The Dirty Work of Facilities Management: Exploring Its Place within Human Resource Management

Due to FM’s longstanding association with being invisible in the organisational landscape, and surface association with janitorial work (cleaning toilets), the concept of dirty work (Cassell and Bishop 2014) will be used to guide the research. Dirty work is defined as tasks and occupations that carry a stigma owing to being perceived as having degraded or immoral qualities, and as such, carry symbolic elements of taint and contamination. The original three forms of dirt - physical, social, and moral are expanded here to also include the under-researched area of emotional dirt following Mikkelsen’s 2021 seminal paper. As such, the research will encompass how FM practitioners navigate their working lives within an organisational discipline that is arguably both stigmatised and at a crossroads. This project specifically centres on how FM are navigating this change as practitioners who are concurrently unrecognized and hidden.

Therefore, by focusing on FM, this project contributes to a call for a deeper understanding of the present state of the FM discipline, function, and profession (Tauscher and Clayton 2015) and therefore will address an important research gap. Additionally, referring to the IWFM definition, the focus is on the workforce, the ‘people’ within the places and process, analysing FM’s interdependence and therefore role in HRM. This is timely as this debated discipline faces the changing use of our physical workplaces, arguably creating a new focus on the workforce and forcing a new consideration of FM as a hidden function within the wider HRM family.

The main purpose of this study will be to: Analyse the impact of FM as dirty work within the HRM understanding.