Goldin, C. (2021). Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity

Abstract

staff, and students) is a much needed and welcome addition to the discussions around stigmatization. By sharing janitors’ accounts of abusive comments from customers, or their recollections of customers ignoring them altogether, Alvarez adds depth to claims of janitors’ communicative isolation and invisibility. Exploring the communication between individuals in service jobs and their clients is also important from the perspective of dirty work research. As some writers have argued (Malvini Redden & Scarduzio, 2018), attending to the communicative dimensions of worker–customer interactions is urgent for an enhanced appreciation of how work becomes more or less dirty (or clean). On this note, for a book with “dirty work” in the title, there is surprisingly little engagement with the dirty work scholarship. The janitorial work examined here is undeniably dirty, as workers’ narratives and some customers’ voices would suggest (see, e.g., pages 15 and 75); however, dirty work is only mentioned in passing. It is not unpacked with reference to the scholarship’s unique preoccupation with the negative impact of societal stigmatizing views on workers’ personal identities and how workers then manage this impact through symbolic and material coping techniques. Rather, the book is about everyday communication and its embedded stigma-reinforcing mechanisms, unfolding against the backdrop of the perceptions of janitorial work as dirty. Communication researchers will find Alvarez’s account of great interest. The book may also be of value to scholars working in the wider domain of social sciences and humanities, but also to practitioners and leaders in nonprofit, academic organizations that aspire to “walk the talk” of inclusivity.