LFU:online

Curr. 2021 § 5 (1) 15: This module serves to deepen the knowledge of selected topics in sociology. The students specialize in one or more subject(s) and acquire in-depth knowledge in this area.

Goffman’s concept of total institutions stimulated social processes of institutional criticism. Coser’s work regarding greedy institutions is less well known. Nevertheless, both authors address a potentially all-encompassing access to individuals. In contemporary society, one can observe diverse manifestations of such accesses: prisons, retirement homes, inpatient housing for people with disabilities, monasteries, psychiatric institutions, refugee homes and others can, on a broader scale, more or less be characterized by structural features of total institutions. Features of greedy institutions can be observed within squad facilities in top-class sports, spiritual-fundamentalist movements, extremist groups, as well as in companies or in science and art.
This lecture aims to examine manifestations of all-encompassing access to individuals in social change theoretically and empirically.

Permanent interlinking of theoretical and empirical reflection on the topic: preparation and (written and oral) discussion of basic texts (individual and group work), small empirical research on a manifestation of total institutions including brief input on research results in the VU, short written reflection work on this

Participation in discussions / group work, preparation of the basic literature (including short written elaborations on this), empirical research and short input in VU, related short written reflection work

Coser, Lewis, 2015[1974]: Gierige Institutionen. Soziologische Studien über totales Engagement. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

Goffman, Erving, 1973[1961]: Asyle. Über die soziale Situation psychiatrischer Patienten und anderer Insassen. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

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