Ruth Simpson

Jason Hughes

Natasha Slutskaya

This insightful new study explores an emerging and growing interest in Sociology and Organization Studies which concerns the meanings and experiences of ‘dirty’ work. Based on a unique study of male street cleaners, refuse collectors, graffiti removers and butchers, and drawing on Bourdieu as a theoretical frame, it presents an ‘embodied’ understanding of ‘dirty’ work. Gender, Work and Occupation explores new avenues of workplace studies, highlighting how material conditions both support and constrain processes of occupation-based ideological constructions. Using original field research, the authors put forward a different agenda in terms of how we think about dirty work, and how we can explore and understand the ‘lived experiences’ of dirty workers.

Working Class Men doing Dirty Work

Gender, Class and Occupation

Patricia Lewis

Heather Höpfl

This book explores new understandings and contemporary experiences of dirty work – tasks or roles that are seen to be disgusting or degrading. Through novel empirical sites that include nursing, medicalization, sex workers, sex call operators, financiers and women's magazines, the book offers new theoretical insights into a form of work that is increasing in significance in the contemporary labour market. By drawing on concepts such as staining, embodiment and 'whiteness', it complicates the clean/dirty divide in the context of work and contributes to understandings of dirty work as contingent, fluid and socially constructed. It offers rich insights into the complex ways in which such work is experienced and the variety of strategies drawn on as dirty workers seek to manage identity.

Natasha Slutskaya

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