Gender Stereotypes and the Reshaping of Stigma in Rehabilitative Eldercare

Rehabilitation policies are becoming increasingly popular in eldercare as a means to ensure dignity and reduce costs. This paper examines the implications of rehabilitation within Danish homecare work, a type of work that is often stigmatized due to its associations with low‐status ‘dirty’ body work in old people's homes. The paper combines two research traditions: studies of dirty work and studies of body work. It draws on observations and focus groups in Denmark to explore how the introduction of rehabilitation changes the work of care workers, and how such changes are associated with a potential reshaping of stigma. In contrast to previous research, this paper shows that although rehabilitation was partly introduced to reduce stigma of this type of work, the practice of rehabilitation paradoxically reinforces the stigma that it attempts to manage. Thus, the analysis helps to improve our understanding of the ambiguous and varying ways rehabilitative eldercare reshapes and reinforces stigma and gender stereotypes among women who do ‘dirty’ body work.     

Disability and dirty workers: stories of physical,social and moral taint

Returning to classics on dirty work and stigma, I offer another perspective on the difficulties that disabled people experience in employment. I claim that disabled workers with multiple sclerosis (MS) feel like ‘dirty workers’ not because of the work that they do, but because of their MS. Secondary analysis of phenomenological interview data revealed workers with MS feeling physical, social and moral taints normally associated with being a ‘dirty worker’ – but because of their MS-related impairments and disabilities. Two respondent stories are shared to illustrate this association.     

Disabled people and dirty work

Based on a longitudinal case study of the work offered by a Swedish sheltered work organization that can be regarded as ‘dirty’, in the sense that it stigmatizes those people that do it, in this paper I analyze how ‘dirty work’ can be seen as an important yet so far neglected source of the social construction of disability. Specifically, the aim of the paper is to suggest how an individual can become a ‘disabled person’ by doing dirty work. By working on ‘tainted tasks’ people (irrespective of their mental or physical condition) may come to be regarded and even officially labeled as ‘disabled’, i.e. incapacitated and impaired for any ‘normal’ and ‘clean’ character of work.     

Privileging work not sex: flexibility and employment in the sexual services industry

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well‐paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to women's decision‐making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.     

Doing Gender,Paying Low: Gender,Class and Work–Life Balance in Aged Care

This article examines how interactions between the doing of gender and class at institutional and organizational levels perpetuate inequality for aged care workers. In particular, it investigates how managers ‘do gender’ and class in relation to their care workers' work–life balance and the unintended consequences of this for aged care workers. The research data comprised interviews with female managers and aged care workers from four case studies in residential aged care in New Zealand. We argue that despite best intentions, the consequences of managers' doing gender and class results in continuing low wages, poor work–life balance and disempowerment at work for aged care workers.     

Gender Logic and (Un)doing Gender at Work

Doing gender is a popular concept in studies on work and organizations that is used to show how gender is constructed through interactions in organizations. Recently researchers have also started looking at how gender can be undone. This article elucidates two understandings of doing gender based on ethnomethodological and poststructural and discursive approaches and shows how these theoretical approaches lead to diverging ways of undoing gender. These two approaches are critically explored by drawing on qualitative research with information communication technology workers. The article thereby examines how gender might be undone within both ethnomethodological and poststructural and discursive traditions. It makes a contribution towards understanding (un)doing gender approaches at work by highlighting the implications for research on gender, work and organization.     

Attitudes towards Women's Work Roles and Women Managers in a Sports Organization: The Case of Turkey

In recent years the need to apply gender equality principles to all sectors of Turkish society has been widely acknowledged and has become an increasingly important issue because of the modernization and recent Europeanization project of Turkey. However, even as this has been acknowledged, attempts to apply gender equality in employment in sports organizations have been mostly ignored. This article reports on the attitudes towards women's work roles and women managers of 83 women and 138 men who work in the General Directorate of Youth and Sport (GDYS) which is the biggest national governing body for sport in Turkey. The findings of this study indicate that both female and male workers in the GDYS scored lower on their attitudes towards women's work roles and held more negative attitudes towards women managers. Although male workers scored higher on attitudes towards women's work roles than female workers they held more negative attitudes towards women managers. In addition, femininity scores were found to be the only predictor of attitudes towards women's career advancement. Finally, we discussed these findings regarding previous studies and the sociocultural context of Turkey.     

Dignity and Dirty Work: Nurses’ Experiences in Managing Genetic Termination for Fetal Anomaly

Qualitative research was conducted with forty-one female registered nurses from four Canadian hospitals who manage the genetic termination (GT) procedure for women who end a wanted pregnancy due to fetal anomaly. Based on the sociological concept of dirty work, interest focused on nurses experiences with work that is viewed as unpleasant and undesirable, work that others would prefer not to do or even know about. The absence of institutional support led to a number of problems for the nurses. They readily discussed situations fraught with dilemmas and frustrations, yet they described this work as professionally rewarding and personally gratifying. They found strategies to respond to the dirty work aspects of their job. Particularly, the quality of care they were able to provide transformed their job from dirty work and led them to find dignity and satisfaction.     

‘Doing femininity’ at work: More than just relational practice1

Workplaces constitute one of the more interesting sites where individuals ‘do gender’, while at the same time constructing their professional identities and meeting their organisation's expectations. Drawing on interactional data recorded in New Zealand professional organisations, this paper focuses in particular on how participants manage and interpret the notion of ‘femininity’ in workplace discourse. In much current usage, the concepts ‘feminine’ and ‘femininity’ typically evoke negative reactions. Our analysis suggests these notions can be reclaimed and reinterpreted positively using an approach which frames doing femininity at work as normal, unmarked, and effective workplace behaviour in many contexts. The analysis also demonstrates that multiple femininities extend beyond normative expectations, such as enacting relational practice ( Fletcher 1999 ), to embrace more contestive and parodic instantiations of femininity in workplace talk.     

Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Based on the study of gender identities in the Israeli hi‐tech sector, this article sets out to explore the doing of gender in a context comprised of two cultural repertoires characterized by divergent and contradictory fundamental assumptions: the new masculine transnational economy and pro‐natalist Israeli society. The article demonstrates how, by manoeuvering and moving between these global and local cultural repertoires, privileged Israeli hi‐tech women enact and construct a ‘new femininity’ that simultaneously challenges both the discourse of the ‘ideal hi‐tech worker’ and that of traditional Israeli femininity. This new femininity, I argue, is grounded in a local translation of the ‘family friendly organization’ discourse.     

“We are not strippers”: How Belly Dancers Manage a (Soft) Stigmatized Serious Leisure Activity

Most stigma research examines people who engage in deviant activities or possess visible and permanent discredited attributes, which lead to “hard” or severe consequences. Existing leisure studies focus on the benefits of leisure pursuits. Less attention is paid to the potential costs associated with serious leisure, such as “soft” stigma. The snubs and slight embarrassments resulting from soft stigma may jeopardize the rewards people receive from participating in leisure, such as a sense of identity, self‐worth, and pride. Using interviews with seventy‐four female belly dancers, most of whom belly dance as a form of “serious leisure,” this article examines how dancers manage perceptions that they are erotic dancers. Results show that dancers use an interesting set of stigma management techniques and new forms of some existing management strategies to simultaneously protect themselves and enhance the reputation of the group. Implications for how people negotiate soft stigma associated with serious leisure are discussed.     

Masculinity and Class in the Context of Dirty Work

Through an ethnographic study of ‘dirty work’ (refuse collection and street cleaning), this article explores how masculinity and class intersect — how, in a mutually constitutive sense, they produce attitudes and practices, strengths and vulnerabilities, which are shaped by shifting relations of privilege and power. We find resistance to class subordination through adherence to traditional forms of masculinity and through esteem‐enhancing social comparison (e.g., with women; with migrant workers). Men also mobilized powerful nostalgic themes around the loss of traditional jobs as well as trade union power. We argue that displays of masculine resilience in the face of devaluation are less indicative of a culture of masculine dominance but more an expression of vulnerability and social dislocation, serving both as a source of resistance whilst simultaneously reinforcing anchors of social disadvantage that characterize forms of dirty work. We suggest that combining social comparison with intersectionality can potentially highlight how categories of difference are strategically deployed in response to varied and unequally valued social positionalities.     

SOCIAL WORLDS OF STRIPPING: The Processual Orders of Exotic Dance

Is stripping exploitation? This ideological question often plagues exotic dance research, with diverse and often contradictory findings across the literature. Existent research highlights both potentially positive and negative experiences among women involved in exotic dance. In this article, we focus on the social organization of strip clubs and how this organization contextualizes the experiences and commitments of dancers. We present ethnographic data collected by the first author, including extensive field observations of 49 strip clubs, formal interviews from 50 dancers and ex‐dancers at various career stages, and informal interviews with dozens of other dancers. We present a typology of strip clubs—hustle clubs, social clubs, and show clubs—and describe the processual orders. We also explain how the processual orders of these different types of clubs relate to dancers’ workplace experiences. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for sociological and public understandings of sex work.     

Making work matter: Satisfied detectives and dissatisfied campus police

Dirty work is part of all occupations. A comparison of two low-status occupations — detectives and campus police — revealed that workers in some occupations can surmount the tarnished image that goes along with dirty work, while others cannot. The detectives, but not the campus police, found ways to make their work matter. The former created a valued core identity, found an appreciative audience, and built collegiality. The constraints of campus police work kept the campus police from using the same strategies, and left them feeling that all their work was dirty. Under certain conditions, workers can redefine the core of a bad job into meaningful work.Order of authorship is alphabetical. Support for this research was provided in part by a grant from the University Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Norfolk, Virginia, 1989. We thank Howard Aldrich, Howard Becker, Carl Klockars, Richard Simpson, Donna K. Darden, and Charles Watson for their comments on earlier drafts.     

Dirty Work,Dirty Resistance: Digital Warfare in the Era of Precarious Labor

This qualitative content analysis of 723 anonymous reviews of 60 Canadian food service employers, posted on RateMyEmployer.ca, explores how digital spaces publically circulate precarious workers’ resistances and management of occupational stigma. We introduce to literature on “dirty work” the concept of socioeconomic hygiene, which identifies a particular kind of social and moral order within which the positions of the subordinated are naturalized between the socially and morally “clean” and “unclean.”     

The gender gap in teenagers’ incomes. A 30-year trend in Finland 1983–2013

In this article, we examine the gender differences in disposable incomes of teenagers during a 30-year period 1983–2013, using large nationally representative survey data. Since the gender pay gap in working life has been rather persistent in Finland and the EU, it was necessary to see whether the gap persists in teenagers’ incomes as well. Although teenagers do not receive much income from work, they adapt to the structures of society during their teenage years and learn gender roles in consumption, education, and working life. Our results reveal that the gender pay gap has been rather persistent in Finland, particularly among 14- and 16-year-old teenagers. It is only among 18-year-olds that the gender difference in income has narrowed. There were interactions between gender and socio-economic indicators such as the father's education and family's place of residence. The persistent gender pay gap cannot be explained solely by wage differences in any age group, because full-time work of teenagers is nowadays very rare, and in Finland they do not work very much even part-time. Although it is rather obvious that boys get higher incomes than girls from external work, the allocation of money by parents seems to be unequal, too.     

Integrating self-care into clinical practice with trauma clients

ABSTRACT

Self-care is recognized as an important aspect of social work practice. Beginning in educational settings, developing social workers are encouraged to learn about and practice self-care. However, self-care is typically promoted through strategies and approaches outside of the practice context. Social workers are oftentimes encouraged to use individualized self-care plans, which often feature a variety of relaxation and secondary techniques; focus on self-awareness and self-reflection; and have proper use of supervision. Although these strategies are invaluable, they do little to directly benefit the social worker during direct practice or while in session with a client which is a time period when clinicians are particularly vulnerable to distress or burnout. The importance of real-time self-care strategies is particularly critical for clinicians, especially those who engage in trauma work, given the sensitivity of topics that clients may have endured or benefit from assistance in processing. Further, little information has been published on the use of self-care techniques during a session with a client or in a clinical context. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss self-care strategies that can be useful both outside of and within a clinical setting and present a model of such strategies that focus on integrating self-care in clinical practice particularly for those engaging in trauma work. The paper will conclude by discussing the relevancy of the developed model in practice.     

‘Dirt,Death and Danger? I Don't Recall Any Adverse Reaction …’: Masculinity and the Taint Management of Hospital Private Security Work

Drawing on an ethnographic narrative written by one of the authors following his resignation from a hospital private security team in Ottawa, Canada and interview data gleaned from eight security men (all former colleagues), this article explores how hospital private security officers draw on discourses of masculinity to navigate the ‘dirty’ boundaries of their work, and to preserve their alpha‐guard statuses as controlled, autonomous and authoritative subjects. We found that hospital guards manage and deflect taint status by emphasizing their resiliency, emotional detachment and enthusiasm towards morbid, disturbing and dangerous tasks. Guards who seek to challenge these components of the job may be subject to gender harassment and reprisal from other guards, senior security officials and nursing staff. Overall, these narratives call attention to the necessity of hospital training programmes, de‐briefing exercises and best‐communication practices that promote the physical and emotional well‐being of persons who engage in intensive forms of dirty work.     

Time With Children,Children's Well‐Being,and Work‐Family Balance Among Employed Parents

Cultural imperatives for “good” parenting include spending time with children and ensuring that they do well in life. Knowledge of how these factors influence employed parents' work‐family balance is limited. Analyses using time diary and survey data from the 2000 National Survey of Parents (N = 933) indicate that how time with children relates to parents' feelings of balance varies by gender and social class. Interactive “quality” time is linked with mothers' feelings of balance more than fathers'. More time in routine care relates to imbalance for fathers without college degrees. Feeling that one spends the “right” amount of time with children and that children are doing well are strong and independent indicators of parents' work‐family balance.