Beyond invisibility: Landscapes of intersubjective recognition experienced by cleaners in Australian schools

Dominant approaches to researching cleaners’ experiences of invisibility and recognition have tended to focus on either the structural determinants of invisibility, such as outsourcing or ‘dirty work’ status, or the ways in which workers seek recognition as a strategy for managing taint. This article uses Honneth's concept of intersubjective recognition as a basis for bringing together structure- and agency-oriented approaches through a focus on the ways in which cleaners’ recognition experiences arise from historically specific contexts that are both found and made by cleaners. The article illustrates the usefulness of Honneth's theory through a comparison of the intersubjective recognition experiences of Australian school cleaners working in different work paradigms in two historical periods, public service cleaners in the 1910s–1990s and outsourced cleaners in the 2000s–2020s. The case studies contribute new empirical findings concerning patterns of cleaner recognition across all three dimensions theorised by Honneth – love, rights and solidarity – and the significance of shared horizons of purpose between cleaners and other workplace actors for enabling intersubjective recognition. Theoretically, the paper advances the concept of ‘dense’ and ‘sparse’ intersubjective recognition landscapes as a lens for understanding the changing nature and sources of cleaner invisibility and recognition over time.