Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

offer palliation and there is a general desire for healthy longevity, but the unpredictable
nature of ageing and the immanent reality of mortality at the end of the tunnel work to
keep people at a scared and humble distance. What the staff at Tacoma Pastures does
want to control is the way customer service is linked to certain definable expectations
and risks that family members might have to use in order to make sense of how and
why their ageing loved ones are living out their lives in a long-term care facility.
Therefore, although Foucault does offer us a more nuanced and historical examination
of the sources and forms of control, a long-term care facility is not entirely about
control, whether in the form of controlling persons or in the case of controlling social
and unwanted bodies.
In the long and short of it, no one is really in charge of the ‘institution’. The persons who
reside at Tacoma Pastures take their cues from others, and from the rules and legal and
financial guidelines set in place. Likewise, Tacoma Pastures is constantly adapting and
updating to reflect changes in social policy and medical practices. To rely too much on
Goffman and Foucault would necessarily lead us astray from the exigencies of ageing
and caregiving that cannot be structured or encased by the terminologies surrounding
the more straight forward studies of institutional ethnographies. In this way, Tacoma
Pastures is the field site and the problem, the medium and the message.
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