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The purpose of this paper is to explore how a group of dirty workers, that is, exotic dancers employed in a gentlemen's club, engage in identity construction amidst various macro, meso and micro considerations.

This study adopts a social constructivist approach in exploring the stories of a group of 21 dancers employed at a chain of exotic dancing clubs in the UK, For Your Eyes Only.

Identity construction is a complex process whereby dancers struggle to secure a positive sense of self among the various resources they encounter. The findings focus upon the processes of distancing through projecting disgust upon clients, other dancers and other clubs. Dancers do this to minimize the stigma associated with their own identities and position themselves in a more favourable light to others. In doing this, dancers construct a variety of identity roles for themselves and “others.” This process of distancing also results in the construction of a hierarchy of stigmatization whereby dancers categorize motivations for dancing, type of dancing and type of clubs to rationalize the work they perform and manage their spoiled identities.

The stories of these dancers illustrate the messy nature of identity construction for dirty workers. In turn, it also illuminates how a better understanding of the complexity of identity construction for exotic dancers can offer insights transferable to other dirty work occupations and organizations in general.

The paper provides an indepth look at an occupational site that is relatively unexplored in organization studies and thus makes a unique empirical contribution. It also offers a more comprehensive theoretical lens for understanding identity construction and dirty workers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore dirty work sites within an academic context. Working with particular “unloved” groups (Fielding, 1993) can present a number of challenges to researchers, and if professional boundaries are not carefully maintained, researchers can be seen as “dirty workers” within an academic context.

The paper draws a qualitative research project that explores women's involvement with nationalist movements in the UK.

Researching “unloved” groups, and in particular racist organizations, presents a number of potential emotional and professional, and can render researchers “dirty workers” if clear professional boundaries are not maintained.

Examining academia and some academic research as a dirty work site adds to existing literature (Kreiner et al., 2006) that suggests any occupation can have a “dirty work” element that must be negotiated. This paper presents new challenges for managing spoiled “dirty” identities, and suggests that identity management is context-specific.

“Dirty work” is an embodied, emotional activity, and may best be expressed through narrative thick description. The purpose of this paper is to employ creative analytic techniques through a “messy text” for better understanding the tacit knowledge and emotionality of dirty work and dirty research. The vignettes, based upon ethnographic fieldwork with US Border Patrol agents, viscerally reveal the embodied emotions of dirty work and doing dirty research.

The research draws on a two and a half year ethnography of the US Border Patrol in which the first author engaged in participant observation, shadowing, and interviews. Based upon the iterative data analysis and narrative writing techniques using verbatim quotations and field data, the essay provides a series of vignettes that explore the multi-faceted feelings of dirty work.

Tacit knowledge about dirty work is unmasked and known through experiences of the body as well as emotional reactions to the scene. A table listing the emotions that emerged in these stories supplements the narrative text. The analysis shows how communication about emotions provides a sense-making tool that, in turn, elucidates both the challenges and the potential highlights of doing dirty work. In particular, findings suggest that emotional ambiguity the “moral emotions” of guilt and shame may serve as sense-making tools that can help in ethical decision making and a re-framing of challenging situations.

A field immersion alongside dirty workers, coupled with a creative writing approach, provides access to the fleeting, embodied, and fragmented nature of tacit knowledge – answering the questions of what dirty work feels like. The essay provides a behind the scenes exploration of US Border Patrol agents – a profession that is alternately stigmatized or hidden from public view. Finally, the piece provides a self-reflexive account of the messy realities of conducting “dirty research” in a way that is open ended and embodied.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of identification and disidentification processes of individuals who perform dirty work. Specifically, this study seeks to understand how identification creates resilience for volunteer workers to endure dirty work.

The present study examines the resilience of volunteers in dirty work roles by interviewing 37 volunteers at an animal shelter and observing volunteers for 72 hours. The transcripts and field notes were analyzed using a grounded theory analysis.

Volunteers construct multiple identifications and disidentifications as part of the resilience process to engage dirty and dangerous work. Volunteers switched between different (dis)identifications and communicatively reinforced (dis)identifications to overcome the physical and social stigma associated with their work.

The present study extends research on resilience into a new context: dirty work. The findings bring into question assumptions regarding resilience and how a disruption is defined in the resilience literature. Disruptions are communicatively constructed and future studies should continue to research alternative contexts to study resilience labor.

The authors explore how service workers negotiate emotional laboring with “dirty” emotions while trying to meet the demands of neoliberal healthcare. In doing so, the authors theorize emotional labor in the context of healthcare as a type of embodied and emotional “dirty” work.

The authors apply interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to their data collected from National Health Service (NHS) workers in the United Kingdom (UK).

The authors’ data show that healthcare service workers absorb, contain and quarantine emotional “dirt”, thereby protecting their organization at a cost to their own well-being. Workers also perform embodied practices to try to absolve themselves of their “dirty” labor.

The authors extend research on emotional “dirty” work and theorize that emotional labor can also be conceptualized as “dirty” work. Further, the authors show that emotionally laboring with “dirty” emotions is an embodied phenomenon, which involves workers absorbing and containing patients' emotional “dirt” to protect the institution (at the expense of their well-being).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relatively hidden phenomenon of researchers who not only study dirty work but who also occupy the position of dirty workers. Drawing on the sociological debate on insider-outsider categories in research, this paper describes how these types of “dirty work/er researchers” understand and negotiate their occupational subjectivity and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their research practice.

Two biographical narratives from different types of “dirty work/er researchers” are analysed using a feminist epistemology of corporeality, social difference and power.

Ambivalence is an underlying dynamic of the narratives which indicate that the stigma attached to certain types of dirty work histories act to both facilitate and constrain research practice. Ambivalence disrupts strict binary categories often relied on in research such as insiders and outsiders, empowered and powerless and researcher and Other.

The experiences of “dirty work/er researchers” indicate a need to reconsider ethical, methodological, epistemological issues within social research.

Participatory research frameworks such as peer research should pay closer attention to issues of professional status, power and risk. Further research is required on what happens after peer researchers leave the field.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the relatively hidden world of the “dirty work/er researcher”, their occupational experiences and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their job.

The literature related to the dirty work had been mobilised to explain how the changes in hospitals (technification and increasing complexification work in particular) affected the allocation of the function between the various corporation (physicians, nursing staff, administration), and contributed to make them evolve. The purpose of this paper is to better understand in a context of organisational change what is the process that allows individuals to appropriate the dirty work that one tries to delegate to them.

To deal with this issue, for a year and a half, the authors conducted a longitudinal case study based on the evolution of the organisational merger between to medical units in a French hospital.

The results showed that the appropriation of dirty work first needs the acceptance of task shifting, then a phase to normalise dirty work through various tactics (reframing, refocusing, and team recognition). The authors also emphasised the essential role played by these activities to enhance collaboration between doctors and caregivers in their quest for restructuring and institutionalising change.

While the literature on dirty work focuses on the “how and why” the allocation of the function between the various corporation can evolve, this research investigates more in depth the working of the appropriation process itself. The issue of appropriation introduces a new element in the framework of dirty work and can constitute an interesting focus for managers looking to enhance organisational change.

This photovoice study aims to explore how cleaners experience dirty and invisible work in the workplace.

This research is twofold. The authors first used the photovoice technique, which is one of the visual data collection techniques, to elaborate on the phenomena. The data were obtained with the participation of seven people (four women and three men) from building cleaners working at two public universities in Turkey. Three photographs were requested from each participant and selected nine photographs were described and analyzed among the collected 21 photographs. In addition to photovoice research, five interviews gave insight into the cleaners’ experiences in the second stage of the study.

This research revealed that participating cleaners experienced invisible dirty work and they felt undervalued, despised, treated as “second class/low-level people” and stigmatized.

This study recommends that university administrations defend the rights and dignity of cleaners at work, provide services to support their inclusion and increase staff awareness.

This study sheds light into an understudied area which is the building cleaners’ invisible and dirty work experiences and how that impacts their lives via a photovoice research.

Dirty workers occupy jobs and perform tasks that are unpleasant and considered distasteful or “tainted” to other members of society. However, while they experience challenges in managing stigma, they are generally successful in creating positive self-identities. Among these dirty jobs is prostitution. As dirty workers, women sex workers in American history have been treated with humor, ridicule and derision. This study aims to explain the social contexts and the limited economic choices these women faced and examine how they may have managed their dirty work’s stigma to create positive self-identities.

This paper uses primary and secondary sources to examine a 53-year period of American history and to frame these women’s stigma management within a “dirty work” perspective.

The author suggests that sex workers in riskier roles (e.g. street walkers, crib workers or “upstairs girls” in saloons) would have been less able to effectively manage stigma and create positive self-identities as compared to brothels workers, due to the brothel’s strong social support, healthier work culture and richer resources.

While sex work has changed significantly in the past century, the principles of identity management in this difficult and dirty work remain. Understanding the economic, social and individual challenges faced by these dirty workers will aid our understanding of the difficulties confronted by today’s sex workers.

Sex work is nearly absent from scholarly management literature. The lack of historical perspective and knowledge in this field limits a full understanding of how various types of dirty workers manage stigma.