Abstract
What a pleasure to read an actual organizational ethnography! The term has been recently and commonly misused, covering everything from praxiographies (descriptions of a certain practice, Mol, 2002) to case studies. The “ethnos” here are the cleaners operating in a “corporate underworld,” and Jana Costas’ Dramas of Dignity is a highly accurate description of their work lives. It is also “organizational” in a double sense: The cleaners are employed by an organization (CleanUp), and they clean “a corporate micro-city” (p. 20).
An HR manager in this cleaning company visited Jana Costas’ university, an event that resulted in a deepening of her earlier interest in cleaners’ jobs. He also helped her to gain access to his company’s employees, who clean buildings at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In her introduction, Costas describes the beginning of her participant observation, lists the earlier studies of relevance, and introduces the framework for dramas of dignity.
In the first chapter, the author depicts Potsdamer Plats and its history, emphasizing the social consequences of its architectural solutions. The descriptions of Potsdamer Platz’s upperworld and underworld are done both from an outsider’s (e.g. a tourist’s) and an insider’s (a cleaner’s) viewpoint, making them particularly effective.
The second chapter presents “the tribe,” including a history of its occupation, and selects four representatives whose work-life stories illustrate different but typical ways of becoming a cleaner. The tribe comprises a woman from Mozambique and three men (a West German teenager from a family of cleaners, a Turkish immigrant, and an ex-drug addict from East Germany). Costas emphasizes that cleaning is “a stigmatized occupation” (p. 42), and that although women prevail numerically, men find better positions than women do. Recent cleaning companies, like the one she studied, have attempted to remove the stigma, with doubtful results.
The contents of Chapter 3 are well summarized in its subtitle: “The Sweat, Shame, Disgust, Pride and Fun of Working with Dirt” (p. 63). While cleaning, Costas learns that “[d]isturbing as it may be to have to deal with a pile of shit, it also makes for a good story” as “[d]isgust and laughter go hand in hand” (p. 70). 1 But disgust is not the only effect of cleaning: Muscle problems and other physical damage are common, as she learned from her fieldwork.
Chapter 4 contains a report from a summer party, organized by the cleaning company and one of its clients. It turns out that cleaners, too, have a status hierarchy and various elaborate markers of difference. The party brought the cleaners into the upper world, rendering these differences especially visible. Age, gender, provenience, race, ethnicity—all these differences are played out, and management’s desired “team attitude” is openly negated.
The Potsdamer Platz underworld does not constitute a so-called melting pot in which differences do not matter. (. . .) Cleaners don’t merely encounter a set of differences in the workplace but actively create, mobilize and practice them in their interactions (p. 91).
Yet it is obvious to Costas that they do it to enhance their sense of worth, and their status hierarchy is neither stable nor static. It is when they meet people from the upper world that they become identical in the eyes of these people.
Chapter 5 focuses on the interactions between cleaners and their clients. Cleaners are treated as “non-persons”: invisible—or visible and humiliated. Costas suggested that there could be multiple reasons for their being held in such contempt: the clients’ feeling of superiority, to be sure, but also a feeling of shame when meeting persons who know the most intimate aspects of one’s life. Cleaners, on the other hand, regard clients with both curiosity (especially when cleaning flats) and disrespect; these two attitudes somewhat equaling the interaction. Still, the cleaners also truly appreciate praise and are often devastated by complaints.
Cleaners struggle to achieve respect they think their work has earned them, and every client complaint may seem like an attack, a confirmation of the assumption that cleaners are lazy and uncommitted. (p. 116)
But invisibility has its advantages. “For cleaners, the invisible underworld can be a refuge from a landscape of indignities” (p. 126).
In Chapter 6, it becomes clear that Costas shares de Certeau’s (1988) opinion that strategy is what bosses want, whereas tactics are how subordinates make strategy impossible. Although this assumption still holds, both the methods of surveillance and the tactics of avoidance have changed in the past decade.
In today’s workplaces, surveillance takes on various shapes and forms, such as direct managerial supervision, security cameras, offline and online inspections, as well as ever more sophisticated digital tracking systems. (pp. 128–129)
In Potsdamer Platz, “cleaners gravitate to the minus areas, to the dark and out-of-the-way spaces hidden from the upperworld” (p. 128). Yet it would be a mistake to assume, in tune with at least some managers, that in this way cleaners try to avoid their duties. As Costa makes clear, “the importance of resistance to surveillance lies in gaining autonomy and therefore dignity; it does not lie in shirking work responsibilities” (p. 143).
Conclusions? The corporate underworld is a labirynthine, dark and stinking place, alternately stifling and cold. It is the “minus area” of society where people are paid to deal with filth and excess of upperworld life (p. 148).
Yet in those “minus areas” cleaners fight for their dignity through their work. Their dignity is daily threatened and daily gained; thus the “dramas of dignity” of Costas’ title.
Jana Costas’ fieldwork is extremely impressive, and just as impressive is the historical and geographical background into which she sets her report. This is a study of the kind that both organization scholars and general readers need: It uncovers the unknown, rather than focusing on the objects and processes studied since the beginning of organization theory. The writing is truly captivating. (Luckily, the numerous references are in footnotes, thus not disturbing reading). Costa managed to avoid the somewhat patronizing attitude displayed by Ehrenreich (2002) in her Nickel and dimed and offers a picture of low-paid workers in Europe that is both respectful and fascinating.
