Challenging the ‘dirty worker’—‘clean client’ dichotomy: Conceptualizing worker‐client relations in dirty work

Abstract

Dirty work research has long analytically prioritized focusing on the people who do dirty work, largely sidestepping who the clients of dirty work are and what contribution they can make to workers’ experience of the job as more or less dirty. We address these oversights through a systematic review and analysis of 65 articles, theorizing the role played by clients within dirty work. Firstly, we propose a three‐fold categorization of dirty work clients based on their temporal‐spatial proximity to the work and explain how clients can be a source of stigma through communicative and corporeal interactions with workers. Secondly, we collate existing discussions that mention worker‐client relations into a conceptual framework of clients’ contributions to dirty work through considering several feedback loops between clients’ and workers’ behaviours and discourses. In doing so, we examine the ways in which clients can both reinforce and alleviate workers’ experience of dirty work stigma.

Managing stigma together: Relationality in the wound clinic

“…Unfortunately, until recently, the nature of worker-client relations in dirty work has been largely overlooked (cf. Galazka & Wallace, 2023;Zhang et al, 20230). Some scholars inadvertently recognised in passing that the interaction between dirty workers and clients can shed light on how work becomes dirty or otherwise (e.g.…”

“…In socially tainted dirty work, stigma is inevitably entangled with the complex relation between a dirty worker and their client (Olvera, 2017). However, in focusing on how workers symbolically cope with stigma that affects them, most dirty work research has overlooked the existence and significance of the key relations between the worker and their clients (Eriksson, 2023;Galazka & Wallace, 2023;Zhang et al, 2023).…”

“…Our paper studies the significance of worker-client relations as an important collective resource that can be tapped into by both workers when coping with courtesy stigma and clients dealing with social stigma (cf. Galazka & Wallace, 2023;Zhang et al, 2023). To make this point, we take a lead from critical realist social theorists Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer (2015; see also Donati, 2016) who have argued that relations hold a distinct reality irreducible to individual agents and their activities.…”

Workforce Planning for Cleaning Services Operation using Integer Programming

“…This service is provided by a contractor to an individual's or an organization's place or property. They typically take on these undesirables but necessary duties, as opposed to a person or employee who would be less than happy about the chance to deal with the dust or waste [13,14,15]. The cleaning services industry in Malaysia is facing www.ijacsa.thesai.org numerous challenges when it comes to effectively managing its workforce.…”