ABSTRACT
Acquiescing was a strategy for dealing with the difficulties faced by patients in the ward. Compliance, which may be nearer to an outcome of the process of acquiescing, has been a major subject of investigation from a number of perspectives. The medical profession often defines the success of treatment by the degree of compliance with a prescribed course of treatment. From a Marxist perspective, compliance is seen as the end state of social control through which persons are returned to their subordinate and productive place in the capitalist division of labour. Acquiescing is analogous to the process of learning the rules and recognising that failure to abide by the norm of submission will result in 'spoiled identity' or stigma. A. M. Williams has argued that really secondary deviance amounts only to a permanent 'spoilage of identity'.
