“Do what you love” in low-wage work: navigating stigma through narratives of work passion

ABSTRACT Most research on “work passion” has focused on white-collar and creative occupations that workers choose to pursue for intrinsic rewards. This paper examines the intriguing case of economically vulnerable workers in the Global South who profess passion for their low-wage and stigmatized occupation. Using qualitative data, I analyze why women beauty workers in Pakistan routinely foreground shauq (intense liking or passion) as an occupational motivation for their low-status jobs, even as they highlight the economic majboori (compulsion) that forced them into these jobs. Interpreting passion as a discursive tactic, rather than simply an affective investment, I argue that beauty workers use the seemingly contradictory discourses of work passion and compulsion to contest intersecting class, occupational, and gender stigmas. This paper illuminates how broader stigmas shape workers’ strategies to negotiate occupational stigma and contributes to the emerging literature on work passion by 1) showing how narratives of work passion serve as a stigma management strategy; 2) explaining how gender dynamics complicate women’s attempts to use work passion to manage stigma; and 3) providing an account of how global discourses of “do what you love” interact with culturally-specific meanings of skill and passion.