Dirty Work: The Social Construction of Taint

5. Bitching about Secretarial ‘‘Dirty Work’’

5 Bitching about Secretarial ‘‘Dirty Work’’ Patty Sotirin 95 I begin with a question prompted by the title of this chapter: How is secretarial work “dirty”? After all, secretaries work in the comparative cleanliness of modern offices and rarely get their hands dirty. Nonetheless, there is a paradox involved in secretarial work and occupational identity: on one hand, we sing the praises of secretaries (or “administrative assistants” or “executive assistants”). On the other hand, we dismiss a great deal of their work as trivial and mundane and cast them as (often insubordinate) office servants. In this regard, secretarial work and identity are tainted by perceptions of secretarial tasks as office drudgery, secretarial roles as degrading, and secretarial identity as feminized (Sotirin & Miller, 1994). My focus is on the identity management that secretaries do among themselves to deal with the small injustices and mundane oppressions endemic to such “dirty work” through a particular form of office talk: secretarial bitching. Specifically, I argue that secretarial bitching responds to the physical, social, and moral “taint” that undermines positive social regard for secretarial tasks, roles, and identity. Yet because bitching carries its own social and moral stigma, secretaries cannot effectively reclaim the dignity of secretarial work and identity through bitching. Nonetheless, I caution against disregarding secretarial bitching as simply “women’s office talk” or disparaging bitching as a co-opted or damaging form of complaining. Instead, I urge researchers to consider the larger contexts for bitching and to remain sensitive to the political potential for rearticulating such contexts in particular episodes of secretarial bitching. The chapter proceeds by clarifying what makes secretarial work “dirty” and the social perceptions and moral suspicions that threaten positive regard for secretaries’ occupational identity. I offer several examples from my own field research to show how secretaries defend secretarial identity through bitching. The examples support the suggestion offered in Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) that members of occupational cultures engage in stigma-resisting practices in order to sustain a positive occupational identity, but that such practices may have dysfunctional effects. How is Secretarial Work “Dirty”? In this section, I detail the perceptions and conditions that render secretarial work “dirty” and that taint the social roles and moral character of secretaries themselves, even though their work is recognized as necessary and they are applauded as the ones who “really run the office.” The Distasteful Drudgery of Secretarial Tasks Secretaries are tasked with maintaining the professional face of the organization, tidying up the dirty details and managing the mundane duties that are the mainstay of office orderliness: answering phones, managing mail, keeping files, xeroxing, coordinating other people’s schedules, making reservations for someone else’s trip. Despite the importance of this work, secretarial tasks are stigmatized as necessary but banal. In addition, the short career ladder and low salary ceiling of secretarial work—in 2004, $28,500–$43,000 annually—has historically compromised occupational prestige (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2006). Instead, secretaries have long looked to interpersonal rewards—the importance of good relationships and the boss’s approval—in lieu of material rewards (Kanter, 1977). However, Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) caution that tediousness and low pay are not sufficient to warrant a “dirty work” classification . Dirty work either deals directly with the polluting elements of social life—garbage, criminals, dirt—or is done under noxious or dangerous conditions. I hold that secretarial work meets both these criteria. 96 Patty Sotorin First, secretaries are responsible for disposing of the unwanted elements and disorder that threaten the professionalism and civilized decorum of the office. They must sort out and dispose of office “garbage” from (physical and virtual) junk mail to unwanted visitors. In addition, secretaries are often called on to do personal “dirty work” for their bosses. The classic example is Rosemary Wood, secretary to impeached U.S. President Richard Nixon, who erased a potentially incriminating segment of an audiotape of her boss’s comments about the Watergate break-in. To be fair, Wood always denied erasing the tape segment deliberately, maintaining that it happened by mistake while she was transcribing the tapes for a Senate investigation of Nixon’s involvement in Watergate. More prosaic examples come from the entries to a contest called “The Good Boss/Bad Boss Contest” conducted annually during the 1980s and early 1990s by 9 to 5, The National Organization for Working Women. The stories about bad bosses that secretaries submitted proved that there is considerable “dirty...