Explorations of Class and Consciousness in the U.S.

Abstract

In the United States there are both classes and a folk model that denies their existence. I explore some anthropologists' and sociologists' conceptualizations of class and folk models of class. I then discuss the salience of elements of these folk models that Katherine Newman outlined as meritocratic individualism for some lawyers, paralegals, and support staff in a legal agency and for some service sector union stewards. I conclude that there are powerful forces in the United States that operate against folk models that recognize class, among them, the structuring of everyday workplace experience by law and administrative practice that operate against the recognition of class. The same is even more true of academics, and that situation provides the experiential basis from which some scholars perpetuate counterfactual folk models of individualism in their academic analysis.