Dirty Work Designations

Human Relations DOI: 10.
1177/0018726705060242 Volume 58(11): 13631390 Copyright 2005 The Tavistock Institute SAGE Publications London,Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi www.sagepublications.com
Dirty work designations: How police ofcers account for their use of coercive force
Penny Dick
The concept of dirty work has much potential to offer insights into processes related to the construction of organizational identities and work-group cultures. In this article, I use a social constructionist framework, to argue that dirty workers perform their identities in two conceptually distinct contexts: front regions and back regions (Goffman, 1959), each producing its own subjective challenges. I use a critical discourse analysis to explore how, within the research interview setting, police ofcers deal with the moral dilemma of their use of coercive authority. I argue that what is designated as dirty within any specic role differs according to the perspective of the observer, revealing the boundaries and landscape of different moral and social orders and how these overlap and compete. It is further argued that, within specic interactional contexts, occupational identity comprises a site of contestation for these different moral and social orders.The utility of the dirty work concept is explored in relation to its ability to illuminate the dynamics of ideological reproduction and transformation.
A B S T R AC T
K E Y WO R D S
dirty work identity police ethics police work social construction
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The expression dirty work was originally coined by Everett Hughes in 1951. By dirty work he refers to occupational activities that are physically disgusting, that symbolize degradation, that wound the individuals dignity, or that run counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions (Hughes, 1958: 50). Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) note that the concept of dirty work raises a provocative issue: specically, how do dirty workers maintain a positive sense of self? Their position is derived from social identity theory, which proposes that people typically strive to see themselves in a positive light. Since occupations constitute salient social roles in which the self is grounded, being branded a dirty worker potentially comprises a signicant threat to this identity goal. Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) suggest that dirty workers use a variety of techniques to protect their identities from the threats posed by the stigma of their work, in particular, arguing that work-group cultures function as effective buffers, providing ideologies which enable group members to make sense of their work in esteem-enhancing ways. In the conclusion to their article they argue that managers of dirty workers have a role in countering societal perceptions of dirtiness through the practices of symbolic management (p. 431). For instance, they suggest that managers can encourage employees to frame dirty work in positive ways. Despite acknowledging that dirty work is socially constructed, the conceptions of both identity and culture utilized in Ashforth and Kreiners (1999) account privilege cognition, such that the broader social processes that impinge upon, as well as actively constitute the identities of individuals, (and their work cultures) are neglected (Henriques et al., 1984; Jermier et al., 1994). So for example, while we can readily comprehend that a refuse collector or a prison guard undertakes dirty work and that this potentially taints their identities, the reasons for the ascription of dirty work to some tasks is left relatively under-explored, and the specic contexts in which the individual is both consciously aware of this taint and motivated to account for it, are left unexplained. Additionally, as Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) argue, the meanings that individuals ascribe to their work tasks are embedded in quite distinctive class, regional and national cultures, that render the specic cultures of many occupations effectively beyond managerial inuence. In this article, I argue that the concept of dirty work offers the potential to utilize an interdisciplinary perspective, in which the relation of the individual to broader social and institutional orders and structures can be usefully explored and elucidated. To this end, I present a social constructionist account of how, within the context of the research interview, some members of a particular occupational group, police ofcers, deal with the dirty aspects of their role, specically, the moral ambiguity that accompanies the potential to
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use coercive force against citizens (Waddington, 1999a). The aim of the account presented here, is to locate this moral ambiguity, this particularly dirty aspect of the police role, in the wider political and social context, as well in the institutional context of policing. In doing so, I want to argue that what is designated as dirty within any specic role differs according to the perspective of the observer, illuminating the boundaries and landscape of different moral and social orders and how these overlap and compete. It is further argued that, within certain forms of interactional context, occupational identity comprises a site of contestation for these different moral and social orders. The article is structured as follows. In the rst section, I discuss the concept of dirty work at some depth, exploring how this concept can be used to understand the variety of meanings that different aspects of work can hold for individuals and for the public who make judgements about the work carried out by various occupational groups. I then focus more specically on police work, concentrating on its dening characteristic the potential to use coercive force against citizens (Waddington, 1999a), examining the contexts in which this is seen as dirty work and contrasting these with those in which it is, in fact, celebrated as a core aspect of police action and identity. In the next section, I present a brief sketch of the social constructionist position adopted in this article, highlighting the ways in which it can add to the dirty work literature. I then present a critical discourse analysis of interview extracts, drawn from a wider research project into policing more generally, which illustrates how a social constructionist approach can be used to understand how ofcers deal with this dirty aspect of their occupational identity. In the nal section, I present the implications of my analysis.
Dirty work
Everett Hughess (1951) conception of dirty work is a useful starting point for thinking about tasks or occupations that are characterized by, or contain elements that are, physically or morally distasteful. But to fully appreciate the theoretical signicance and utility of this construct requires a reasonably detailed consideration of two key issues: rst, why and how some tasks are considered dirty. And second, whether a task or occupation is universally designated as dirty: one persons dirty work can be anothers sought and fought for prerogative (Emerson & Pollner, 1975: 244). To render the dirty work concept useful we need to more thoroughly understand its socially located nature.
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What makes some work dirty?

To the lay-person, it is probably self-evident why some tasks and occupations would be classed as dirty work. Dealing with literal dirt, in the form of refuse, human or animal bodily uids or parts, excrement and general muck would be considered dirty work by many people in many parts of the world. However, dirt has a signicance beyond its physical manifestation. It is also essentially a social matter. As Mary Douglas (1966) comments, Dirt is matter out of place, [it] offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment (p. 2). Dirt, then, symbolizes contravention of the ordered relations of which any society is composed, and the desire to remove it, or to avoid it, is that societys way of dealing with the confusion or contradiction that dirt poses to cherished classications. In many societies, the symbolic signicance of dirt is transmitted through avoidance rules (Douglas, 1966), which trace the ideal social order, sketching the positions of social groups relative to each other and xing them in the social space. For instance, rules of hygiene that govern our personal and domestic lives, emphasizing the importance of being clean and tidy, symbolize our social status and the value we place on self and home maintenance. These values can be traced, in part, to the Enlightenment era, when, in the emerging capitalist and democratic West, thresholds between the higher and lower social classes were re-negotiated, with lth, dirt and pollution seen as signiers of the lower orders (Stallybrass & White, 1986). Avoidance rules are also embedded in the social structure of occupations. For example, occupations that involve dealing with physical dirt can sometimes be designated as low skill or unskilled work, and often carried out by groups designated as lower class, less educated, and even less socially valuable. Garbage disposal, street and lavatory cleaners, and general cleaners are all examples here. Similar to the untouchables in the Hindu caste system, dealing with dirt is allocated to the lowest positions in the social hierarchy, enabling the higher classes to avoid pollution, not only literally, but metaphorically. Nonetheless, there are higher status occupations that contain tasks that involve dealing with physical dirt. A surgeon, for example, has to deal with human bodily uids and parts, as do nurses and care assistants, and police ofcers, the focus for this study, have to deal with all manner of dirt including rotting corpses. Avoidance rules continue to operate here, however. While the surgeon, for example, will cut into the human body and remove or handle bodily organs or uids, the removal and disposal of the remains of the
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surgery is delegated to a lower status employee, like the theatre nurse. All higher status occupations, in fact, tend to delegate physically dirty tasks to those lower in the occupational pecking order (Hughes, 1958). Literal dirt then has a distinct social signicance, in as much as its presence and removal are related to the maintenance of boundaries that mark out the social space, and the distance between groups in that space. Dirt, however, is not only a material matter. Dirt is also designated to events, objects and subjects of social origin. For example pornography is considered dirty, as is prostitution and vagrancy. Gypsies or travellers can be designated as dirt, as can criminals, and other people considered bad by certain sectors of society. Within occupations, we tend to designate dirty work to morally dubious tasks, such as sacking people, or giving people bad news of some sort or other. Dirt additionally signies transgression of the moral order (Cresswell, 1996; Douglas, 1966; Stallybrass & White, 1986). Thus some occupations are tainted with the dirty work stigma because the tasks carried out by role occupants transgress the boundaries that mark out the moral terrain of any given society. Cahill (1996), for example, argues that funeral direction constitutes a tainted occupation, which can be attributed to the cultural shift in the meaning of death that occurred around the beginning of the 20th century. During this period the rising medical professions secured their authority over the bodily care of the living, and death became a signier of the failure of medical expertise and skill, with dead bodies now seen as both polluting and polluted. It was during this era that funeral direction became an established occupation, providing a method of dealing with the dead away from the physical and moral boundaries of the healthy. Bittner (1970) argues that police work is a tainted occupation because police ofcers: . . . are viewed as the re it takes to ght re . . . that they in the natural course of their duties inict harm, albeit deserved, and that their very existence attests that the nobler aspirations of mankind do not contain the means necessary to ensure survival. (p. 8) Psychiatric nursing is another example of a tainted profession, dealing as it does, with the insane, which represent a group that routinely transgresses societys ideas of what is right and proper in human conduct (Foucault, 1967), and involving the use of coercion to bring patients under control (Godin, 2000; May & Kelly, 1982). Dirt in its social sense is, therefore, related to ideological beliefs in
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societies. Such beliefs operate to produce and maintain the moral order, in which the appropriateness and correctness of social action and practice are clearly demarcated and bounded. Transgression of these boundaries not only signies a threat to the moral order but also to the power that certain groups have to dene that order and the meanings that attach to its associated actions (Cresswell, 1996).

As illustrated in the discussion above, some occupations, like policing and nursing, are tainted with the dirty work stigma, precisely because of the moral ambiguity that attaches to some of their core tasks, and to the groups with which they habitually deal. An interesting theoretical question raised by this, is not simply how role occupants maintain a positive sense of self (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999), but whether they themselves consider their work to be dirty. Dirt, whether physical or moral, is essentially a matter of perspective, not empirics. Cahill (1996) for example, shows how funeral directors resist the stigma that attaches to their work by designating the public as in denial and ignorant about death, transforming the stigma of their chosen occupational identity into a mark of honour (p. 114). Research suggests that what role occupants count as dirty work is not necessarily those aspects of their work that the public might consider dirty. Studies of nursing, particularly in psychiatric settings (Emerson & Pollner, 1975; Godin, 2000; May & Kelly, 1982) and in care homes (Stannard, 1973); of medical students (Becker et al., 1961) and GPs (Shaw, 2004; Strong, 1980); as well as of police ofcers (Bittner, 1970; Ericson, 1982; Waddington, 1999a, 1999b), suggest that dirty work is attributed to tasks that are perceived to undermine the professions raison dtre. For instance, Becker et al. (1961) in their ethnography of medical student culture, illustrate how students designate as scut work, tasks that undermine their abilities to perform the core characteristics of medical practice: diagnosis and treatment. Strong (1980) argues that GPs designation of the treatment of alcoholics as dirty work, derives not from ignorance or prejudice about this group, but from the realities of the fact that such patients can rarely be successfully managed or cured using a medical model. Emerson and Pollners (1975) study of psychiatric nurses, and Stannards (1973) study of nurses in care homes, show how patients that are perceived to be difcult and annoying are those that undermine the nurses potential to take care of them, by, for example, not responding to nursing interventions. The police in both the UK (Waddington, 1999a) and USA (Bittner, 1970) tend to designate as dirty or
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rubbish those tasks that are seen not to be relevant to policings stated rhetorical purpose: crime-ghting. What counts as dirty work within any given profession can, therefore, provide a marker that indicates its ideological landscape (Emerson & Pollner, 1975; Shaw, 2004). Dirt, as in the more general social context, is designated to tasks that are seen as marginal to the professional terrain, occurring at, and threatening, the ideological boundaries within which role occupants construct, maintain and defend their professional identities. The active construction and defence of these boundaries illustrates that the meanings that attach to the tasks carried out within any given profession are neither universal nor monolithic, they are situated within specic social and ideological contexts, open to contestation and dispute, and requiring continuous negotiation.
Dirty work designations and occupational identity

While dirty work designations differ according to the perspective of the observer, members of tainted occupations will nevertheless be aware of how their activities and tasks are viewed by the wider public (Bolton, 2005). When an occupation is morally tainted, that taint carries over to the identity of the role occupant, which, as Ashforth and Kreiners (1999) work indicates, has cognitive implications, in as much as individuals appear to be motivated to negate it. They identify three specic ideological techniques that workers can use to protect or bolster their identities in the face of the stigma posed by dirty work: reframing where the meaning attached to a specic occupation is transformed; recalibrating where the tasks that constitute the role are re-categorized so as to emphasize the more acceptable or palatable tasks; and refocusing where an attempt is made to shift attention to nonstigmatized aspects of the role. Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) argue that the strength of work-group culture and occupational identication will determine the extent to which individuals are motivated to deploy these ideological techniques to deal with the dirty aspects of their roles. I would suggest that these techniques can be additionally viewed as context-specic strategies that are deployed in different ways depending on the audience and its perceived likelihood to interpret the dirty worker in pejorative ways (Emerson & Pollner, 1975). When tasks, role characteristics, or complete occupations are designated as dirty work, this exposes the fragility and contingency of any constructed ideological order in the occupational domain. The motivation to reframe, refocus, or recalibrate ideological meanings, stems from how these meanings struggle for hegemony in
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the mobile node of the workers identity (Kondo, 1990), especially when these meanings expose the precariousness and marginality of the groups identity. To illustrate this argument more fully, I now turn to the specic example of police use of coercive authority.
Police work as dirty work The moral ambiguity of coercive authority

According to Waddington (1999a), the dening characteristic of policing is the exercise of coercive authority. While the actual use of coercive authority by police ofcers is difcult to ascertain empirically, it is used more or less routinely, for example in stop and search situations, and arrests, which will frequently involve handcufng. Of less frequency, though more troubling, is the use of sometimes lethal force, as illustrated by high prole cases of deaths in custody, or of disproportionate force, as illustrated by the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1992 by Los Angeles police ofcers, which was caught on video. Klockars (1980) refers to such situations as examples of the Dirty Harry problem, alluding to the 1971 lm of the same name in which a good cop is seen to act immorally in order to bring a criminal to justice. When police ofcers use coercive force, they do so because they have been authorijed to prevent, impede or stop, some form of activity that would otherwise threaten the peace of citizens, or their physical and psychological well-being (Kleinig, 1996). The difculty is, as police sociologists point out, that making a judgement as to whether a given situation necessitates the use of coercive authority, and judging the manner in which that authority is to be exercised is not straightforward (Adams, 1996; Bayley, 1996; Kleinig, 1996; Klockars, 1996). It is precisely this judgemental dilemma that produces the moral ambiguity of this core characteristic of policing. In very many situations, police ofcers cannot be certain that had they not used coercive authority a greater wrong would have occurred. Because this utilitarian logic is untestable, making judgements about whether police use of coercive authority has tipped over into abuse of that authority is extremely problematic. Unsurprisingly, the use of coercive authority by police ofcers has been the subject of intense political and academic debate, at the centre of which is the issue of how police ofcers are to be controlled (see for example, Waddington, 1999b, for a good summary of the issues here). What is additionally worthy of study, however, is how police ofcers themselves account for and, deal with, this morally ambiguous aspect of their role. Simply put, what meanings do police ofcers attach to the use of coercive authority?
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The meaning of coercive authority

Ethnographic studies of police culture have examined this issue at some depth. Waddington (1999a), for example, argues that police sub-culture, often referred to as the canteen culture, enables ofcers to deal with the moral ambiguity inherent in the use of coercive authority, by celebrating it, via a cult of masculinity. Studies show how police story-telling within the organization, constructs the use of force and violence as normal features of encounters with villains and other disreputable groups (Fletcher, 1996; Graef, 1990; Herbert, 1998; Van Maanen, 1980). Such stories not only act to vilify and marginalize the out-groups at whom such force is targeted, but to construct the police identity as heroic, moral, and retributive (Van Maanen, 1980). Central to this process is the ideological justication of coercive authority through the notion that crime-ghting constitutes one of policings primary activities. If coercive authority is only ever exercised against those who deserve it, that is, criminals, then the Dirty Harry problem is effectively morally neutralized. This suggests that police ofcers frame their use of coercive authority within a broader ideological context, in which human rights and liberties are articulated as core values. It is clear, nonetheless, that while police forces across Europe and North America share in common many features of the canteen culture, including the tendency to glorify crime-ghting, the emphasis on crimeghting and the extent to which this impacts on the identities and actions of ofcers is deeply embedded in the broader organizational and social fabric. Skolnick and Fyfe (1993), for instance, argue that police ofcers are more likely to routinely over-use coercive authority when, for one reason or another, they are encouraged to dene their primary purpose as waging a war on crime, and to see potential offenders as enemies that require militaristic treatment to bring them under control. Furthermore, the enemy and therefore the targets of excessive coercive force are dened as such because of specic socio-cultural conditions. For example, in Los Angeles, where Rodney King was brutally beaten by a group of police ofcers, the LA Police Department had a long history of using excessive force against the black community, which was related to historical approaches to policing, favouring aggressive approaches, coupled with antipathy between the police and the black community, reecting Americas troubled race relations history (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993). Likewise, Banton (1964), Cain (1973) and Young (1993) in their studies of rural and urban forces in the UK, argue that the crime-ghting ideology of policing ourishes more in urban than rural regions, because in the latter, the police ofcer derives the meanings of her or his activities more from the values prevalent in the local community. Since
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these frequently emphasize the importance of community, and of ordered and harmonious social relations, the police in such regions tend to see themselves more as peace-keepers than crime-ghters (Cain, 1973), with attendant effects on how they interpret and act upon apparent breaches of the law. As Banton (1964) argues, where the police ofcer is dependent on the local community in terms of both dening and enacting the role, policing is characterized by under-enforcement of the law. Conversely, where the police perceive themselves as members of an in-group attempting to maintain order in a society on the brink of anarchy, there tends to be more use of coercive authority against those that are socially dened as the out-group, and seen as the perpetrators and causes of societal breakdown (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993; Young, 1993). In sum, when the police dene themselves and their activities principally in terms of crime-ghting, this tends to be because they are removed (relatively speaking) from the informal control of community expectations, which as Skolnick and Fyfe (1993) show, is related to geography, culture and history. In such contexts, due to the fragmented and inconsistent support that police ofcers obtain from the wider community (Reiner, 2000), they tend to develop a strong in-group identity, which allows the group to legitimate itself (Cain, 1973). Thus, one core function of the celebration of the use of coercive authority observed by police ethnographers is an assertion of a distinct, moral identity in contexts where this is open to considerable contestation. The insularity (Reiner, 2000; Waddington, 1999a; Young, 1993) that police ofcers demonstrate reects the precariousness of this assertion. To protect and defend the moral and ideological boundaries of the profession requires in-group afrmation and both spatial and moral distanciation from out-groups, who pose a potential threat to this identity. Similar arguments have been presented by Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) in their study of slaughterhouse workers, by Cahill (1996) in his study of funeral directors, and by Emerson and Pollner (1975) in their study of psychiatric nurses.
Front and back regions

During the routine enactment of policing, and in social encounters with colleagues, peers and family, the celebration of coercive authority can unproblematically full this function (Herbert, 1996, 1998). However, members of stigmatized occupations, like police ofcers, slaughterhouse workers and funeral directors, are not always at work, or with people who share their values and beliefs. In this sense, then, we can understand dirty workers as occupying front regions and back regions (Goffman, 1959). In
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back regions such as at work with colleagues, or at home with supportive friends and family, the individual can relax; the audience is absent, and the boundaries of professional ideology are relatively secured. Conversely in front regions, the audience is present, and the individual may feel incumbent to give the appearance that his [sic] activity . . . maintains and embodies certain standards (Goffman, 1959: 93). This characterizes contexts where dirty workers are held morally accountable for their activities by other individuals who may actively or potentially disapprove of those activities, and hence, of the person performing them. In these contexts, not only might the ideological boundaries of the profession be contested, but the individuals identity is at stake, exposed to different, perhaps, pejorative meanings, attaching to occupational activities.
The social construction of dirty work in front regions

The traditional social psychological view, illustrated by the concept of social identity (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Hogg & Abrams, 1990), sees identity as relatively xed and stable, even if subject to evolution and change across time and situations. Conversely, recent approaches to identity from the social constructionist perspective problematize this assumption, arguing instead for a view of identity as a narrative achievement, or a social accomplishment (Deetz, 1994; Dick & Cassell, 2004; Karreman & Alvesson, 2001; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Shotter & Gergen, 1989). From this perspective identity is always relational, produced within a specic social context for a specic purpose, partly a temporary outcome of the powers and regulations that the subject encounters (Karreman & Alevsson, 2001: 63). This is not to deny that individuals experience their selves as relatively stable or enduring, but analytically, the individual is de-centred (Dick & Cassell, 2002), the causes or roots of expressed identity instead located in the social situation, rather than the inner psychology of the individual. The task in a social constructionist exploration is to identify those aspects of the situation that are productive of the identity expressed by the individual, as well to explain the purpose this expression fulls. As already argued, individuals perform identity work in quite different contexts, and I have already differentiated between front and back regions in this regard. Van Maanen (1980), in his examination of how police ofcers account for fatal shooting incidents, makes a similar point, when he suggests that such accounts take place in three different contexts: accounts intended for public consumption, such as those articulated in formal organizational descriptions of, and justications for, fatal shootings; accounts made to fellow ofcers, who may help the individual frame the shooting as a
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morally justiable action; and accounts made to self, where the ofcer has to deal with the self-doubt created by the incident. Each context is characterized by a different vocabulary of motive and legitimation (Van Maanen, 1980: 148). Whether such vocabularies will succeed in convincing the relevant audience that the reasons for the actions are essentially honourable, rather than dishonourable, will depend on a wide array of contextual dimensions, that can only be understood by examining how specic meanings are articulated, contested, reproduced or changed within specic accounting situations (Van Maanen, 1980). I argue here that the research interview can be considered as an opportunity to explore how identity work is performed in a front region, and amenable to the relatively complex analysis required for understanding how individuals account for activities and actions whose meaning is subject to hegemonic struggle. This is because the interaction between the researcher and the participant can be understood as a particular power relation, in which the latter has agreed to be accountable to the former (Hollway, 1989). Additionally, certain aspects of the research situation are likely to feed into and affect the interactional dynamic. For example, in the case of the research reported here, the researcher was a woman, interviewing mainly male police ofcers, with a stated research agenda that was concerned with gendered aspects of police culture. The reputation that the police force has for sexism and other undesirable behaviours is a backdrop to this interaction. There is a likelihood that the researchers intentions will be read by the participant as potentially hostile, and the participant may feel especially morally accountable (Gergen, 1990; Widdicombe, 1995). Alternatively, it could be argued that the participants identity may be troubled by potential, though unstated, judgements implied by the social status of the researcher (Ball & Wilson, 2000). Discussing the morally ambiguous aspects of policing represents a situation in which the participant may attempt to accomplish a creditable identity, because the biographical characteristics of the researcher and the content and scope of the research, mean that the participant could be positioned as discreditable by the researcher. This can also be likened to Foucaults (1981) view of the confession as technique of power: The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile . . . (p. 67)
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In short, the front region of the research interview can represent a site of contestation of the ideologies that members of stigmatized occupations draw upon to maintain and defend professional boundaries and identities. In such contexts, the meaning of activities (like the use of coercive authority) is not so readily xed as it in back regions because the researcher may, by dint of his or her identity, research agenda and interview schedule, expose the interviewee to alternative, potentially pejorative meanings, that may need to be negotiated and transformed if the interviewee is to convince the interviewer that they are not a dirty worker.
Methodology Research setting

The research was conducted over a ve-year period, spanning 1993 to 1997, in a large rural constabulary in England employing around 1500 uniformed ofcers. The research was concerned with examining the extent to which police culture could be understood as gendered and with identifying how women and men experienced police culture during their day to day activities as police ofcers. The research involved multiple methods, including repertory grid interviews, surveys, and in-depth qualitative interviews which were carried out in the last stages of the study and from which the conversational extracts presented and analysed here were taken. The dirty-work concept was not used to inform the interview questions, nor was it part of the initial analysis. However, I re-read and revisited the qualitative interview data more recently in the light of my ongoing research interests within the police service, specically, in attempting to understand why and how police work is socially constructed in the ways that it is, and was intrigued and fascinated by the identity-work that went on in these interviews, especially with respect to the morally ambiguous aspects of policing which I have already described.
Research participants
Research participants were recruited opportunistically. The police service is subject to much academic scrutiny, and police ofcers are, in general, somewhat research-weary. I had a contact within the constabulary, established during the preceding years, who canvassed his colleagues at two local sites, asking for volunteers to take part in qualitative interviews. This initial attempt resulted in the recruitment of three participants, all men, and all at the rank of inspector and above. From these initial contacts, I was referred on to other participants who expressed interest in the research, which
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included a group of seven male ofcers (all constables) undertaking a training course; two trafc police men (constables) who asked to be interviewed together; six female ofcers, including the most senior female in the force (a chief inspector) and one part-time ofcer (at that time something of a novelty); three more male chief inspectors and one male sergeant; and a further group of ofcers of both sexes who were attending a one-day workshop (all constables). In total therefore, I carried out 15 interviews with individuals (and one pair) and two group interviews. The participation of 15 individuals and two groups is typical of discourse analytic studies, where the aim is not to establish generalizability, but to examine in detail how different versions of the world are constructed and with what consequences, as already mentioned.
Research interviews
Because of my recruitment procedure, participants were more or less conversant with the research aims before I met them. However, on meeting each participant I informed them of the projects basic aims (i.e. an exploration of how police culture could be characterized and how it affected the lived experiences of police men and women) and informed them that my method was non-traditional, in that I had no xed set of questions. Instead I told participants that I wished to have an open-ended discussion with them around the issues of central concern to the project. I informed them that I saw myself as a research participant as much as a researcher and that I wanted them to feel free to challenge or debate the issues raised. This approach was informed by my epistemological stance, from which I rejected the view of the interviewer as a neutral passive observer, believing my own identity to be as at stake as those of the participants, and having a distinct effect on the knowledge production process (Hollway, 1989; Mama, 1995). All conversations were tape-recorded with the participants permission, which was refused by none. The conversations were all conducted at the participants place of work, typically over lunch. The conversations lasted for between one and four hours. All were curtailed due to shortage of time, rather than ideas. The conversations were extremely open-ended, with a variety of topics discussed, sometimes which were quite unrelated to the research aims. Each conversation was transcribed.
Analytic technique: Critical discourse analysis

The aim in a critical discourse analysis is to establish how different levels of meaning are related to each other (Dick, 2004; Fairclough, 1992; Grant et
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al., 1998). The resources used in a text (i.e. words, ideas and so forth) are understood as emanating from the social context, though inuenced by both the specic context in which the text is used, and the motives of the users and consumers of the text. Any text (be it written or spoken) can be understood as fullling a number of functions: rst the text will aim to achieve something, specically, to construct a particular version of an event, an object or an identity, using tactics of persuasion, justication, and so forth. Second, the text will be targeted at specic audiences, and hence when making judgements about what the text is attempting to achieve, the analysis needs to account for the way it handles its audience. Finally, the text can be understood as reproducing, resisting or even changing, broader ideologies that exist in society and that have distinct regulatory effects. The way that these levels relate to each other needs to be built into the analysis. The analysis used in this article is developed from Faircloughs (1992) framework. He suggests that discourse constitutes the identities of individuals, the relationships between individuals, and ideological systems that exist in society. He refers to these as, respectively, the identity, relational and ideational functions of discourse. In order to identify how discourse constitutes these three domains, Fairclough recommends a three dimensional analytic framework in which discourse is analysed as text, as discursive practice and as social practice. 1) Text: This analytic level is very similar to that used in more traditional conversation and discourse analysis. The concern is with understanding how a piece of text (either written or spoken) is constructed. The key task is to understand what the text is trying to achieve. Is it attempting to assert, persuade, justify, accuse, defend or explain? Fairclough (1992) refers to this as the force of the text. A related task is to examine how the text achieves its aims. What words and phrases are used and what propositions are made? 2) Discursive practice: Discursive practice is the analytic level that examines the context of text production. This is a very important level of analysis as it is this which enables an understanding of how different interpretations of the text might be made. For example, in an interview, the question Do you drink? is likely to be interpreted in different ways, dependent on the real or ascribed status of the interviewer, for example, a medical doctor versus a social science researcher. In turn, the interpretation that is made of the question will then have quite specic consequences for the type of response made by the interviewee. For instance, if the question was asked by a doctor, it might account for the fact that the response contains hedges (the question is not answered directly), and an attempt to defend the behaviour (only on social occasions).
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3) Social practice: This level of analysis is closely related to Foucaults ideas on discourse (1977, 1981, 1990). The key focus for the analyst is examining the propositions that are made in the text and the extent to which these are treated as self evident or common-sense. Similar to Therborns (1980) denition of ideology, such propositions are those that express: i) ii) iii) what does and does not exist; what is good, just and appropriate and what is not; what is possible and impossible.
Analytically, those propositions that are made without being challenged, or anticipating being challenged, are those that, in the specic context of text production (i.e. at the level of discursive practice), have succeeded in securing ideological consent: . . . an established order, if it is successful, must make its world seem to be the natural world (Cresswell, 1996: 15). Propositions that are challenged or which are defended in the text are examples of hegemonic struggle, which Fairclough (1992) describes as the process through which contested views of reality are dealt with in an attempt to secure ideological consent. Essentially, therefore, the analysis is looking to understand how people make sense of themselves, objects and events within situations that contain structural constraints, and the task is to relate the former to the latter. Below, I present a detailed analysis of two extracts of conversation taken from interviews with a female and male ofcer respectively. These extracts were chosen because they illustrate an explicit discussion of the coercive authority, detailed above. The analysis below is not intended to represent the denitive interpretation of these extracts (even if such a thing were possible), but represents one of a possible multitude of readings that could be made (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000; Cresswell, 1996; Mama, 1995). The validity of this analysis cannot be established according to the usual criteria employed in the social sciences. I believe Lincoln and Gubas (1985) criterion of naturalistic generalization is appropriate here, as this is concerned with whether the analysis helps the reader to frame or extend their understanding of the world. Extract 1: Female ofcer constable: age 29 1. Interviewer: Do you have some sympathy with the criminal fraternity? 2. Respondent: Oh yeah. I mean like, to me, when I arrest somebody, yknow, youve
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3. actually taken their liberty away from them so that in itself, I think, is degrading. So 4. to me if theyre kicking off and ghting, youre in a different position and youve 5. got to wait for them to calm down but as soon as you arrest someone whats the 6. point of being balshy with them? Youve done what youve been authorized you 7. take them back to the station and you explain to them and I always try and say to 8. them Do you want a cup of tea or anything before we go ahead with the 9. interview thats not because youre sweetening them but to me theyre going 10. to be more co-operative with you if you treat them as a human being rather than 11. just throwing your collar around. Its unnecessary I think and I dont see that 12. a lot, which is what I thought I would do. But weve got a lot of experienced 13. ofcers who Im working with as well and you learn from them every day. The opening question, Do you have some sympathy with the criminal fraternity? implies that it is possible or even probable, that the interviewee does not, which, I would argue, is a dominant lay belief concerning police attitudes, held, especially, by more liberal groups. It is a reasonable conjecture, that she positioned me, as an academic, as a likely member of this group, which would have been further reinforced by the research topic. Thus, at the relational level, I represent a potentially hostile audience. Furthermore, as the member of the interview who is older and has more
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socially ascribed status, an asymmetrical power relation exists. Overall, the ofcer may feel the necessity for self-justication (Widdicombe, 1995). Being able to control conict is celebrated as a core attribute of the police ofcers occupational identity (Reiner, 2000; Waddington, 1999a) and throughout this extract, at the level of identity, the ofcer constructs herself as possessing this attribute. At the relational level, however, there is a danger that the interviewer (given her biographical characteristics) could, using lay beliefs, judge the police ofcer as making arrests (and hence using coercive authority) simply because she enjoys doing so. The ofcer anticipates this judgement by providing a fairly comprehensive vocabulary of motive (Van Maanen, 1980) in which her justication for the arrest is made, and the meaning of her use of coercive authority reframed (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999). First of all, in lines 2 through to 5, the ofcer draws attention to the degradation that is created by an arrest, drawing on liberal-democratic discourse in which individual rights and freedoms are constructed as core values. Thus here, the ofcer constructs the prisoners aggression as a legitimate response to his (or her) circumstances, rather than attributing it to his (or her) personal characteristics. This is a powerful tactic, as it subverts the normal rules of attribution, whereby observers generally attribute the causes of behaviour to actors (Heider, 1958). The power asymmetry between the prisoner and the ofcer is explicitly referred to, and used to justify why an ofcer should wait for a prisoner to calm down before proceeding with the arrest. Thus the conict engendered by the use of coercive authority (i.e. the arrest) is successfully attributed to the situation of the prisoner, not the behaviour of the ofcer, who constructs her response to the prisoners situation (and therefore her identity) as humanitarian. This could be interpreted as a recalibrating tactic (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Shulman, 2000) in which certain actions are made more signicant, and other actions, less so. In this extract, for instance, the emphasis placed on the hospitable and friendly treatment of the prisoner deects attention away from the less palatable fact of the arrest itself. At the ideational level, we see evidence of hegemonic struggle, where lay ideas about police motivations, in which they are constructed as characteristically coercive and authoritarian, compete with more ofcial and acceptable accounts of their motivations. To construct her motivations as publicly acceptable, she carefully emphasizes and constructs the meaning of arrests: that they are made not by individuals who enjoy this activity, but by individuals who have been authorized to make arrests by licence, that is, being allowed or expected to do things that other people are not allowed or expected to do (Hughes, 1958). This is illustrated in line 6, when she
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comments: Youve done what youve been authorized. In Ashforth and Kreiners (1999) typology, this tactic is a form of reframing, labelled neutralizing, where employees deny their responsibility for a negative event by asserting they are simply doing their job because the system demands it, a tactic that is often employed by actors when their behaviour is morally ambiguous (Arluke & Hafferty, 1996). Whether licensed or not, however, as Waddington (1999b) points out, the ability to use coercive authority in any society with pretensions to liberal democracy is problematic. By constructing not only a professional but also a humanitarian identity, the ofcer is able to navigate this problem. The description of the aftermath of the arrest, for instance, is constructed as conversational and hospitable (lines 7 and 8). This incongruity is resolved by her implicit acknowledgement that her humane treatment of the prisoner could be constructed as cynical manipulation (thats not because youre sweetening them: line 9), and by drawing attention to the practical and professional goals achieved. The ofcer also attempts to establish the credibility of her humanitarianism by her acknowledgement of lay discourses about police ofcers: (Whats the point of being balshy with them?: line 6); (. . . rather than just throwing your collar around: lines 1011); (I dont see that a lot, which I thought I would do: lines 1112). These acknowledgements enable the ofcer to produce a credible account of her motives without drawing the potential accusation that she is being unrealistic, nave or idealistic (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), and she effectively deals with the unspoken backdrop to this interaction: the well-publicized accounts of police brutality, especially of prisoners in custody. Further, in juxtaposing the sentence in which experienced ofcers are discussed, to that which acknowledges that police ofcers can be characteristically coercive, she implies that this is the domain of inexperienced and, hence, less accountable ofcers. Extract 2: Male ofcer sergeant: age 42 1. Interviewer: Have you changed [over the years] in the way that you deal with people youve arrested? 2. Respondent: I feel more condent in the way Im prepared to relate to other 3. people . . . because Im not just, I mean . . . Im part of the organization. When I say do 4. this . . . it isnt me telling you to do this, it is me, Sergeant and ultimately, the whole
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5. organization that stands behind me telling you to do this . . . so I wield the 6. organizations authority and ultimately the states authority. Umm . . . when people 7. say youre doing this to me . . . I say No Im not . . . youve done it to yourself and 8. Im not doing this for me Im doing this for society as a whole. In this extract there is far less justication for the use of coercive authority than was apparent in extract 1, probably because the lead-up discussion and the question posed by the interviewer have not troubled (Ball & Wilson, 2000) the ofcers identity to the same extent as the question that was posed in extract 1. Additionally, this ofcer is a sergeant, and therefore his status is more commensurate with that of the interviewer; he is, additionally, a similar age to the interviewer. Overall, there is less of a power asymmetry in this interaction, rendering the degree to which this ofcer might feel morally accountable to the interviewer less acute than that apparent in extract 1. Nonetheless, the interview is a front region, and, at the relational level, the ofcer does show a motivation to account for his use of coercive authority in a way that negates the lay discourse in which police ofcers are constructed as bullies or authoritarians, thus revealing evidence of hegemonic struggle. In the build-up to this extract, the interview had focused on how police culture affects identity, and the ofcer concerned had been describing the personal change he had experienced in his 23 years service. The key proposition in the extract is that the ofcer has been more and more able to separate the personal from the professional as he has become increasingly part of the organization (line 3). This feeling of membership has not only increased his condence (line 2) but has enabled him to locate his ability to use coercive authority in the broader context of the organization, the state and ultimately, society (lines 58). In line 4, he separates the personal me from the professional sergeant, with agency consigned to the latter. Thus the potential authoritarianism implied by the notion of telling you to do this (line 4) is a product of the role, not his personal motivations, needs or desires. He goes on to further reject the notion of himself as an authoritarian agent, by locating the source of the roles authority in the organization and the state. At the level of identity, this ofcer, does not, unlike the ofcer in extract 1, attempt to construct himself as possessing humanitarian credentials. This
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might be because as a man, his willingness to use coercive authority is explicable, simply because of the stereotypical association between masculinity and force. The presence of the lay discourse on police characteristics is acknowledged in this extract, when he recounts the reactions of prisoners (youre doing this to me: line 7). This statement implies the use of force, of an agent acting on a passive victim. The ofcer rejects and resists the construction of prisoners as passive victims, articulating the use of coercive authority as an action engendered by the immoral behaviour of the prisoner (youve done it to yourself: line 7). At the ideational level, as in extract 1, liberaldemocratic discourse is also drawn upon, but here, it is used to justify the necessity of using coercive authority, rather than to excuse the behaviour of the arrestee: the prisoner is constructed as breaching the rights and freedoms of society. So whereas in extract 1, liberal-democratic ideology was drawn upon to enable the interviewee to construct a creditable humanitarian identity, here it is used as a further reframing tactic, labelled, denial of victim, in which it is argue[d] that the exploited either desire or deserve their fate (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999: 422), a tactic that is often used to justify the apparent ill treatment of minority groups (Wetherell & Potter, 1992). The lay discourse on police characteristics and motivations is again acknowledged in line 8 (Im not doing this for me), and rejected by his ascription of a moral jurisdiction (Im doing this for society as a whole: line 8). In this extract, the use of coercive authority is more robustly justied at the ideational level, by drawing on the notion of mandate, that is, the moral, legal or intellectual power to designate what is right and proper in human conduct (Hughes, 1958). Whereas drawing on the notion of licence can work to provide a justication for the use of coercive authority as I have illustrated in my analysis of extract 1, mandate is a more powerful justication, because, as Herbert (1998) and Manning (1977) point out, it invokes the broader value of preserving a legally dened social order.
Summary of analysis
Taken together, these extracts show that these ofcers succeed in reframing the meaning of coercive authority using broadly similar strategies. Both ofcers, for example, absolve (Arluke & Hafferty, 1996) themselves for their use of coercive authority, by locating their responsibility for their actions in a broader, legally dened social order (Herbert, 1998). In this way, they deal with the potential accusation that their use of coercive authority could proceed from questionable, personal motivations. Second, both ofcers were able to construct a moral identity, by framing their actions within
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liberal-democratic discourses of human rights and freedoms, though in different ways. In extract 1, for example, this discourse was used to both excuse the behaviour of the prisoner and to attribute it to his or her situation. In subverting the normal rules of attribution in this way, this ofcer was able, using a variety of further tactics, to construct a credible and creditable humanitarian identity. In extract 2, this discourse was used to condemn the actions of the prisoner, drawing on the notion of mandate (Hughes, 1958) to morally justify the use of coercive authority. The two extracts differ to the extent that the ofcer in extract 1 appears to show a greater concern than the ofcer in extract 2, with how the use of coercive authority might reect on her identity, revealed by the more extensive working up of her humanitarian credentials.
Conclusions and implications

The moral ambiguity that inheres in the use of coercive authority, and that leads some sectors of the public to perhaps view policing as dirty work, stems not so much from whether its use is justiable, because as Van Maanen (1980) points out, this is not veriable, but from the fact that society has licensed (Hughes, 1958) the police with these powers. As Douglas (1966) argues, when a society requires a given group to hold ambiguous roles, the persons in that group are often credited with the potential to wield uncontrolled, dangerous and disapproved power. As a profession, police ofcers perform societys dirty work, operating at the margins and boundaries of the social order, using coercive authority, or the threat of it, to keep people in their place (Waddington, 1999b), more often than ghting crime. Their ambiguous and marginal status derives not only from their symbolic clash with the ideals of advanced liberal democracies, but from the way they expose the demarcations in society, between the haves and have-nots, the socially excluded and the socially included. In keeping people in their place they make us aware that the established order in which the majority of citizens live their lives is not the natural order of things, after all, but always a temporary accomplishment, that could, at any time, be overturned, displaced, and transformed. They symbolize the possibility of potential disorder that inheres in any fragmented social system threatening our cherished way of life and its habits, customs and routines. All police ofcers have, at some time or other, the occasion to use coercive authority. Whether that is celebrated at group level, is, I have argued, dependent on the extent to which the broader social and cultural context is a politically contested domain, which acts to both marginalize the police and
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to render their ideological boundaries fragile and precarious. Celebrating coercive authority, not only occurs more overtly in back regions (Goffman, 1959), but provides an in-group legitimation of their espoused function, and a negation of the possibility that what they do is potentially both antidemocratic and ineffective. In other contexts, like that of the research interview, the individual police ofcer can become exposed to the possibility that he or she is judged to be a member of one of societys out-groups (Hughes, 1984), licensed to perform tasks that normal upright citizens would disdain on moral grounds. Like all out-groups, the causes of their behaviours, especially those that are judged to be morally ambiguous, tend to be attributed to their agency, rather than the situation, resulting in lay discourses which brand police ofcers as bullies and authoritarians. In such front region contexts, the fragile and contingent boundaries of professional ideology are rendered permeable, requiring active re-construction. The identity of the police ofcer is the site of this re-construction, acting as the node through which different and, sometimes, contradictory ideologies struggle for hegemony. In my analysis I have argued that, in the cases presented here, to successfully accomplish this re-construction, the meaning of coercive authority had to be negotiated, by bringing it in line with the ideals of a liberaldemocratic society and the way that these construct norms of conduct and personhood. In doing so, not only were the research participants able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for the use of coercive authority, but, crucially, to locate its use within the terms of a moral, professional mandate. There are a number of implications of the analysis presented here. The rst concerns the dirty work concept itself. The utility of this concept lies partly in the way in which it draws our attention to the socially embedded nature of all occupations, and of occupational identities. What we do and how we see ourselves can never be disconnected from the wider social system. By closer attention to the context relativity of the dirty work concept, examining differences between how it is framed in back regions and front regions, we can better explore those micro-processes through which different reframing techniques (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999) are mobilized and rendered effective. What is branded as dirty, for example, refers to the transgression of a particular boundary (Lockyer & Pickering, 2001), but this is never xed. While the use of coercive authority can be seen as morally ambiguous, this depends on the perspective of the observer and their power to dene it as morally ambiguous (Cresswell, 1996). Thus studying how workers in tainted occupations and professions deal with the stigma of dirt that attaches to their role, provides an opportunity to more closely examine the dynamics of power that exist between occupations and the broader social
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context, particularly in relation to the ways that certain occupations draw attention to the moral boundaries and margins of the social order and how these are ideologically constructed and contested. A second implication is that if organizational ideologies that provide the identity resources which individuals use to make sense of themselves routinely, are both deeply embedded in the fundamentals of the occupation and in its dialectical relation with society, then as Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) query: how manageable is organizational culture? This is a critical question for the police, whose culture has frequently been blamed for both race and sex discrimination (Brown, 1992; Chan, 1996; Fielding, 1994; Fletcher, 1996; Graef, 1990). The argument in this article is that we cannot understand organizational ideologies as existing in any monolithic or static sense, and that such ideologies are neither smoothly nor routinely reproduced in every context. So while I would argue that culture is probably not amenable to the symbolic management strategies advocated by Ashforth and Kreiner (1999), we need to have a better understanding of those organizational contexts in which those ideologies are disrupted and resisted, if we are to identify spaces from which change to organizational culture might begin to emerge. Future research could usefully explore these issues by examining dirty work identities in a broader range of front and back regions than those considered in this study, perhaps examining the extent to which identity presentation differs in various contexts and how, or whether, individuals experience any differences as dissonant. A further implication relates to the conceptualization of the reframing techniques identied by Ashforth and Kreiner (1999). The use of the term reframing draws our attention to the fact that certain meanings become privileged, taken-for-granted as truths, reecting the power that some groups have to dene the world and its events for us. I suggest that the analysis presented here exposes the temporality and contingency of all meanings. They are never xed. Space for redenition is always potentially available, and my analysis implies it is in the active attempt to achieve a coherent and integral self that such spaces can open up, as individuals draw on different meanings to make sense of themselves and their activities (Fine, 1996; Wrzesniewski et al., 2003). In studying how dirty workers make sense of themselves and their work, therefore, we need to be aware that our account and understanding of what they do derives from a specic sociocultural perspective, it does not reect the reality of the dirty workers status. Finally, my analysis suggests that the creative capacities agents have to accomplish an identity in any given context are subject to social-structural constraint. That is, we are not always free to present ourselves in the way or ways that we might like. Gender, class, occupational status,
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educational background, accent and age are all examples of the structural constraints that need to be negotiated in the performance of identity. This necessarily leads us to a further consideration of power. Part of the identity problem for the likes of police constables, police sergeants and slaughterhouse workers, is that they occupy subordinate positions in the organizational hierarchy. The threat that is posed to their identity emanates from these structural positions as well as from the nature of the work they undertake. In another sense, then, we can understand both the celebration of their dirty roles in back regions and the moral justication of their roles in front regions as resistance to the relations of power in their organizations and in society more generally. In rejecting their dirty worker status, they afrm their power as agents, to redene and contest the meaning of what they do.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Linda Putnam and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Penny Dick (BA, MSc, PhD, C.Psychol.) is a Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour at Shefeld University Management School. Her research interests include the management of diversity; identity, resistance and power; and the impact of family-friendly policies on organizations and individuals. She has published in journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Work, Employment & Society, and the Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology. She is co-author of Introduction to organizational behaviour (3rd edn, McGraw Hill) and has recently completed a role as the principal investigator on a two year Economic and Social Research Council project on the management of exible working practices in the UK police service. [E-mail: p.dick@shefeld.ac.uk]

Dirty Work Designations - Dick

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Human Relations DOI: 10.

dirty work identity police ethics police work social construction

Human Relations 58(11)

Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com by Nicolas Rodriguez Games on September 4, 2010

Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com by Nicolas Rodriguez Games on September 4, 2010

Human Relations 58(11)

What makes some work dirty?

Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com by Nicolas Rodriguez Games on September 4, 2010