Managing spoiled identities: dirty workers' struggles for a favourable sense of self

My Work Is Meaningless: The Consequences of Perceived Occupational Stigma for Employees in High-Prestige Occupations

Occupational stigma is pervasive, but there is a lack of understanding about how it impacts the behaviors of employees in relatively high-prestige occupations. We draw on the job characteristics model and social information processing theory to establish hypotheses about the effects of occupational stigma on the withdrawal behavior of employees in a relatively high-prestige occupation (preschool teacher). We suggest that perceptions of skill variety and task significance among high-prestige employees may be negatively influenced due to occupational stigma perception. In addition, occupational stigma conveys information to employees that the work they do is not appreciated by beneficiaries. For those reasons, making it difficult for them to perceive the meaningfulness of their work. This lack of meaningful experience is in turn positively associated with employees’ withdrawal behavior. Furthermore, we propose that these indirect effects are moderated by perceived job embeddedness of employees. Based on data collected at two time points from 466 preschool teachers in China, we find that occupational stigma is positively related to employees’ withdrawal behavior through meaningfulness. In addition, the negative relationship between perceived occupational stigma and experienced meaningfulness is stronger for employees with high job embeddedness than for employees with low job embeddedness.

Identity work at the intersection of dirty work, caste, and precarity: How Indian cleaners negotiate stigma

Drawing from in-depth interviews of cleaners employed in the cleaning industry in India, the study examines the ongoing process of constructing a positive identity among dirty workers. Cleaners respond to the intense identity struggles emerging from caste stigma, dirty taint, and precarity by constructing ambivalent identities. Cleaners’ identity work is constituted by the very identity struggles they encounter, and their efforts to negotiate stigmatized identities further create identity tensions. Apart from accenting the paradoxical duality inhered in identity work, the findings show how caste/class inequalities are reworked in a neoliberal milieu and reproduced in identity construction processes. The findings call attention to caste as an important social category in organizational studies that has implications for work identities, dirty work, and precarious work.

“(Not) forever talk”: restaurant employees managing occupational stigma consciousness

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine restaurant employees’ engagement in identity work to manage occupational stigma consciousness.

Design/methodology/approach

Research methods included ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews.

Findings

Widespread societal stigma attached to food service work disturbed participants’ sense of coherence. Therefore, they undertook harmonizing their present and envisioned selves with “forever talk,” a form of identity work whereby people discursively construct desired, favorable and positive identities and self-concepts by discussing what they view themselves engaged and not engaged in forever. Participants employed three forever talk strategies: conceptualizing work durations, framing legitimate careers and managing feelings about employment. Consequently, their talk simultaneously resisted and reproduced restaurant work stigmatization. Findings elucidated occupational stigma consciousness, ambivalence about jobs considered “bad,” “dirty” and “not real,” discursive tools for negotiating laudable identities, and costs of equivocal work appraisals.

Originality/value

This study provides a valuable conceptual and theoretical contribution by developing a more comprehensive understanding of occupational stigma consciousness. Moreover, an identity work framework helps explain how and why people shape identities congruent with and supportive of self-concepts. Forever talk operates as a temporal “protect and preserve” reconciliation tool whereby people are able to construct positive self-concepts while holding marginalized, stereotyped and stigmatized jobs. This paper offers a unique empirical case of the ways in which people talk about possible future selves when their employment runs counter to professions normatively evaluated as esteemed and lifelong. Notably, research findings are germane for analyzing any identities (work and non-work related) that pose incoherence between extant and desired selves.

"I Wanted to Rebel, But There They Hit Me Even Harder": Discourse Analysis of Israeli Women Offenders' Accounts of Their Pathways to Substance Abuse and Crime

This study examined women offenders' accounts of their pathways to substance abuse and crime and the intersection between them, to reach a holistic understanding that captures the dynamics of victimization, agency, and gender. Discourse analyses of the accounts of 11 Israeli women offenders indicated differential use of two discourses. Five participants used the victimization discourse, which viewed substance abuse as an attempt to medicate the self that was injured following victimization experiences; two used the agency discourse, which viewed substance abuse as a way to experience pleasure, leisure, and control over their destiny. Four of the participants used these two contradictory discourses simultaneously. The findings indicate the absence of a cultural discourse that encompasses women's complex experience of gender, victimization, and agency. Possible implications for intervention are discussed.

What we can learn from de-valued and marginalised work/research

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how QROM has become an outlet that gives voice to de-valued and marginalised work/research and those who undertake it. The authors present an overview of the research published in the journal over the past ten years that has provided rich accounts of hidden and marginalised groups and experiences. The authors also summarise the unique contributions of the research covered in the special issue the authors co-edited on doing dirty research using qualitative methodologies: lesson from stigmatized occupations (volume 9, issue 3).

Design/methodology/approach

– The authors adopt a literature review approach identifying key pieces covered in QROM that surface various forms of qualitative methods employed to illuminate the everyday practices of “Other” occupations, individuals and groups; experiences situated outside of the mainstream and often hidden, devalued and stigmatised as a result.

Findings

– The authors conclude that the articles published in QROM have demonstrated that in-context understandings are critically important. Such studies offer insights that are both unique and transferable to other settings. A number of invisible or hidden issues come to light in studying marginalised work/ers such as: the hidden texts, ambiguities and ambivalence which mark the experiences of those marginalised; that stigmatised work/research is embodied, emotional and reflexive; and, that expectations of reciprocity and insider-outsider complexities make the research experience rich, but sometimes uncomfortable.

Originality/value

– The authors review the research published in QROM over the past ten years that contributes to understandings of work, research and experiences of those who are often de-valued, silenced and marginalised in mainstream business and management studies.

Money Matters: Teflonic Identity Manoeuvring in the Investment Banking Sector

In this paper we address identity issues in relation to senior employees in the UK investment banking sector. Drawing on in-depth material, the study demonstrates their marginal concerns about identity issues or engagement in what is typically viewed as identity work. Instead they had what we refer to as an identity minimalism orientation and met potential challenges to identity with what we conceptualize as teflonic identity manoeuvring. In so doing they were able to deflect attention away from themselves, enabling them to circumvent identity concerns. These employees drew upon material resources, specifically money, to rationalize this disposition and social (in particular, dress codes) and discursive resources (around professionalism) to bolster and sustain this disposition.

Dirty Work and Dirtier Work: Differences in Countering Physical, Social, and Moral Stigma

The literature on dirty work has focused on what physically (e.g., garbage collectors), socially (e.g., addiction counsellors), and morally (e.g., exotic dancers) stigmatized occupations have in common, implying that dirty work is a relatively monolithic construct. In this article, we focus on thedifferencesbetween these three forms of dirty work and how occupational members collectively attempt to counter the particular stigma associated with each. We argue that the largest differences are between moral dirty work and the other two forms; if physical and social dirty work tend to be seen as more necessary than evil, then moral dirty work tends to be seen as more evil than necessary. Moral dirty work typically constitutes a graver identity threat to occupational members, fostering greater entitativity (a sense of being a distinct group), a greater reliance on members as social buffers, and a greater use of condemning condemners and organization-level defensive tactics. We develop a series of propositions to formalize our arguments and suggest how this more nuanced approach to studying dirty work can stimulate and inform future research.

Devalued, deskilled and diversified: explaining the proliferation of the strip industry in the UK

This paper looks beyond the debates that focus on the objectification of the female body to examine the question as to why strip clubs have proliferated and found a permanent place in the night-time economy in the UK. Using empirical qualitative and quantitative data from the largest study into the strip industry in the UK to date, we challenge the common assumption that 'demand' is responsible for the rise in erotic dance. Instead, we argue that the proliferation of strip clubs is largely due to the internal economic structures of the industry which have developed partly in response to the financial crisis beginning in 2008. First, we argue that clubs profit from individual dancers through an exploitative system of fees and fines, rendering a strip club business a low cost investment with high returns and little risk to club owners. Second, we note that the last decade has seen diversification of the industry accompanied by deskilling and devaluing of dancing and dancers' labour. Third, we demonstrate that despite the negative effects of these changes on workers, there has been an expansion of the industry as the ability to make profit, even during a financial crisis was ensured through the transferral of risk to workers. Overall, we suggest that far from proliferating as a response to demand, the industry has maintained its market presence due to its ability to establish highly financially exploitation employment relationships with dancers at a time of economic fragility.

Occupational image, organizational image and identity in dirty work: Intersections of organizational efforts and media accounts

This article proposes that media representations of an occupational category may intersect with organizations’ efforts to construct a positive organizational identity and image. We fuse three streams of literature namely, organizational identity and image, media and the social construction of reality, and dirty work to extend extant literature on organizational identity and image. Attention is drawn to occupational image as the position of an occupational category in society. We contend that occupational image is likely to influence the decisions and actions taken by organizations and its members, in particular when the occupation is central to the organization’s mission. Occupational image is partly informed by the media. We analyse one year of media coverage of a dirty work occupation, specifically exotic dancing, and identify various ways in which the media portrays the exotic dancing occupation and the organizations providing these services. We focus upon two of these categories, namely Public (dis) Order and Art and Entertainment. We also draw upon a variety of data from one organization, For Your Eyes Only, to explore how organizational efforts to construct a positive organizational identity (based upon professionalism and legitimacy) and image (based upon fantasy, exclusivity and high quality service) intersect these media representations.