Data, home, state: Goffman and the re-invented total institution
Author(s): Gunhild Tøndel
Wednesday 14 | 15:20-15:40
Room: TP45
Session: Untangling the entangled processes of digitization and privatization
During the past decades, arenas commonly known as “private” have become increasingly important for the realization of international welfare state policies. More and more public care, treatment and rehabilitation now takes place in the home. The bio-geographical transition of the body from public institutions to the home is supported and made possible by the establishment of a range of different tools, from digital technologies to new data reporting routines. Bodily fragility is now personally lived and professionally managed locally, instead of in larger public/total institutions. For instance, within elderly care, a key sustainability strategy has been to simply keep the old bodies at home as long as possible, to postpone these people’s moving into formal public institutions.
Changes in policy and service-delivery are legitimated by a range of social concerns about how to make better lives, through for instance securing individual service user rights, dignity, and autonomy, in addition to financial concerns. Yet, the development implies that not only the bodies, but also the public moves into the most private arena of everyday living. This raises questions about how the private changes to adjust the interaction with the public, and how the public changes the private home to achieve its goals. Sociological theorization about institutions have long addressed this concern. When Goffman introduced the concept of total institution, he wanted to address the importance of change in self-understanding that living with such an institutional framework induced on people. According to social and health and care policy, the total institution has been ideologically built down and removed. However, this presentation rather argues that the total institution is as vital as ever. Rather than being extinct, it has become infrastructurally organized and now anchored within the private home. This implies that the total institution has become a far more powerful and intimately working institution in citizens’ everyday life than ever before.