Introduction to Social Analysis Week 6.ppt

Introduction to Social Analysis Week 6 Foucault, discourse and discipline How to make sense of madness? What broader social insights can we can from understanding institutional life? What can we understand from the historical examination of the development of dominant ways of thinking and classifying people. Start with Goffman and move on to Foucault using the contrasts between them to look at “total institutions” and to illuminate their ideas. Reading: Seidman, Steven, (2004) Contested Knowledge 3rd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapter 12 ‘ Michel Foucault’s Disciplinary Society’. Good account of Foucault’s ideas and relates them to those of other theorists. Uses the example of sexuality. In this lecture I use the example of madness and medicalisation. Pip Jones 2003 Introducing Social Theory. Polity Press, Chap. 7 Michel Foucault and Body-centeredness of Modernity. Easy to read account of Foucault’s ideas Asylums Goffman, Erving. 1968 Asylums : essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates Harmondsworth : Penguin. ?362.2 GOF Idea of “total institutions”; batch living, all aspects of life in one organisation. Includes prisons, barracks, hospitals, convents, children’s homes, boarding schools, ships, etc. Symbolic interactionist perspective Characterised by two contrasting roles: staff and inmates, no social mobility between them. Different strategies of interaction to achieve the objects of the institution and of the individual members of staff and inmates. Staff strategies To obtain compliance of inmates – for the smooth running of institution (getting everyone fed on time), for their own good (taking the medication), to shape desirable characteristics. How to get them into role? Role stripping, taking away previous roles, induction rituals “Mortification of self” removal of resources for opposition, for adopting other roles than inmate, for adopting a different moral order. Inmate strategies Primary v Secondary adjustments; formal rules v