Coordinamento:
Diego Coletto
Università di Milano-Bicocca
diego.coletto@unimib.it
Davide Carbonai
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
davide.carbonai@ufrgs.br
Call for papers
The expression “dirty work” was first used by Everett Hughes (1951) to refer to occupations that involve tasks generally considered to be unpleasant, disgusting or humiliating. Over the years, numerous studies have shown that workers tend to be associated with their so-called dirty jobs, thus becoming “dirty workers”. The literature highlighted three forms of stigma usually experienced by dirty workers: (1) physical/material, (2) social, and (3) moral (Ashforth and Kreiner 2014). These forms of stigma can affect the formation of professional identity, negatively influencing workers’ processes of constructing self-esteem. Furthermore, according to various authors, the analysis of the meanings attributed to dirty jobs and their stigma can allow to explore and better understand the dynamics of class and power that underly these types of occupations, as well as the relations among single individuals and the social structures in which they are embedded (Dick 2005; Slutskaya et al. 2016).
Within the literature on dirty jobs, the attention was often focused on the dirty workers’ actions to reduce or neutralise stigmatisation. These studies described dirty workers as active social actors, highlighting their perceptions of work, their prevailing patterns of actions and the ways they position themselves as subjects engaged in redefining a series of symbolic aspects related to their occupations. Other scholars, however, pointed out how readings of the dirty-jobs phenomenon strictly focusing on the production of meanings attributed to the jobs and the construction of workers’ sense of self increase the risk to overlook the physical and material aspects of the work itself (Hughes et al. 2017). It is therefore necessary to pay more attention to the material aspects of dirty jobs in order to fully understand how dirty workers seek to dignify their work, both from a discursive-symbolic and a practical-material points of view.
In general, the interpretive framework that tried to analyse how the material and the symbolic relate to each other was particularly useful to understand and analyse dirty workers’ actions and perceptions and their changes. Moreover, this approach seems even more promising when the focus of analysis is composed of material and symbolic aspects of dirty jobs that are part of a set of occupations involved in the most recent changes of economic sectors in terms of sustainable and green transitions.
This panel aims to invite and discuss papers that deal with dirty jobs, its material and symbolic aspects in economic sectors particularly affected by processes of sustainable and green transition (for instance, waste management, health, cleaning, security, commerce, services sectors). Comparative empirical studies will be highly appreciated, and the variety of methods is welcome.