Abstract:

Occupation is the product of social division of labor, and every occupation beneficial to the society are not superior or inferior to others. In practice, however, some occupations have been “stigmatized” by the public because of their dirty attributes, and have been marginalized in the labor market. Dirty work refers to the occupations that are necessary for the functioning of the society but belittled or disliked by the general public, such as caregivers in hospital who provide patient care services, undertakers who defend the dignity of life at the end, and sanitation workers who play the role of city beauticians. Despite the social value of these occupations, the “defaced image” viewed by the public poses serious identify threat to dirty workers.

Occupation is an important source of an individual’s positive self-concept and existence value. Dirty worker would usually be questioned by mainstream value that “how could you be occupied in this work”. Therefore, the scientific community takes it as a key issue that how dirty workers exert influence on their identification, and have controversy on whether practitioners identify or disidentify their occupations. Some researchers point out that dirty workers own complicated identification process and hardly identify or disidentify their occupations, and thus, they are more or less ambivalent about their occupations. However, existing researches about the ambivalent identification of dirty worker are limited in theoretical discussion, and do not have clear idea on the formation mechanism of the ambivalent identification of dirty workers.

Accordingly, this study stands from the perspective of paradox and aims to construct a formation mechanism of dirty workers’ ambivalent occupational identification. Specifically, we introduce conflict experience as a mediator, and internal motivation (i.e., family motivation and career calling) and work environment (i.e., work chance and organizational support) as boundary condition. We suggest that the interaction of occupational stigma perception with internal motivation, or with work environment, would induce dirty workers’ conflict experience, which in turn leads to ambivalent occupational identification.

The possible innovations of this study are as followed. First, standing from the paradox theory, we propose that the multiple tensions among individuals, organizations and occupations are important sources of conflict experience, and the conflict experience would act as an important influence mechanism of occupational stigma perception on practitioners’ ambivalent occupational identification. It provides a new theoretical perspective for understanding the formation mechanism of dirty workers’ ambivalent occupational identification. Second, we take internal motivation (i.e., family motivation and career calling) and work environment (i.e., work chance and organizational support) into consideration, and present the interaction of occupational stigma perception with these two boundary conditions would be more likely to trigger dirty workers’ conflict experience, which would further lead to ambivalent occupational identification. It points out the direction to discuss the formation mechanism of dirty workers’ ambivalent occupational identification. Third, based on the paradigm of paradox, we construct a formation mechanism of dirty workers’ ambivalent occupational identification. In Chinese context, dirty workers own more complicated identification process and hardly absolutely identify or disidentify their occupations. Therefore, ambivalent occupational identification would be more realistic to describe the identification process of dirty workers.

Key words: non-decent work, occupational stigma, ambivalent occupational identification, formation mechanism