Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

Wilson, William J. 1980. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rating:
8

Summary:
Makes a good point, but you have to read the book close to tease it out

The primary gist of the book is, best outlined in the postscript that was included in the second edition (1980) of the book, “Even if all current discrimination were eliminated, the differences in the economic resources of blacks and whites would persist for years until the effects of past racial oppression disappear. Thus, when I speak of the declining significance of race, I am neither ignoring the legacy of previous discrimination nor am I arguing that racial discrimination no longer exists. I am referring to the relative role race plays in determining black life chances in the modern industrial period–in other words, the changing impact of race in the economic sector and, in particular, the changing importance of race versus class for mobility opportunities” (p. 167).

Let me see if I can further elucidate this point, as I think the basic argument of the book is commonly misunderstood. What the author is saying is not that race is no longer important but that a better understanding of the class structure of blacks is now what is needed in order to continue to help blacks. The author outlines a class structure specific to blacks (as opposed to the commonly referenced general class structure in the U.S.) that is polarizing: there is a growing distinction between black educated professionals and the black urban poor living in ghettoes. The point the author is making is that efforts to help blacks as a race (e.g., affirmative action) are primarily benefiting the educated professionals while the urban poor are being overlooked entirely. The author is not claiming that race no longer matters but rather is saying that if we are going to do something about inequality in America today we need to begin looking past race and focus on poverty, which disproportionately affects blacks, but also affects many other groups, all of whom need help.

How the author goes about building his argument is outlined in the quote from pages xi and xii below.

Review:
I think I need to explain, to begin with, the expectations I had of this book before reading it. This book, and the position of the author, was often referenced in a course I took on race and health. The instructor of the course seemed to indicate that the book made a very strong case that race no longer mattered in the U.S. and that class accounted for racial differences. While William Julius Wilson seems to be headed somewhat in that direction, after having finally gone to the source and examined the book, I think his book is misconstrued by many sociologists as indicating something that it never intended to indicate. Basically, the book is a very ‘toned-down’ version of that argument. It does not say that race is unimportant, it simply says that if we want to address race issues in the U.S. today, we are implementing policies that disproportionately benefit those who are already doing well – black educated professionals – and are over-looking the blacks who really need help – the urban poor. In making this argument, the author, almost in passing, groups the black poor with all the poor (race and ethnicity aside) in his attempt to reorient policy makers as to the real problem in America today – poverty!

Thus, while the misconstrued notion is seemingly related to the actual argument of the book, I think a closer reading of the text by those who use it so commonly in their courses, research, and conversations would reveal that the author is not making an ‘anti-black’ argument but rather a ‘let’s do something about poverty’ argument that overlooks racial and ethnic boundaries. When the author’s real argument is understood, I can’t help but admit that I agree with his point 100%. That said, let me move on to some of the criticisms I have of the book.

On a purely literary note, the book is not very clear, often repetitive, and has a tendency to get off topic and roam on unrelated tangents. If the author had stuck more closely to his arguments and the primary thesis, not only would it have made for more engaging reading but it may have prevented the necessity for including an entire chapter to explain the book in the second edition. Interestingly, the postscript is a good example of the benefits of criticism – the postscript is the clearest and most lucid part of the book. The postscript seems to illustrate that there is very little as effective as criticism for getting an author to clarify his/her argument.

As far as the author’s theoretical analysis, I have several criticisms. First, I’m not really sure why the author feels it is necessary to claim he is creating a class structure specific to blacks. Despite his claims, he proceeds to use the existing class model of the U.S. (i.e., lower, middle, and upper classes) for blacks. Perhaps the author felt that by illustrating how blacks are fanning out and even polarizing in the class structure that he was in some way moving beyond traditional understandings of class, but in the end I was left with the impression that his discussion of class structure could have been tremendously simplified if he had just said, ‘Blacks are spreading out over the traditional U.S. class structures, but they seem to be pooling primarily in two places – on the very lowest rung and near the upper-middle class.’ That is really the gist of his argument.

Another theoretical point the author tries to develop is that there is a difference between sociopolitical and economic racism. The author argues that in the past blacks suffered primarily from forms of economic racism (they did not control the means of production and, in fact, didn’t even control their labor), but now, the author argues, the racism blacks suffer is primarily sociopolitical in form – they are not in power politically and live in segregated sections of cities. I won’t disagree that the forms of racism have changed over time, but I’m not sure that this distinction adds additional understanding and, in fact, it may actually cloud understanding. Where one lives and political power are both based on economic power (as much as I hate to admit that money rules our lives, it certainly seems to be the case). Given this fact, sociopolitical racism is, at very best, a disguised form of economic racism. Thus, to draw distinctions between the two isn’t necessarily informative and may actually be misleading.

Despite my minor theoretical disagreements with the author, I should point out that the book is also informative. The author presents some very interesting information (primarily historical in nature) on racism during the 18th and 19th centuries, like the fact that in the Southern U.S. cities and towns were not segregated (to prevent blacks from building a power base). This discussion ultimately led to the author illustrating how the white, slave-holding class in the South worked to keep the poor whites and blacks down. Whether this was intentional or simply the wranglings of a group that wanted to maintain their wealth and power is uncertain (though Wilson seems to depict it as intentional), but it certainly does not present the wealthy whites of the Southern U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries in a positive light.

Overall, though I’m a bit hesitant to admit it due to the lack of clarity in developing his argument, I will admit that I can see why this book deserves its place as a classic sociological work. By refocusing policy and research toward the real disparity in the U.S. – poverty – Wilson has made a solid contribution to both sociology as an impactful science and to humanity.

Lindblom, Charles E. 1979. Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving. Yale University Press.

Rating:
4

Summary:
This book was written by a couple of Yale social science professors who interested in applied social research. The book is relatively short, coming in at just under 100 pages. The basic idea is to raise some issues about the practicality of what they call Professional Social Inquiry (or PSI), which is just another term for social science in all its flavors – sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc. In particular, they are interested in applied social science, which includes things like policy research. Several of the points they make are interesting, but much of the book is spent just defining what they mean by PSI and what their definition includes.

I found one of their major points intriguing. The authors point out that a significant problem with PSI is that it is “destined for steady obsolescence” (p. 52) because society and social problems are constantly changing. This is both good and bad for PSI. It’s good in that PSI is constantly necessary – the phenomena it examines is constantly evolving, meaning the theories, methods, and data need updating. It’s bad in that, unlike the hard sciences, it is very difficult to develop over-arching theories of social life because social life is constantly under flux. As a result, PSI is not, as the authors describe it, “independently authoritative.” PSI relies on common sense and common knowledge for many of its insights and is often seen as the study of common sense. Additionally, PSI relies on the hard sciences for many of its methodologies. In a certain sense, PSI lies somewhere between the hard sciences and common knowledge – it takes the methodologies of the hard sciences and applies them to social issues that common knowledge can and often does address without the help of PSI. Thus, the object of study is both a problem and an opportunity for practitioners of PSI.

While the authors talk at length about this problem and a few others, they don’t actually offer any solutions for the problems they raise; they specifically state at the beginning of the book they go “no further with each issue raised than to indicate that it poses a challenge to research” (p. 3). Thus, the book is a short treatment of some of the problems faced by practitioners of PSI without any solutions offered.

Review:
I think I picked this book up from my department in one of the periodic book “give aways” that occurs when professors are trying to find more book space on their shelves and get rid of old stuff they don’t want. I thought it looked interesting. This past Saturday I was looking for something to read not directly related to all of the other stuff I am constantly reading and I saw this book. I didn’t really plan on finishing it in less than 2 hours, but I did (I did a lot of skimming).

Admittedly, some of the issues the authors raised were intriguing, but for the most part I thought the book was tedious and boring. They did, however, finally hit on one point I really liked on page 99, which is almost the last page of the book. I have often pondered the idea that sociology doesn’t really seem to have a clear agenda in terms of research questions or topics of interest – sociologists just study whatever they want to study and somehow this results in some of the major social problems being addressed. Apparently I’m not the only one to consider this oddity, “The most carefully thought out version of these possibilities is Michael Polanyi’s. His thesis is that science is well guided by a mutually interactive process among scientists in which the “system” achieves a rationality superior to that of any individual in it. … [H]e may be right in arguing that under appropriate circumstances mutual adjustment can achieve defensible coordination and guidance of the complex processes of scientific choice. He points to the market as an example of a different but related kind of mutual adjustment in another area in which coordination is required. He suggests that a “hidden hand” may operate to guide science, even though it is a different hidden hand from Adam Smith’s” (p. 99). The point the authors are developing here is that there is a sense of direction guiding the discipline of sociology, but it’s not something tangible – it’s a “hidden hand” like Adam Smith’s “hidden hand” of the capitalist market. Unseen forces direct research interests toward pressing social issues. And while some people clearly have divergent and odd research interests that have little or no practical bearing on social life, that research is quietly selected against in the marketplace of ideas. The hidden hand pushes an unseen agenda that results in relevant research being valued more than less relevant research. While sociologists may not feel a lot of affinity for economists, in a subtle bit of irony, an element of economic theory may be guiding the very discipline of sociology.

Overall, I’m not sure this book is really worth going out of your way to find. It does make some intriguing points and is probably worth the 2 hours or so it takes to read it, but it’s probably not worth the several hours it would take to find a copy (unless you want mine). It raises some important questions, but it doesn’t answer them. The lack of answers combined with the tedium of defining the issues result in a mostly boring book.

Caplovitz, D., and F. Sherrow. 1977. The religious drop-outs: Apostasy among college graduates. Beverly Hills, California: Sage.

Rating:
8

Summary:
The book originated as a class paper, then a PhD dissertation, and ultimately turned into a book. Also, the original focus of the book was to be just on the religious experiences and identities of Jewish college students, but in expanding the project it became apparent that extending the analysis to Catholics and Protestants was worthwhile. Ultimately, “[t]he chief objective of [the] monograph [is] to discover the determinants of apostasy among American college graduates” (p. 31).

The bulk of the findings in the book are based on a 1961 NORC survey in which about 33,000 college graduates were asked questions about their college experience. However, the survey included two important questions: ‘In which religion were you raised?’ and ‘What is your current religion?’ When the answer to the second was ‘none’ but the respondent included a religion when asked the first question, the authors considered the respondent an ‘apostate’ (someone who leaves a religion). The authors then explore the characteristics of apostates in contrast to ‘identifiers’ or people who remained in the religion in which they were raised.

The main findings of the book include:
-The apostasy rate for Jews and Protestants in 1961 was around 15% (that percentage of people raised in the religion left by the time they graduated from college; for Catholics in that year it was around 9% (pp. 32-33).
-People in the West are the most likely to apostatize or not belong to a religion; people in the south are the least likely (p. 43).
-Protestant and Catholic men are almost twice as likely to apostatize as are Protestant and Catholic women; Jewish women are just slightly less likely than are Jewish men (p. 46).
-Closeness of relationship with one’s parents is also an indicator of apostasy; the closer one’s relationship growing up and one’s present relationship, the less likely the person is to apostatize (p. 51; however, this statistic has been questioned by later research – see Hunsberger’s work in the 1980s).
-Those who consider themselves “intellectually oriented” are up to three times more likely to apostatize than those who do not ponder “deep” questions or engage in academic pursuits (pp. 57 & 76).
-Liberals are more likely than conservatives to apostatize (p. 64).
-College is a breeding ground for apostasy; there are more apostates at the end of college then at the beginning (p. 109); also, the quality of a school makes a big differences, “Apostasy increases as the quality of the school increases” (p. 111).
-Not attending graduate school was associated with a decline in apostasy rates; attending graduate school increased apostasy rates (p. 147).
-Mixed religion marriages are more likely to lead to apostasy than are marriages between two people of the same religion (p. 154).

Review:
The book is fairly well-written and includes, in the introduction, a detailed explanation of why the primary data source is so old (1961) in light of the publication date of the book (1977) – the co-author, Sherrow, passed away in 1971 while working on the book and it was quite a while before the lead author, Caplovitz, was able to finish up the project.

The data analysis for the book consists of mostly t-tests and elaboration models in which certain variables are held constant in order to test for specific effects (this is a forerunner of regression analysis). Using such models, the authors generate a number of tables that clearly illustrate the relationships outlined above.

There are a few problems with the findings of the book, which is the only criticism I have of it. First, as has been the case with a number of other studies, this study finds that religious apostates are not as happy as religious identifiers (people who stay). The authors begin to hint at where this relationship might stem from, but they don’t really conclude the thought, “In fact, instead of being an antidote to unhappiness as the Zelan-Greeley substitute religion theory would hold, intellectualism turns out to be negatively related to happiness. Both apostasy and intellectualism seem to be causes of unhappiness, working in the same, rather than opposite, directions” (p. 93). What the authors fail to do is hold intellectualism constant and then test for differences in happiness. I’m fairly certain that if you were to do so you would find that apostates are no more likely to be unhappy than identifiers; the happiness component is intimately tied to intellectualism not to whether or not you are religious.

Another finding that warrants additional research is the idea proposed by the authors that apostates tend to be alienated, “The person who is ready to sever his ties with any major institutional sector of society-in this case, a religious community-is apt to be the alienated person-a type of continuing interest to sociologists” (p. 35). I think a clearer notion of what is meant by alienation is warranted, as is a retest of this notion both at present and in other countries where religiosity is not as pervasive as it is in the U.S.

Finally, while perhaps unintentional, the author has a tendency to use pejorative adjectives in describing the traits of apostates (e.g., rebellious, alienated, etc.). Whether you choose to present such traits in the negative or positive is in the eye of the beholder. Rather than calling apostates one might call them “trendsetters” or “revolutionaries” or “iconoclasts”. This does away with the negative connotations of leaving religion, which some people will certainly find objectionable.

Overall, this is a very good book despite the fact that the findings are dated and limited to a precise age group – recent college graduates. It remains a primary source for delineating predictors of apostasy and is a must read for anyone interested in the subject.

Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Social Reality of Religion. New York: Faber and Faber.

Rating:
9

Summary:
Building on his earlier works, “The Sacred Canopy” and “The Social Construction of Reality,” Berger extends his theories about religion by taking a very broad view of religion, from defining it to exploring its past, current, and future states. He notes at the beginning that he is not trying to write a “sociology” of religion, but despite his claim, he touches on key issues that would make up the bulk of such a text – at least from his particular theoretical framework.

The book builds on the notion that religion is a social construction, just like the rest of society. In fact, Berger states this idea rather explicitly, “… the point is that the same human activity that produces society also produces religion, with the relation between the two products always being a dialectical one” (p. 48). What he means here is that society is a social construction that is reified (objectivated) by the shared belief in it. Seldom do people consider that society and reality do not exist apart from the individuals (us) who make it up, but instead act as though society is a tangible, separately existing third party. Berger, who made this point in The Social Construction of Reality with Thomas Luckmann, argues that religion, just like society, is a creation of man, “Put differently, whatever else the constellations of the sacred may be “ultimately,” empirically they are products of human activity and human signification – that is, they are human projections” (p. 89). Berger kind of hedges his bets here – in true agnostic fashion – by saying there may be “something more,” but as understood by a social theorist, religion can only be understood as something created by man.

Having developed this idea, Berger then explores why this understanding has serious portends for religion generally. First, as is the case with any social construction, it is, “… produced and reproduced by man. Its structures are, therefore, inherently precarious and predestined to change” (p. 6). This means religion, like other social constructions, is in a tenuous position in that the legitimations for it must continuously be reinforced. Even so, religion, unlike other social constructs, has found certain ways to bolster this tenuous position. For instance, socialization functions to internalize the objectivated social world, “Socialization achieves success to the degree that this taken-for-granted quality is internalized. It is not enough that the individual look upon the key meanings of the social order as useful, desirable, or right. It is much better (better, that is, in terms of social stability) if he looks upon them as inevitable, as part and parcel of the universal “nature of things”” (p. 24). In other words, socialization is most effective if people are unaware of the fact that they have been socialized. Once people become aware of the fact that socialization is a process by which the rules of group membership are taught (be it a poker club or living in U.S. society), they can question those rules and the process. A good example of this is the political situation in modern China. The Chinese government doesn’t want its citizenship to learn more about democracy because, if it can socialize its citizens into a particularly nomos (or worldview), the people will not only not question the existing system but not realize that they should question the structures of their society (however futile that struggle may be with the internet today).

Berger illustrates that religions are very good at socializing adherents. But, in addition to socialization, religions have another tool: alienation. While it is unfortunate that Berger uses this term differently than Karl Marx did (possibly leading to confusion), his application of the idea is quite brilliant. Berger argues that one of the best ways to legitimate an objectified (or socially constructed) world is to “[immunize] them against the innumerable contingencies of the human enterprise of world-building” (p. 87). This effectively creates, “The world as an opus alienum (of the gods, of nature, of the forces of history, or what not) [that] is seemingly everlasting” (p. 87). In other words, by using legitimations that are unfalsifiable and beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, the powers that be are able to create legitimations of the objectified world that prevent them from being questioned. For example, the classic rationale that “god told me to do it” is difficult to debate because god is a referent to an unknown and unknowable force outside the realm of naturalistic science. The use of such a legitimation results in a nomos that is incredibly difficult to disrupt. As this relates to religions, Berger argues that, “… religion has been one of the most effective bulwarks against anomy throughout human history. It is now important to see that this very fact is directly related to the alienating propensity of religion. Religion has been so powerful an agency of nomization precisely because it has also been a powerful, probably the most powerful, agency of alienation.” (p. 87).

Having developed his arguments concerning the nature of religion, Berger then moves to changes in religion over time. He points out that the formal organization of Christianity (as Catholicism initially, but then with the Protestant Reformation) actually started the process of secularization (which is the separation of things from religion). I had never considered that the organization of the Catholic Church as an institution separate from other institutions was actually the beginning of secularization in that religion now had an exclusive position in society and did not permeate all of society. Berger argues that this was one of the first steps. With the Protestant Reformation and the advent of capitalist economic systems, secularization was furthered by introducing religious pluralism. As Berger ultimately argues, religions cease to be mysterious and sacred (in the Durkheimian sense) once pluralism becomes a factor (pluralism being the legal co-existence of different religious groups in a single society). Once pluralism takes hold, “… the religious ex-monopolies can no longer take for granted the allegiance of their client populations. Allegiance is voluntary and thus, by definition, less than certain. As a result, the religious tradition, which previously could be authoritatively imposed, now has to be marketed. It must be “sold” to a clientele that is no longer constrained to “buy.” The pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation. What happens here, quite simply, is that the religious groups are transformed from monopolies to competitive marketing agencies” (p. 137).

Ultimately, religious pluralism returns Berger’s discussion full circle to the nature of religion, “… the demenopolization of religion is a social-structural as well as a social-psychological process. Religion no longer legitimates “the world.” Rather, different religious groups seek, by different means, to maintain their particular subworlds in the face of a plurality of competing subworlds. Concomitantly, this plurality of religious legitimations is internalized in consciousness as a plurality of possibilities between which one may choose. Ipso facto, any particular choice is relativized and less than certain. What certainty there is must be dredged up from within the subjective consciousness of the individual, since it can no longer be derived from the external, socially shared and taken-for-granted world”(p. 152). This also ties this book into Berger’s earlier book, The Sacred Canopy, in which he argues that in order for religions to continue to exist they need to maintain “plausibility structures” that reinforce the objectified nomos of the individual. Without strong plausibility structures, such worlds collapse, leading to personal-level secularization (or religious switching).

Included in this rather erudite discussion of the sociology of religion are several chapters on theology that read very much like Greek to me. I’ll touch on those chapters a bit more below, but they seem to be included more because of Berger’s personal interest in theology than to bolster the arguments he develops in this text.

Review:
My only complaint with this book is that it includes several chapters and appendices on theology that, while I probably should be familiar with them, were completely foreign to me. Perhaps I will eventually pick up the ideas of Christian theology as I read more and more books that touch on it here and there (the names are starting to sound familiar now), but it just isn’t my cup of tea at this point. I could also potentially argue that the author doesn’t clearly lay out where he is going with this book from the beginning, but then, as is the case with most of Berger’s books, the style of writing and depth of thought are so complex that he may have done so and I just missed it. But that is a minor point.

All in all, I think this is a brilliantly insightful book that takes two of Berger’s earlier ideas, the social construction of reality and plausibility structures, and applies them to a historical and theoretical understanding of religion. I’m actually amazed this book isn’t referenced more by sociologists of religion as it makes so many good points and develops such clear theories. Perhaps I’ve just been reading the wrong papers, but I’m certainly going to keep my eyes peeled for references to it now.

In addition to developing some profound theories of religion (all outlined above), this book develops some theories that secular critics of religion would likely find useful. For instance, Berger develops a clear explanation for why religion has so often played a role in legitimating violence, “Killing under the auspices of the legitimate authorities has, for this reason, been accompanied from ancient times to today by religious paraphernalia and ritualism. Men go to war and men are put to death amid prayers, blessings, and incantations. The ecstasies of fear and violence are, by these means, kept within the bounds of “sanity,” that is, of the reality of the social world”(p. 45). In other words, religious legitimations of violence make it okay, even though it clearly is not in other circumstances.

Another clear example of the function of religion is detailed in a hypothetical scenario that I found particularly insightful and relate here in its entirety for your reading pleasure, “If one imagines oneself as a fully aware founder of a society, a kind of combination of Moses and Machiavelli, one could ask oneself the following question: How can the future continuation of the institutional order, now established ex nihilo, be best ensured? There is an obvious answer to the question in terms of power. But let it be assumed that all the means of power have been effectively employed – all opponents have been destroyed, all means of coercion are in one’s own hands, reasonably safe provisions have been made for the transmission of power to one’s designated successors. There still remains the problem of legitimation, all the more urgent because of the novelty and thus highly conscious precariousness of the new order. The problem would best be solved by applying the following recipe: Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. Let the people forget that this order was established by men and continues to be dependent upon the consent of men. Let them believe that, in acting out the institutional programs that have been imposed upon them, they are but realizing the deepest aspirations of their own being and putting themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the universe. In sum: Set up religious legitimations” (p. 33). Brilliant!

Overall, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the theory behind religions and their origins. Why this book is not more popular among sociologists of religion, I’m not certain (it could be the theology stuff!). But it should be more popular. Oh, and if you’re wholly uninterested in the social construction of reality and the origins of religion, well, you can skip this book.

Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. New York: Anchor Books.

Rating:
10

Summary:
The definitive sociological treatise of total institutions

The contents of this book are really far too complex to summarize, but I will do my best. There are two major points made in this text. The first is the development of the concept of the total institution. Goffman gives the following characteristics of total institutions: (1) all aspects of life are conducted in the same place under the same authority; (2) the individual is a member of a large cohort, all treated alike; (3) all daily activities (over a 24-hour period) are tightly scheduled; (4) there is a sharp split between supervisors and lower participants; (5) information about the member’s fate is withheld. (p. 6) The basic examples of total institutions are mental hospitals, prisons, and military boot camps, though there are numerous other institutions that could be considered total institutions as well. Goffman doesn’t leave his discussion of total institutions at a simple definition, he also describes nearly every aspect of total institutions, focusing primarily on the life of the inmates of the institutions (he also discusses the roles of the staff, but that isn’t really the focus) and the effects of the institutional environment on the selves and identities of the inmates.

The second major point in the text is Goffman’s criticism of total institutions, which is really limited to the very last section in the book (though you could easily see an underlying criticism throughout). Goffman’s basic argument is that the total institution does several things to inmates (I should note that he is speaking specifically of mental hospitals here, though some of this could likely be applied to other institutions): First it stigmatizes the inmate, preventing them from being able to ever completely reintegrate into society afterwards. Second, it forces a ‘sick’ identity on the inmate. For some inmates, any problems or disorders they may (or may not) have are actually encouraged and/or emphasized in mental hospitals because of the culture and environment inside. In a sense Goffman is actually arguing that total institutions create more problems then they solve by turning relatively normal people into mentally unhealthy people (a good fictitious example of this would be One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

Goffman’s basis for his discussion and analysis is a period of time he spent in a mental hospital. As an academic work, the book is also filled with references to previous literature and explanatory notes.

Review:
I was actually introduced to Goffman in an advanced social theory course but it wasn’t until I thought about applying the concept of total institutions to one of the institutions with which I am familiar that I actually read the book. In researching the topic it appears that very little work has actually been done on total institutions (labeled as such) since Goffman’s treatise (a lot of work has been done on prisons but it is in the criminology literature and does not generally refer to prisons as total institutions). I did find several examples of papers applying this Weberian ‘ideal type’ to different institutions, including: Indian Reservations, Graduate School, and others.

I think the reason why there is so little work following Goffman’s treatise is because he is generally right, very clear, and remarkably insightful. If he has pushed the concept to its limits then there really isn’t any point in trying to push it any further. In this sense, this book is comprehensive and very, very insightful.

But one of my reviews would not be complete without a criticism or two. The only real criticisms I have are the length of the book and the organization. The book is very long and, despite using a surprisingly large font, it takes quite a while to dig through the entire thing. There is quite of bit of information that could potentially have been left out, but if he had, perhaps this wouldn’t be the masterpiece it generally is considered to be. Also, and Goffman recognizes this and apologizes for it in the beginning, the organization is kind of strange. Rather than organizing the book as a book with distinct chapters it is actually just a compilation of 4 papers that he had previously published. Some of the papers are massive (over 100 pages), but the problem is that there isn’t a perfectly clear logic to the organization and there is absolutely no transition from one chapter/paper to the next. This really is forgivable as an academic work, but it does make things a bit awkward for the reader.

Overall this book is superb. Not only is it well-written (though perhaps at a rather advanced level) but it is incredibly insightful. Obviously Goffman caught the essence of the concept because no one has really challenged his understandings since. If you are looking for the sociological Symbolic Interactionist perspective on total institutions (mental hospitals specifically) or are just interested in what mental hospitals are really like (though this book is likely a bit dated), then look no further than Asylums. I highly recommend this for anyone interested in these topics.