Dirty Work: The Social Construction of Taint

Introduction

Introduction Melanie Mills, Shirley K. Drew, & Bob M. Gassaway Many jobs, and even the ordinary lives of most people, have some level of dirty work in them. For most people, however, the dirty work in their lives is limited to changing diapers, carrying out the trash, or cleaning an occasional toilet. But dirty work is at the heart of a number of occupations and professions. It is often work that is not talked about in polite company, yet it is labor that allows many of us to live in a way to which we have become accustomed—without a lot of muss and fuss. Those who do dirty work make it possible for other people to take it for granted. In this volume, we do not assume that dirty work denigrates the people who perform it, but dirty work does take people in a wide range of jobs into situations that most of us would prefer to avoid. Further, these dirty jobs, while absolutely necessary to continue civilized life as we know it, tend to be relegated to the low end of occupational social hierarchies—with some exceptions, such as, attorneys and judges. Despite its fundamental nature, dirty work seldom makes it into “polite” public conversation. There is an apparent understood obligation to protect society from its dirty work, and this stigmatizes (taints) its dirty workers. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this volume explores the workaday lives of people in ten occupations who come into frequent and persistent contact with dirty work. We studied these occupational cultures to learn how the people who 1 perform dirty work talk about their jobs, their coworkers, and the foul aspects of their occupations. Each chapter studies an occupation , the people who perform that occupation, and how they communicate at and about work. We focus especially on how they manage the taint of their dirty work. Evolution of a Concept The study of organizational cultures went mainstream in the early 1980s with the publication of Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures and Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence. The idea that social or community issues could significantly affect not only employee morale but also the proverbial bottom line was an idea ripe for public consumption. There was a good bit of popular as well as scholarly attention to the concept of using (in the very manipulative sense of the word) culture to improve the success of organizations . A new occupation, corporate anthropology, was developed in response to this new wisdom. Communication scholars and other social scientists produced much literature about how culture is created , transmitted, and maintained. While subsequent publications minimized the effect of culture as an economic indicator, the language of culture still became a part of the public talk about how we understand organizational behavior. So what is organizational culture? A definition we like comes from Pacanowsky and O’Donnell-Trujillo (1983, p. 123) who say culture is a “reality as it is constructed of particular jokes, stories, songs, myths, polite exchanges, and so forth . . . which give substance to what would otherwise be insensate behavior.” When individuals interact in organizations, their medium of exchange is in units of culture (Conquergood, 1984). That is how we learn the rules of being in a group. It is how we understand the values of a group, along with how to express them appropriately. It goes beyond the formal structure of the organization identified in documents like procedures manuals and into the everyday performance of working. Not only do people perform, transmit, and move in organizational cultures—they also identify with their occupational roles. An occupational community is a “group of people who consider themselves to be engaged in the same sort of work, whose identity is drawn from the work, who share with one another a set of values, norms, and perspectives that apply to but extend beyond organizational matters, and whose social relationships meld work and pleasure ” (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984, p. 287). There is a layering of 2 Melanie Mills, Shirley Drew, & Bob Gassaway organizational and occupational cultures such that each contributes uniquely to individual worker identities. The differences are important to note. The organizational perspective of culture often accentuates the meaning of work for others (i.e., what is the role of this work/job in the organizational system?). The occupational perspective concentrates on the meaning of work for those who do it (i.e., what moves individuals to “be...