Asylums by Goffman Erving

Author:Goffman, Erving
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

But whatever the social entity relative to which we want to consider secondary adjustments, we are likely to have to refer to wider units, for we must consider both the actual place in which the secondary adjustment occurs and the “drawing region” from which the participants come. With children who snitch cookies from their mother's kitchen jar and consume them in the cellar, these distinctions are neither apparent nor important, since the household is at once the organization involved, the region from which the practitioners are drawn, and, roughly, the place in which the practice occurs. But in other cases the organization itself is not the only relevant unit. Thus, children from a whole neighborhood may gather in a vacant house to engage in activities forbidden in the households of the neighborhood, and the swimming hole outside some small towns may provide a place of forbidden behavior that draws youths from the whole town. There is a section of the city, sometimes called the “tenderloin,” that draws some husbands from households in every section of the city; and some towns, such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City, themselves became tenderloin districts for the whole nation.

An interest in the actual place in which secondary adjustments are practised and in the drawing region from which practitioners come shifts the focus of attention from the individual and his act to collective matters. In terms of a formal organization as a social establishment, the corresponding shift would be from an individual's secondary adjustment to the full set of such adjustments that all the members of the organization severally and collectively sustain. These practices together comprise what can be called the underlife of the institution, being to a social establishment what an underworld is to a city.

Reverting once again to the social establishment, an important characteristic of primary adjustments is their contribution to institutional stability: the participant who adapts to the organization in this way is likely to keep on participating as long as the organization wants him to, and, if he leaves before this, to leave in a way that smooths the transition for his replacement. This aspect of primary adjustments leads us to distinguish two kinds of secondary adjustments: first, disruptive ones, where the realistic intentions of the participants are to abandon the organization or radically alter its structure, in either case leading to a rupture in the smooth operation of the organization; second, contained ones, which share with primary adjustments the characteristic of fitting into existing institutional structures without introducing pressure for radical change,38 and which can, in fact, have the obvious function of deflecting efforts that might otherwise be disruptive. The settled and established parts of an organization's underlife tend, therefore, to be composed primarily of contained, not disruptive, adjustments.

Disruptive secondary adjustments have been studied in the dramatic processes of unionization and infiltration of governments. Because disruptive secondary adjustments are by definition temporary things, as in the planning for a mutiny, the term “adjustment” may not be quite suitable.

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