Sotirin, Patricia JeanAuthor InformationView Profile; Miller, David JamesAuthor InformationView Profile. The American Journal of Semiotics; Kent Vol. 11, Iss. 1/2, (1994): 215-235.
It is now a commonplace to argue that a privileged term within a given economy of difference more often than not accrues such privilege at the expense of another term which serves as its alibi. It is part of the same topoi to claim further that the strict delineation of this hierarchical imbalance dissimulates an interpenetration that binds the terms to one another. The resulting ambivalence of terms, evidenced in the indelible traces of the other borne by each of the terms, produces a terminal tension that threatens to undermine the privilege itself. A perpetual vigilance is required in order to maintain that privilege.
But is such vigilance always enough? What happens when this ambivalence and its attendant tension is exploited from outside the economy itself-from the standpoint of a more encompassing economy? What happens when the perpetual reverberation of privilege and its demise is utilized in order to keep this intertangled identity in its 'proper' place? Is this not the very machinery of oppression and exploitation?
Not-Trash/Trash
This paper uses the synonymic polysemy of the not-trash/trash couplet in order to look at precisely such a situation. It is concerned with a concrete economy of difference, the lived economy in which the mundane experience of secretarial workers is structured, an experience of oppression and exploitation that, at this level of waged-labor, constitutes the typical-perhaps prototypical -female employment experience (Feldberg and Glenn 1979). While the title phrase 'pink-collar trash' could well refer to material discarded by secretaries, here it refers not so much to the trash
secretaries get rid of, but to the trash they are required to bear.1 In light of this, the paper will consider secretarial task, role, and character within the context of the synonomic play of the not-trash/trash couplet.2
The secretarial position is necessary to the rational functioning of the organization, at least in terms of the structural requirements of bureaucratic operation. Nevertheless, despite this functional necessity, there is a certain insincerity to the common claims about secretarial labor, role, and character within the organization. Claims about the value (not-trash) of secretarial labor are often undermined by practices in which that labor is devalued (trash); claims about the indispensability (not-trash) of the secretarial role, by practices in which that role is treated as disposable (trash); and claims about the respectability (not-trash) of secretarial character, by practices in which that character is treated as trashy (trash).
In conclusion, the paper will consider the discourse of trashing (trash) as pointing, in its articulation of secretarial tasks as devalued, of secretarial role as disposable, and of secretarial character as trashy, toward an other of its own, the mutuality (not-trash) of secretarial women as a possibility for escaping the machinery of oppression and exploitation.
I. Secretarial Tasks: Valued and Devalued Labor
Secretarial labor as the routine management of information appears to be invaluable to the operation and integrity of organizational information systems. In keeping with this, contemporary secretarial manuals, for example, tout the secretary as an information manager with primary task responsibilities for information processing - the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information (Eckersley-Johnson 1976). But is this secretarial labor deemed invaluable by the organization or does it bear within itself traces of its devaluation?
Prosaically, the information processing tasks acclaimed in the manuals involve various activities organized around the relation of what is not-trash and what is, a relation marking the boundaries of organizational information systems. In this sense, commonplace secretarial tasks might be said to involve sorting, disseminating, and/or filing what is not-trash.
Sorting What is Mot-Trash
In sorting what is not-trash, secretaries seem to be entrusted with the celebrated gate keeper function. Charged with screening requests for managerial attention in order to ensure that managers do not waste their (more valuable) time, secretaries appear to be responsible for determining what is not trash and for assembling and prioritizing it. However, the "ordinary competence and minor initiative" involved in such pragmatic assessments is little more than an expected commitment to and display of pre-established procedural logics (Feldman and March 1981). The determination of what is not-trash is always made within a "climate of accountability" which denigrates or prohibits unjustified departure from these various logics (Wieck 1979: 249). Consequently, sorting what is not-trash from what is, for the most part, amounts to a simple recognition and manipulation of organizational codes of authority and etiquette (Lalonde 1980).
Disseminating What is Not-Trash
In disseminating what is not-trash, secretaries appear to be responsible for creating communicative forms and managing communicative flows. However, with respect to the former, secretaries are typically restricted to the use of institutionalized formats, both written and oral, that display a metonymic array of indices for bureaucratic rationality (for example, standardization of format and content, etiquette of address, impersonal voice, nearness, and so on). While such restrictions are often expressed as a concern for clarity, efficiency and professionalism, they in fact impose a rational form that mitigates against variation as unjustified deviation.
With respect to communicative flows, secretaries are restricted for the most part to the use of pre-established routing patterns, patterns that control the information load on the rest of the system through such activities as message omission, delay, summarization, modification, and selective distribution (Huber and Daft 1987: 146). These routing patterns include secretaries as mediators but not as originators of messages. Indeed, when secretaries attempt to originate information other than that which is routinely expected or requested, others in the organization tend to devalue or disregard those messages as unimportant, trivial - in a word, trash - unless they are substantiated by those in formal positions of authority or responsibility (Louis 1980; Stohl 1986). Secretaries need be adept only at recognizing and mediating formal relations of communication and authority.
By contrast, contributions that go beyond these bureaucratically rationalized communicative forms and flows are deemed 'dispensable' discourses which the organization feels obligated to monitor and control.3 secretaries often serve as hubs within informal communication networks. Here information flows more fluidly and serendipitously, ambiguating the boundaries of what is not-trash and what is. By way of these forms and flows, secretaries maintain non-institutionalized linkages not only within occupational and affinity groups at work but also with family and community (Chester and Grossman 1990: 6; Monge and Eisenberg 1987).
These 'dispensable' discourses and their non-institutional linkages often threaten to reconstitute boundaries between what is not-trash and what is as well as between organization and not-organization as dictated in dominant bureaucratic codes. To mitigate against this reconstitution, certain non-institutionalized communicative practices like gossip, idle chatter, and bitching, are denigrated as merely disseminating trash in the form of trivial, personal or distorted messages and the networks these practices form are discouraged (Judith Ann 1979). secretariestraditionally have been linked to such devalued practices, practices associated with their penchant as women for trivialities and irrationality (Davies 1982).
It is also noteworthy that the 'responsibility' for disseminating information often reduces to the endless duplication of what is not-trash, utilizing the photocopy machine and other technological capabilities for text and graphic reproduction (after all, who is it that stands next to the xerox making 'your own copy' for everyone?). Within the bureaucratic climate of accountability where quantity is its own justification, the proliferation of what is not-trash is relentless - "an estimated 15 trillion pieces of paper are presently in circulation in U.S. business offices, and another million new pages are added each minute of each working day" (Eckersley-Johnson 1976: 392).
Filing What is Mot-Trash
As both the mainstay and bane of secretarial work, filing is another task for which secretaries appear to have responsibility. However, filing what is not-trash, like sorting it and disseminating it, often involves little more than a manipulation of codes. Filing systems are self-organizing storage systems-incoming information gets filed into existing categories or into categories related to those that already exist (Weick 1979). It is worth noting that in a survey by Professional secretaries International, filing was the task rated most disliked by secretaries surveyed (PSI 1983; cited in Carroll 1983: 132).
Further, organizations may collect information less for instrumental than for symbolic value - that is, to create the appearance of decision rationality and legitimacy; this, along with the conservative nature of organizational enactments and the emphasis placed on written records in bureaucracies, leads to a suspicion that much of what gets filed gains its status as not being trash from the place assigned to it in the filing system. However, it is estimated that up to 85 percent of the records most organizations keep are never referred to and that 95 percent of all references made are to records in the files that have been there for less than three years (Pringle 1989: 187).
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