Dramas of Dignity

Jana Costas is Chair of People, Work & Management at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She is the co-author of Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life (2016). Awards include the European Union Marie Curie Fellowship and the Best-Critical-Paper Award 2020 of the Academy of Management.

• 1. The corporate micro-city Potsdamer Platz: Cleaners' presence from below; 2. Characters from the corporate underworld: Alex, Ali, Luisa, and Marcel; 3. From feces to flowers: The sweat, shame, disgust, pride and fun of working with dirt; 4. Separate in the same boat: Others and allies among cleaners; 5. When worlds collide: Cleaners at work in the upperworld; 6. 'Back to the dark side': Cleaners' tactics against surveillance; 7. Leaving the minus area behind; Postscript; Bibliography; Appendix; Index.

'This book prompts the reader to think of dirt afresh and to enter the world of those who, invisibly, keep our urban spaces clean: the armies of cleaners engaged in an endless battle with filth in shopping malls, office blacks and department stores. Dirt is not an ordinary adversary to these low-paid but not low-skill workers. It can be the source of stigma but also a badge of honour, a Tantalus-like goal out of reach but also a guarantor of a workplace autonomy. Far from draining meaning from their lives, dirt becomes a fountain of meaning. With this book, Costas joins the distinguished company of urban ethnographers whose work liberates their subjects from stifling assumptions and meaningless banalities and lets their stories be heard as they deserve.' Yiannis Gabriel, Visiting Professor at Lund University, Emeritus Professor at University of Bath