The Cultural Construction of Class: Knowledge and the Labor Process

Abstract

This chapter studies the films Do the Right Thing and Working Girl, which exemplify the “no exit” and “only exit” scenarios of the lives of working-class men and women. The problem for most working-class people is that they lack both the economic and the cultural resources necessary to become professional knowledge workers, i.e. they have no exit. The minority of working-class people who can become professional workers must leave their class culture behind, i.e. they can only exit. The African-American and Italian cultures seen in Do the Right Thing have high dropout rates and thus poor occupational outlooks. In Working Girl, a working-class woman can “make it” only by leaving her working-class culture behind.