Status Passage by Anselm L. Strauss

Author:Anselm L. Strauss [Strauss, Anselm L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9781351488136
Google: ICAxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T03:26:19+00:00

Undesirable For Passagee

When the status passage is desirable only for the agent, then recalcitrance and conflict are likely to dominate it Whether the agent tries to persuade the passagee to cooperate or forces him to go along with the passage depends upon the kind of power he has at hand and whether the situation is appropriate for its use. Usually, the agent possesses a combination of powers for gaining some measure of compliance and cooperation. He has the ability to gain the passagee’s attention at certain times, when he can communicate at will. He tries to persuade, convince, and convert. In his temporal ordering of these efforts at conversion he will try to include the right atmosphere or situation conducive to conversion. Agents of an institution, such as guards in prisons and attendants in mental institutions, may hold group conferences or thereapy sessions with prisoners, patients, or inmates respectively to gain their cooperation. They, also, may have private consultations. They encourage cooperation as a way of making the passage less undesirable for the passagee.

When efforts at conversion or persuasion fail, usually some agents, particularly institutional ones, are able to use powers of enforcement based on physical or normative forces. A prisoner can be put into solitary confinement. (A political or war prisoner, in some countries, may even be killed.) Host agents can revoke privileges or induce hardships of various sorts and degrees to gain cooperation. Children can be spanked, students suspended or expelled, “noncooperative” patients in the hospital reprimanded or their complaints and requests ignored. Thus, when agents control the reward system that controls desirability of a passage, they can discourage or encourage behaviors through this reward system so that the passagee will cooperate more during an undesirable passage. The passagee’s only resort may be to halt his passage through such tactics as striking or dropping out. For the inmates of many institutions such tactics may be difficult; these persons are captive passagees of inevitable passages no matter how undesirable. (They can only mitigate undesirability through such tactics as described in the chapter on Shape.)

While ordinarily the recovery passage (from illness) is desirable for both the patient and the doctor, under certain conditions this passage is desirable only for the agent—neither the process nor goal of the passage seems desirable to the passagee. The basic condition for this situation is that the patient does not realize he is sick or can deny it, because he has no particular pain or other recognizable symptoms (as in many heart, psychiatric, or tuberculosis cases). Thus, he believes it undesirable to submit to the regimen, often rigorous and costly, of a recovery passage that seems meaningless or of low priority. Because the agent believes, however, that the passage is desirable, he tries to convince the passagee of this while simultaneously using what means he has to enforce the requisite cooperation for treatment. The means of enforcement vary from simple, authoritarian efforts by the doctor, to family pressures and legal controls as in tuberculosis or mental disease.

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