An autoethnographic account of gender and workflow processes in a commercial laundry

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.