Disposing of Waste: Paradoxes of Recognition

Abstract

The meanings that workers assign to their work are predicated to a large extent on notions and experiences of recognition—as a potential source of self-realisation and positive feelings of self-worth. Drawing on Alex Honneth and his conceptualisation of the struggle for recognition and Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus, this chapter sets out to demonstrate how through schemes of evaluation, recognition might lose its emancipatory nature and in fact might limit possibilities of autonomous self-determination. Although patterns of recognition may still function as a ‘steering wheel’ in individual self-realisation, they can fail to transform human potentialities into actualities damagingly affecting individual self-esteem and self-respect. Thus, drawing on the experiences of street cleaners and refuse collectors, the chapter focuses on paradoxes of recognition and makes an effort to comprehend the constitutive elements, reference points, and dynamics of these paradoxes. In so doing, the chapter aims at developing a more subtle understanding of a complex system of interactions between economic laws (i.e. market competition) and schemes of evaluation that, on the one hand, permit certain groups to monopolise particular resources in order to enhance existing or gain new life chances and opportunities (Brubaker 2004) and, on the other, function as legitimating principles for exclusion of other groups leading to production and reproduction of states of inequalities.