar to readers, but the author’s analysis of them challenges why they exist, what function these identities serve at work, and who is able to deploy and inscribe them as part of the games people play at work.

This book uses identity theories to explore the struggles of indigenous peoples against the domination of the settler imaginary in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. The book argues that a new relational imaginary can revolutionize the way settler peoples think about and relate to indigenous difference.