Abstract
This chapter explores the work of Mary Douglas, arguably the most widely read social anthropologist of her generation, through her seminal text Purity and Danger. It examines the influence of her work on our understandings of ‘dirt’ in the context of the growing body of literature that focuses on ‘dirty work’, i.e. work that is seen as disgusting or undesirable. Mary Douglas’s work on the symbolic dimensions of dirt has had a profound influence on the burgeoning literature on dirty work in the sociology of work and in organization studies. In order to illustrate the significance of anomalies in classification, Douglas draws on Sartre’s essay on stickiness and slime. Douglas’s work and the themes of purity and impurity form the foundations, potentially, for a rich trajectory in terms of future research. This could explore different, emerging cultural practices of ‘ritual purity’ in organizations and how they ‘inflect’ modern, contextually driven notions of conformity, morality and transgression.
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