White Collar Revisited: A Commentary on Isler, Osnowitz, and Kenny

Abstract

With these three interesting articles on the plight of the semi-professional occupations and with a flurry of books on the degradation of the middle class including Jill Fraser, White Collar Sweatshop, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch, and Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, I was led back to C Wright Mills’s White Collar. What light does this classic, published in 1951, shed on white-collar work today? More than 20 years before Harry Braverman penned his classic, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, Mills wrote about deskilling and rationalization, both of work in general, and of white-collar work in particular—all laid out in his unforgettable and brilliant chapter 10 on the demise of “craftsmanship” and the rise of “cheerful robots.” Unlike Braverman, and clearly influenced by Veblen, Mills delved into the subjective as well as the objective dimensions of white-collar work, writing of status panic, upward mobility, and the frenzy for success. This commanding analysis of production and its regulation is couched in a sweeping history of the rise of the office, mass consumption, and the retail store, all propelled by what he called the “managerial demiurge” of the all-dominating corporation. Mills ends, as he does all his books, with a political diagnosis. With great prescience for his time, he saw the convergence of the white-collar and blue-collar as the former suffered rationalization and the latter experienced uplift through union struggles and a protective welfare state. He points to the percentage of white-collar workers unionized, rising from 2.5% in 1900 (about what it is today!) to 16.2% in 1948 (as compared to 44.1% for wage workers). Still, Mills was no revolutionary optimist. The new middle classes, another name Mills used for white-collar workers, can never be an autonomous or guiding force, but are always, to coin a phrase, in a “contradictory class location.” They blow with the wind; when the capitalist is ascendant they will shift in that direction, when the working class is ascendant they side with that class. They are no incipient ruling class; they don’t have a coherent class consciousness to call their own. They are, he says, the rearguard, not the vanguard. Qual Sociol (2007) 30:501–504 DOI 10.1007/s11133-007-9078-5