Speaker: Professor Jana Costas (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Work, Organisation and Management Group
Open to: Management School PhD students and academic staff, with no sign up needed
Date: Thursday 20 June 2024
Time: 1:30-3pm
Place: Management School - Seminar Room 6
Abstract
In tomorrow's guest speaker event Jana will present work from her recent book that reports on ethnographic research conducted with cleaners in a Berlin underworld.
Her presentation will invite us behind-the-scenes and underground the surface world of the corporate head offices and shopping malls, the office blocks and department stores in the Potsdamer Platz.
Here cleaners pick up cigarette butts from sidewalks, scrape chewing gum from marble floors, wipe coffee stains from office desks and scrub public toilets, long before white-collar workers, consumers and tourists enter the complex.
Jana's ethnography takes us on a 'Dantean'-like journey to a large yet hidden, four-level deep corporate underworld below Potsdamer Platz.
There, Costas discovers how cleaners' attitudes to work are much less straightforward than the public perceptions of cleaning as degrading work would suggest.
Cleaners turn to their work for dignity, yet find it elusive. Her research explores their day-to-day struggles for dignity at work that unfolds in interaction with co-workers, management, clients and the public.
Speaker
Professor Costas is a distinguished and internationally recognised scholar and holds the chair of People, Work and Organization in the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics in the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt.
With expertise in organization theory, organisational behavior, organisation studies, sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies and urban studies.
Jana serves as Senior Editor for the journal Organization and publishes widely in management and organization studies.
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