Cleaning Up Dirty Work (2009)
Undergraduate: Nicholas LoBuglio
Faculty Advisor: Adam Grant
Department: Business Administration
The term dirty work is used to describe occupations that society views as physically, socially, or morally tainted. I conducted 20 exploratory, semi-structured interviews to investigate how individual employees in dirty work occupations attempt to alter the stigma perceptions of outsiders, which I refer to as “destigmatizing”. Evidence suggesting the variance in different people’s views of stigma led to the conceptualization of a model for how individual outsiders’ occupational stigma beliefs are shaped. Informed by this model, I explore opportunities for dirty workers to proactively destigmatize their work to individuals outside of their occupation.