Challenging the ‘dirty worker’—‘clean client’ dichotomy: Conceptualizing worker-client relations in dirty work

Abstract

Dirty work research has long analytically prioritized focusing on the people who do dirty work, largely sidestepping who the clients of dirty work are and what contribution they can make to workers’ experience of the job as more or less dirty. We address these oversights through a systematic review and analysis of 65 articles, theorizing the role played by clients within dirty work. Firstly, we propose a three-fold categorization of dirty work clients based on their temporal-spatial proximity to the work and explain how clients can be a source of stigma through communicative and corporeal interactions with workers. Secondly, we collate existing discussions that mention worker-client relations into a conceptual framework of clients’ contributions to dirty work through considering several feedback loops between clients’ and workers’ behaviours and discourses. In doing so, we examine the ways in which clients can both reinforce and alleviate workers’ experience of dirty work stigma.