The Socio-Materiality of Dirty Work: A Critical Realist Perspective

Abstract

New materialist applications in ‘dirty work’ studies have rightly emphasised the importance of materiality alongside symbolism. However, these approaches have neglected important themes irreducible to the material world, such as temporality, reflexivity and social structure. This article develops an alternative critical realist perspective on socio-materiality in dirty work which emphasises these themes. It draws on 2016–2017 ethnographic data on the work of clinical photographers of wounds in a UK specialist outpatient wound healing clinic. First, it shows how photographers’ reflexivity mediates the relationship between their embodied materiality and their agency in the physical domain. Second, it highlights the temporal dynamics between reflexive agents, their material environment, and the context of their operation. Finally, it emphasises the non-conflationary relationship between the social structures of the medical hierarchy and photographers’ agency in dirty work. Together, these contributions highlight the utility of an emergent, realist ontology in understanding the dynamics of dirty work.

Making Markets Material: Enactments, Resistances, and Erasures of Materiality in the Graduate Labour Market

“…Recent studies of organisations do, to an extent, take up this agenda, decentring humans as the sole source of agency (and language as the primary technology of power) and emphasising instead multiple processes of materialisation of organisational power and resistance (Ford et al, 2017; Gond and Nyberg, 2017; Harding et al, 2017; Kokkinidis and Checchi, 2021; Visser and Davies, 2021; Wilhoit and Kisselburgh, 2019). In scholarship concerning work and employment, materiality is similarly beginning to be addressed, especially in relation to professions that obviously implicate the body, such as clinical photography (Galazka and O’Mahoney, 2021), waste collection (Hughes et al, 2017), and construction (Ajslev et al, 2017)—or in relation to understanding specific embodied experiences of work, such as the experiences of women in (peri)menopause (Atkinson et al, 2020). These studies explore the complex entanglements and intra-actions between material and discursive, ideological or symbolic aspects of work and the construction of workers’ subjectivities.…”

Identity work at the intersection of dirty work, caste, and precarity: How Indian cleaners negotiate stigma

“…In the case of dirty work, such identity struggles can be intense, ongoing, and demanding (Van Vuuren et al, 2012). This is true especially in the case of low-prestige and intractable dirty work where multiple sources of taint intersect, and taint is unavoidable due to social identities (Galazka and O'Mahoney, 2021;Shepherd et al, 2021). Sustaining and creating an enhanced identity takes a toll on dirty workers, resulting in competing feelings about one's work and self.…”

Examining ‘dirty work’ using an analysis of place and territorial stigma: low-income communities and the home credit sector

“…Embryonic work from a critical realist approach (for example, Galazka and O'Mahoney, 2021) has started to look at dirty work, in particularly the impact of Archer's morphogenic approach and the mechanisms by which the social interactions of reflexive agents are reproduced or modified by social structures. Galazka and O'Mahoney (2021) take Ackroyd and Crowdy's (1990) analysis of slaughterhouse workers as an example of how implicitly realist work shows that dirty workers' attitudes and behaviours are impacted by their social ties and their broader social class status.…”