How is social inequality maintained in the Global South? Critiquing the concept of dirty work

Abstract

Extant research on dirty work—occupations involving physical, social, or moral taint, which affect worker identities—has been read primarily through the lens of social identity theory (SIT). There are two notable shortcomings that emerge as a consequence of dirty work being too heavily reliant upon the precepts of SIT, which we seek to remedy in this article: (1) the overemphasis on the symbolic to the detriment of the material has led to false optimism regarding the ability for subjects doing dirty work to exercise agency in constructing their own sense of selves, and (2) the failure to substantively account for the role of identity differences suggests that empirical research on the phenomenon is devoid of proper historical and cultural contextualization. Drawing on a qualitive study on low-caste toilet cleaners in Pakistan, our findings were largely incongruous with the scholarly conceptualization of dirty work that has been propagated to date. We explicate the embedded role of power and context in dirty work, which are not adequately considered using SIT alone. Repudiating the overly romanticized version of the concept, we argue that SIT’s account of dirty work ought to be complemented by status construction theory going forward.