Knowledge Workers as a “New Class”

Abstract

Recent discussions of American political and occupational structure have suggested that knowledge workers have become a structurally and ideologically cohesive “new class” due to rising levels of education, rising numbers of knowledge-intensive occupations, and the growing role of government in supporting education and in providing positions for knowledge workers. Discussions advanced by neoconservatives regard professional-technical workers as the chief members of the emerging new class and suggest that they are sharply divided ideologically from managers and other representatives of business. Neo Marxists suggest that professional-technical workers and managers constitute a single emerging class. This article examines evidence on the attitudes of professional-technical workers and managers from a large national sample survey. The results provide a number of indications of ideological convergence between members of the two occupational categories.