Dirty Work

In 1951, Everett C. Hughes, a prominent Chicago School sociologist of work, ethnography, and the sociological imagination in general, wrote just a few very salient and definitional words about “dirty work.” These words and ideas spawned sociological inquiry into work that is held in low esteem by society because the work is perceived as somehow degrading, undignified, or morally dubious. He wrote,

Hughes offered an analytic framework that preceded his student Erving Goffman's famous writing on stigma (1963), though stigma has much to do with dirty work. In the case of dirty work, stigma attaches to the worker through her or his occupation; the person may be tainted by the work, or taint may be acquired through contact with stigmatized persons while doing the work; thus, taint can be contagious.

Where dirty work seems to encompass a broader range of experiences than occupationally derived stigma is in the notion that dirty work can have a charismatic or prestigious component, especially when such specialized skill is required that the work cannot be delegated to those lower down the line. This is evident in certain types of medical work where the human body is handled or opened. Thus, the richness of the concept of dirty work, as laid out by Hughes, is that it encompasses work generally viewed as physically distasteful or morally problematic, but at the same time necessary in order to maintain the standard or quality of life to which people have become accustomed. Critical to understanding the nature of dirty work, though, is this additional piece: the work may have heroic or charismatic elements or framings. Several sociologists have taken Hughes's framework and applied it in different occupational realms in order to understand how people view their “dirty work,” how they believe others view it, the way this affects one's self-identity, and the ways workers learn to manage or mitigate the taint. The list alone provides a richer understanding of the concept: The concept of dirty work has been applied to the study of custodial workers, garbage collectors, topless dancers, beef-packers, bike messengers, abortion providers, prison guards, scavengers, domestic workers, service workers, lawyers, truck drivers, nurses, caregivers, police, and forensic scientists.

Sewer pipe is laid by workers using an indigenous manual labor process in Kolkata, India, in 2009. Dirty and dangerous work in India is relegated to members of lower castes.

Fifty years after Hughes first wrote on the topic, scholars within the field of management studies have further theorized it to reflect the agency of those doing dirty work. Blake Ashforth and Glen Kreiner posit that dirty work jobs generally fall into categories of physical taint, social taint, and/or moral taint. Their framework addresses how workers manage taint in order to maintain a positive work identity and sense of self.

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