‘Why would you want to do that?’: Defining emotional dirty work

Abstract

This article considers how and why people work with difficult emotions. Extending Hughes’ typology of the physical, social and moral taints that constitute ‘dirty work’, the article explores the nature of a previously neglected and undefined concept, emotional dirt. Drawing on data from a situated ethnographic study of Samaritans, we consider how the handling of difficult and burdensome emotions, which are often written out of rational accounts of work, is outsourced to others who act as society’s agents in the containment of emotional dirt. We provide the first explicit definition of emotional dirt, and contribute an extension to the existing tripartite classification of occupational taint. Moreover, in naming emotional dirt we seek to open up a sphere of research dedicated to understanding its emergence, nature and relational effects. To this end, we demonstrate how taint emerges as a sociological consequence of the performance of emotional labour as emotional dirty work, while considering how management of the difficult, negative or out-of-place emotions of others can be framed as a positive experience such that it can be good to feel bad when handling emotional dirt.

Why resilience managers aren’t resilient, and what human resource management can do about it

“…is abstract), whereas physical taint is about real proximity to dirt, moral taint is about engaging in, subjectively, immoral or illegal activity, and emotional taint is about the display of exhibited emotions (i.e. sadness and despair) (McMurray & Ward, 2014). We also recognise that abstract proximity to death-related concepts often involves resilience managers in intense emotional work, which sometimes put them in a position of creating 'emotional dirt' for others.…”

“…The early dirty jobs literature focused upon types of work that are viewed as physically tainted or socially/ morally unacceptable (Hughes, 1958), such as garbage collection, funeral direction and sex work. In recognition of the changing occupational landscape, McMurray and Ward (2014) have recently introduced a new category of 'emotional dirt' which relates to the burdensome, and inappropriate emotions' expressed by others (McMurray & Ward, 2014;Rivera, 2015). Whilst we acknowledge that resilience managers share common experiences with professionals that are impacted by moral taint (i.e.…”

“…Indeed, resilience work, by definition, handles what falls outside 'business as usual', and as such, resists the 'clean rational logic of efficiency' embedded in the managerial ideology (McMurray & Ward, 2014). Resilience is therefore seen by some organisational actors as diverting from legitimate core business functions, 'the culture is actually against business continuity because it just gets in the way of the sales' (uk).…”

“…Our respondents were working on influenza pandemics, nuclear, radiological, biological and chemical risks, suicide prevention, flooding, fire, earthquakes, terrorism and cyber attacks. Through this focus on negative events, the resilience manager reminds their co-workers that 'the spectre of emotional turmoil is never far away' (McMurray & Ward, 2014) and that the worst could happen, as 'we envisioned the worse, and to prepare for the worse, we communicated about the worse' (fr). This necessary preoccupation with disruption, catastrophe, death, losses, and threats critically distinguishes resilience managers from other organisational members, as they work daily with these negative concepts and therefore have an abstract, or conceptual, proximity with these phenomena.…”

‘Lower than a Snake’s Belly’: Discursive Constructions of Dignity and Heroism in Low-Status Garbage Work

“…Finally, it may be dirty work in that it in some way goes counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions' (Hughes 1951, p. 319). It is from this that Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) popularised the distinction between the physical, social and moral taints that arise from dirt and dirty work and to which others have added emotional taint (McMurray and Ward 2014). The taints associated with doing dirty work can in turn lead to those doing such work being stigmatised or marked as contaminated in some way by their contact with dirt.…”