Blue-Collar Discourses of Workplace Dignity: Using Outgroup Comparisons to Construct Positive Identities

Critical Analysis

In this paper, the author identifies three ways blue-collar workers connect identity with work: viewing all jobs as important, locating dignity in the quality of work performed, and relating dignity to how people are treated, and how they treat others.

It is common for people to relate their identity to their work, and to find or make that relationship clear through dignity, which is “inherent worth and value and/or being deserving of respect” (354). Studio is an organization, students frame their projects as work, and their worth is intimately related to the output of what they make. These students are in a particularly vulnerable role, however, as part of the work process is to examine and judge the work product. The job of design is not simply to make things. It is also to hold these things up to group scrutiny, with an expectation that the artifacts will require being remade and improved. It’s clear that design can be a dignified job, and so instructors sometimes make efforts to extract dignity from the artifacts that are made and instead tie it to the process of making them.

The tactics for this are unclear. One approach may be to view dignity as something that is given and received, reinforcing a power asymmetry: instructors are in a position to give dignity based on any criteria they want. The authors note the presence of this power dynamic in traditional blue-collar work, as “blue-collar workers often are placed in powerless organizational positions as they do not control the means and modes of production” (356). It’s unreasonable to expect the same amount of control for a student as with a worker. Students must engage in proactive identity refinement, as “individuals are more likely to engage in active identity work when encounters with others raise worry and/or self-doubt” (357). Students may go through the same process as “dirty workers”, where “inner determination was held up as a central organizational value and measure for success” (357).

Self-categorization is a way that the determination manifests, and it may be true for students that “the construction of a positive identity necessarily relies on social comparison and intergroup competition” (358). It’s unclear how commiseration in the face of hard labor and long hours is resolved through comparison and competition, although those factors may actually constitute what is being compared—the quality of the work may reasonably be celebrated while the amount of effort it took to achieve the work may be critiqued.

Studio work exists as a complex interconnectedness between identity development (“I am becoming a designer”), comparison and competition (“Are you becoming a better designer?”) and the respect given to effort and hours (“Without hard work, it’s impossible to become a designer.”) Critique is a public place where these qualities are examined, but the nature of work being done becomes a more subtle and consistent judge of how much dignity should be afforded from one student to another. In a collaborative studio, a feeling of “we’re all in it together” recognizes that the work-related identity development is shared. This reinforces a basic premise that a large amount of hard work is fundamental to designerly-identity development.

This is sort of a mess of thoughts. What a hairball.