Abstract
Thus far in this book we have employed the terms ‘dirt’ and ‘dirtiness’ without a detailed account of what we mean by them. The concept of dirty work itself has arisen from an enduring set of underpinning debates surrounding the material and symbolic facets of ‘dirt’ and how the nexus of taint, morality, social ranking, and social division extends to certain kinds of occupation. In this chapter, we shall explore these underpinning debates in some depth. In particular, we consider the seminal work of Mary Douglas who defines dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966); the influence of Douglas’s work over key paradigmatic progenitors in the field of dirty work, notably Ashforth and Kreiner (1999); and more recent attempts to ‘return to the material’, both specifically in relation to dirty work and within the social sciences more generally. Here we will centrally explore Dant and Bowles’s (2003) efforts to highlight how physical and material constraints operate within the context of dirty work as a corrective to a tendency towards cultural reductionism.
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Simpson, R., Hughes, J., Slutskaya, N. (2016). Dirt in Material Worlds. In: Gender, Class and Occupation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43969-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43969-7_3
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