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“Dirty work” is an embodied, emotional activity, and may best be expressed through narrative thick description. The purpose of this paper is to employ creative analytic techniques through a “messy text” for better understanding the tacit knowledge and emotionality of dirty work and dirty research. The vignettes, based upon ethnographic fieldwork with US Border Patrol agents, viscerally reveal the embodied emotions of dirty work and doing dirty research.

The research draws on a two and a half year ethnography of the US Border Patrol in which the first author engaged in participant observation, shadowing, and interviews. Based upon the iterative data analysis and narrative writing techniques using verbatim quotations and field data, the essay provides a series of vignettes that explore the multi-faceted feelings of dirty work.

Tacit knowledge about dirty work is unmasked and known through experiences of the body as well as emotional reactions to the scene. A table listing the emotions that emerged in these stories supplements the narrative text. The analysis shows how communication about emotions provides a sense-making tool that, in turn, elucidates both the challenges and the potential highlights of doing dirty work. In particular, findings suggest that emotional ambiguity the “moral emotions” of guilt and shame may serve as sense-making tools that can help in ethical decision making and a re-framing of challenging situations.

A field immersion alongside dirty workers, coupled with a creative writing approach, provides access to the fleeting, embodied, and fragmented nature of tacit knowledge – answering the questions of what dirty work feels like. The essay provides a behind the scenes exploration of US Border Patrol agents – a profession that is alternately stigmatized or hidden from public view. Finally, the piece provides a self-reflexive account of the messy realities of conducting “dirty research” in a way that is open ended and embodied.

The authors explore how service workers negotiate emotional laboring with “dirty” emotions while trying to meet the demands of neoliberal healthcare. In doing so, the authors theorize emotional labor in the context of healthcare as a type of embodied and emotional “dirty” work.

The authors apply interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to their data collected from National Health Service (NHS) workers in the United Kingdom (UK).

The authors’ data show that healthcare service workers absorb, contain and quarantine emotional “dirt”, thereby protecting their organization at a cost to their own well-being. Workers also perform embodied practices to try to absolve themselves of their “dirty” labor.

The authors extend research on emotional “dirty” work and theorize that emotional labor can also be conceptualized as “dirty” work. Further, the authors show that emotionally laboring with “dirty” emotions is an embodied phenomenon, which involves workers absorbing and containing patients' emotional “dirt” to protect the institution (at the expense of their well-being).

Dirty work involves contacting “polluting” substances; engaging in unpleasant tasks; and dealing with disvalued people, beings, or other objects. As Hughes (1984) observes:(E)very occupation is not one but several activities; some of them are the “dirty work” of the trade. It may be dirty in one of several ways. It may be simply physically disgusting. It may be a symbol of degradation, something that wounds one's dignity….(I)t may be dirty work in that it in some way goes counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions. Dirty work of some kind is found in all occupations. (p. 343)

The purpose of this paper is to explore dirty work sites within an academic context. Working with particular “unloved” groups (Fielding, 1993) can present a number of challenges to researchers, and if professional boundaries are not carefully maintained, researchers can be seen as “dirty workers” within an academic context.

The paper draws a qualitative research project that explores women's involvement with nationalist movements in the UK.

Researching “unloved” groups, and in particular racist organizations, presents a number of potential emotional and professional, and can render researchers “dirty workers” if clear professional boundaries are not maintained.

Examining academia and some academic research as a dirty work site adds to existing literature (Kreiner et al., 2006) that suggests any occupation can have a “dirty work” element that must be negotiated. This paper presents new challenges for managing spoiled “dirty” identities, and suggests that identity management is context-specific.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relatively hidden phenomenon of researchers who not only study dirty work but who also occupy the position of dirty workers. Drawing on the sociological debate on insider-outsider categories in research, this paper describes how these types of “dirty work/er researchers” understand and negotiate their occupational subjectivity and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their research practice.

Two biographical narratives from different types of “dirty work/er researchers” are analysed using a feminist epistemology of corporeality, social difference and power.

Ambivalence is an underlying dynamic of the narratives which indicate that the stigma attached to certain types of dirty work histories act to both facilitate and constrain research practice. Ambivalence disrupts strict binary categories often relied on in research such as insiders and outsiders, empowered and powerless and researcher and Other.

The experiences of “dirty work/er researchers” indicate a need to reconsider ethical, methodological, epistemological issues within social research.

Participatory research frameworks such as peer research should pay closer attention to issues of professional status, power and risk. Further research is required on what happens after peer researchers leave the field.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the relatively hidden world of the “dirty work/er researcher”, their occupational experiences and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their job.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.

The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.

Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.

The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.

This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

Professionals often dislike dirty work, yet they accommodate or even embrace it in everyday practice. This chapter problematizes Andrew Abbott’s professional purity thesis by examining five major forms of impurities in professional work, namely impurity in expertise, impurity in jurisdictions, impurity in clients, impurity in organizations, and impurity in politics. These impurities complicate the relationship between purity and status as some impurities may enhance professional status while others may jeopardize it, especially when the social origins of professionals are rapidly diversifying and professional work is increasingly intertwined with the logics of market and bureaucracy. Taking impurities seriously can help the sociology of professions move beyond the idealistic image of an independent, disinterested professional detached from human emotions, turf battles, client influence, and organizational or political forces and towards a more pragmatic understanding of professional work, expertise, ethics and the nature of professionalism.

This study illuminates how organizational actors use images in their struggle to define a contested industry. By leveraging social semiotics and visual rhetoric, we examine how multimodal texts (combining words and images) are used to label and reframe an industry using technical, environmental, human-rights, and preservation-of-life criteria. Building on theories of legitimation, we find that for this industry, contesting attempts at legitimacy work are escalated along a moral hierarchy. We offer an approach for examining how actors draw from broader meaning systems, use visual rhetoric in multimodal texts, and employ dual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a group of dirty workers, that is, exotic dancers employed in a gentlemen's club, engage in identity construction amidst various macro, meso and micro considerations.

This study adopts a social constructivist approach in exploring the stories of a group of 21 dancers employed at a chain of exotic dancing clubs in the UK, For Your Eyes Only.

Identity construction is a complex process whereby dancers struggle to secure a positive sense of self among the various resources they encounter. The findings focus upon the processes of distancing through projecting disgust upon clients, other dancers and other clubs. Dancers do this to minimize the stigma associated with their own identities and position themselves in a more favourable light to others. In doing this, dancers construct a variety of identity roles for themselves and “others.” This process of distancing also results in the construction of a hierarchy of stigmatization whereby dancers categorize motivations for dancing, type of dancing and type of clubs to rationalize the work they perform and manage their spoiled identities.

The stories of these dancers illustrate the messy nature of identity construction for dirty workers. In turn, it also illuminates how a better understanding of the complexity of identity construction for exotic dancers can offer insights transferable to other dirty work occupations and organizations in general.

The paper provides an indepth look at an occupational site that is relatively unexplored in organization studies and thus makes a unique empirical contribution. It also offers a more comprehensive theoretical lens for understanding identity construction and dirty workers.