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Ethnographic Research and Analysis pp 171–189Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

An Autoethnographic Account of Gender and Workflow Processes in a Commercial Laundry

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Abstract

The commercial laundry is of interest as an important institution because it stands at the fulcrum of organised industrial society’s concern with cleanliness and the need to regularly purify clothing, linen, and table coverings and make them fit for social use again. The function of a laundry is to make dirty things clean and re-fit them for their proper function in a social order in which cleanliness is a virtue. This case study uses Douglas’ framework of Purity and Danger to illustrate the central significance of gender and the distinction between heavy and light tasks in mapping the flow of work through the organisation.

I had submitted a brief biography but was asked to change it because it was very conventional with much emphasis on posts held and achievements recorded. As I reread it, it became clear that this very act of biographising had become a static, structured, stereotyped ritual and that it told the reader rather little about me as the author of what had been written. Then I saw how self-revelatory were the alternatives offered by my colleagues. OK, so here goes.

My mother died when I was 6 years old, and my two sisters were three: increasingly I realise that this was a turning point in my life: the end of innocence and the start of uncertainty driving a need for enquiry. After a school career where I excelled in sport, especially athletics, I won a History scholarship to Oxford, discovered politics and changed to Politics, Philosophy, and Economics moving to Sociology for graduate study. My father died in my first year at university, and I now see that to an extent my career choices have involved a restitution of his life as much as a set of choices for myself.

My first working decade was as a sociologist and I still want to know how society works but never questioned what I had been learning about myself until I had been a professor and then Director of Business Schools for over 20 years. A stopped train on a summer afternoon changed my life utterly and I suddenly understood that “each venture is a new beginning” and that it was time to start raiding the inarticulate. Then it became gradually clear that there was another person bubbling along beneath the superficials of role, status, and public persona: this person had been learning different tasks and trades all the time—it is too late to become again a farm worker or a laundry hand, but maybe I could become a poet?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. York St John University, York, UK

    David Weir

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  1. David Weir
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Suffolk, Ipswich, United Kingdom

    Tom Vine

  2. University of Suffolk, Ipswich, United Kingdom

    Jessica Clark

  3. University of Suffolk, Ipswich, United Kingdom

    Sarah Richards

  4. York St John University, York, United Kingdom

    David Weir

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Weir, D. (2018). An Autoethnographic Account of Gender and Workflow Processes in a Commercial Laundry. In: Vine, T., Clark, J., Richards, S., Weir, D. (eds) Ethnographic Research and Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58555-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58555-4_10

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58554-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58555-4

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