Professional-managerial Class Research Articles

Critical engagements with “Climate Change as Class War”—proletarian ecology, environmental provision, and the welfare of children as a public good

Matt Huber offers a powerful materialist class-based account of the notion of the interplay of nature and human life as the struggle of “proletarian ecology.” This formulation has led me to think about D.W. Winnicott’s idea of infant development and “environmental provision” in class-based terms. Winnicott’s ideas of environmental provision seem well suited to Huber’s work on environmental policy and governance. Issues of environmental provision for caretakers and children are increasingly eclipsed in a public policy sphere dominated by the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) as birthrates for high-income women and families continue to fall and birthrates for the poorest women are almost double those of their higher income counterparts. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Critical engagements with “Climate Change as Class War”—class critical ecomodernism

This essay considers the import and originality of Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. It identifies class critique and skillful application of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) concept to contemporary environmental movements as the book’s most substantive contributions, culminating in a reflective reassertion of Marxian modernism with regard to capitalist-induced climate change. It also finds lacunae in Huber’s underdeveloped theory of the state as it pertains to energy transition and in his connection (or lack thereof) between specific policy demands and working-class agency. These issues pose questions for further debate and elaboration, yet fail to overshadow the book’s generative class analysis and promising strategic proposals, which deserve widespread discussion on the activist Left. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Toward a moral reckoning on structural racism: Examining structural factors, encouraging structural thinking, and supporting structural intervention.

The racial reckoning of 2020 involved the largest social movement protest in U.S. history, but support for the Black Lives Matter movement declined shortly after. To advance a moral reckoning on structural racism that dismantles racialized structures and redresses racial inequities, we call on scholar activists within the field of community psychology to realign their own practices by (a) examining structural factors; (b) encouraging structural thinking; and (c) supporting structural intervention for racial justice. Two structural factors-political determinants and commercial determinants-maintain the status quo of structural racism, undermining efforts for racial equity. As a result, we encourage the development of structural thinking, which provides a structural analysis of racism and leads to support for structural intervention. With an intersectional race and class perspective, we detail how structural thinking could be developed among the professional managerial class (through structural competency) and among the oppressed class (through critical consciousness). Finally, we discuss structural intervention factors and approaches that can redress racial inequities and produce structural change. Ultimately, we provide a pathway for community psychologists to support activists building a multiracial, multiclass coalition to eliminate structures and systems of racial, political, and economic injustice.

Being on the Outside of the Inside of the Ivory Tower: Nontenured Part-Time Faculty’s Attitudes Toward Their Colleagues and Management

This national qualitative exploratory study utilizes a critical social class lens to analyze how nontenured part-time faculty members’ relationships with their tenured/tenure-track colleagues and management shape their attitudes and behaviors toward their employment in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 54 participants were selected through random and convenience sampling. Participants completed a digital survey protocol. The resulting data underwent two cycles of coding, descriptive and pattern coding, which revealed four findings: nontenured part-time faculty describe members of the professional managerial class (PMC) as out-of-touch and unsympathetic individuals who exude elitism, believe higher education is structured to exploit and trap them, describe waning class solidarity with tenured/tenure-track faculty, and feel segregated from the PMC and tenured/tenure-track faculty. The study concludes with a discussion of the findings, recommendations, and areas for future scholarship.

Millennial Fiction Meets the Campus Novel

Millennial Fiction Meets the Campus Novel Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The campus novel has changed as campuses and their denizens have changed. Critics often treat the genre as a continuous one, harking back to Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), and they sometimes still invoke David Lodge's Small World (1985) as a send-up of contemporary academic life. But anyone coming through university gates since the late 1980s has encountered a very different world from Small World, and fiction has likewise changed. As I've described in "The Rise of the Academic Novel" (2012) and elsewhere, we have seen a new age of campus fiction since then, one that responds to the ubiquity of higher education in American life. Rather than an ivory tower, universities are a hub for real estate, industry, banking, healthcare, sports, technology, and cultural enterprises. And with 80 percent of Americans attending college at some point and millions working in teaching and staff positions, higher education permeates our culture and society. A good deal of fiction has responded to its contemporary state, and several recent novels by millennials give an updated sense of the troubled experience of those working in the institution. Since the late 1980s the academic novel—and I distinguish the academic novel, those dealing with the lives of college teachers, from the campus novel, which I reserve for those dealing with undergraduate life, largely on campus—left the confines of a quaint subgenre, like the locked room mystery, to meld into the mainstream of literary fiction, with entries by writers including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, Percival Everett, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Richard Powers, Francine Prose, Richard Russo, and Jane Smiley. They have dealt with the culture wars, sexual politics, midlife crises, love and relationships, work, and the vicissitudes of the professional-managerial class—staples of mainstream fiction. Around 2000 the genre spawned a new branch, the adjunct novel, depicting, instead of the bumbling but lucky Jim, decidedly unlucky Jims (see my "Unlucky Jim," Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 2012). James Hynes has been a prominent portraitist of the unlucky in Publish and Perish (1997), A [End Page 14] Lecturer's Tale (2001), Kings of Infinite Space (2004), and Next (2010), which depict underemployed PhDs scrambling for decent jobs. The adjunct novel has spawned its own subgenre, with micro-press or self-published entries like J. Hayes Hurley's The Adjunct (2006), Alex Kudera's Fight for Your Long Day (2010), and Geoff Cebula's Adjunct (2017). Rather than the crux of the plot turning on tenure, as in McCarthy's Groves of Academe or to a degree Lodge's Changing Places (1975), the new crux is landing a decent academic job in the first place. The past five years have seen a further development: snapshots from the millennial generation. In particular, three well-received novels—Weike Wang's Chemistry (2017), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award; Brandon Taylor's Real Life (2020); and Christine Smallwood's Life of the Mind (2021)—depict the demoralized world of graduate student researchers—less students than underlings in a lab—and elite adjuncts. The protagonists, like their authors, come from the millennial generation (Wang was born in 1988, Taylor in 1989, Smallwood in 1981) and show the enforced holding pattern of those in their late twenties and early thirties. The problem is not that they have difficulties—that is a conventional spring of narrative action—but that they have little chance for a better future. Their positions stand in sharp contrast to that of their advisers, who in each novel is a successful academic, receiving grants and plaudits and jetting off to give talks, but who has little understanding of their advisee's plight. Chemistry depicts an unnamed chemistry graduate student who works in a lab but undergoes a breakdown, a breakup, and ejection from academe, finding recovery while tutoring math. In short, poetic paragraphs, it combines an academic story with one of second-generation Asian American experience in the shadow of her parents, first-generation Chinese immigrants. Real Life likewise portrays a graduate...

The grey matter of decolonial activism, or, socially engaged art as professional-managerial class

According to Yates McKee, socially engaged art reached its Situationist moment of sublation when the participants at the 2011 Creative Time Summit joined the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in Zuccotti Park. However, like the ‘Bernie Bro’ left and the Corbynistas, OWS was criticized for its ‘class reductionist’ focus on economic inequality. Through various affinity groups like Decolonize This Place (DTP) and actions like Strike MoMA, post-Occupy artists have increased their commitment to intersectional demands and the effort to decolonize museums. Making use of the Barbara and John Ehrenreich concept of the professional-managerial class (PMC), this article extends the PMC critique from the social democratic left to the realm of activist art, where the question of political representation is both assumed and avoided in calls for Black reparations and Indigenous restitution.

Left anti-politics or left populism? Political distinctions at the end of the end of history

This review essay argues that once a fuller genealogy of populism is presented, Hochuli et al.’s rationale for attempting to corral the left into an embrace of nationalism begins to look suspicious. Despite the authors’ claims, the genealogy of American left populism reveals a political project that is not at all aligned with the virtue-hoarding desires of the left flank of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). To the contrary, it is a political project synonymous with the material struggles of the global working class. Thus, while we should concede that the contemporary Left has been captured to no small degree by PMC sensibilities, a full understanding of today’s ongoing revival in socialism requires further explanation. To this end, this essay argues that we need a proper discussion about the history of left populism in the United States, its meaningful achievements, and its potential as a strategic partner. Admittedly, the term “populism” has very different valences, depending on whether it is used in an American or European context. But it cannot be gainsaid that the term originated in America, and that American populism has hewed more toward working class struggle over the sort of “woke” ideologies, worried about in The End of the End of History.

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Gentrification and social classes in Paris, 1982-2008

ABSTRACT This paper explores the articulation between gentrification and social class, in the context of the debate that opposes the notions of replacement and displacement of the working class. Working from Marxist sociological analyses of the professional-managerial class, this social geography study reviews statistical data spanning over three decades to demonstrate the magnitude of gentrification in Paris, both on the scale of the city and on that of its metropolitan area. The author examines detailed socio-economic categories from French population censuses and focuses on the household population rather than on the sole working population, from the early 1980s onward: through this methodology, the author intends to prove that, contrary to Préteceille’s assessment, gentrification is indeed the main factor of socio-spatial transformation in inner Paris and contributes to the diverse forms of social upgrading that affect the metropolitan area as a whole. This process has brought about a shift in the scale of segregation, which has increasingly acquired a micro-local dimension.

“Making coin” and the networker: Masculine self‐making in the Australian professional managerial class

AbstractIn this article I unpack the labour of “networking” to understand the changes in sociality and worker identity that have occurred in the Australian professional managerial class workforce under post‐Fordism. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the interface of the pubic service and private consultancy firms in Canberra, I break from dominant readings of intimacy in post‐Fordism which preference either a downwards imposition of “ways of being” from capital to worker, or a reactive self‐regulation in line with objective external structures. Networking, I argue, is as much about being recognised as patron as it is about any tangible economic benefits. The intimate relations and self‐fashioning of networking constitute attempts to embody particular classed, sexualised, gendered fantasies of the figure of “the networker” in post‐Fordist Australian business culture. This interpretation does not necessitate overlooking the tangible results of networking, and I discuss too, how masculine fantasy structures the topography of workplaces.

Langston Hughes,Esquire, and the Professional-Managerial Class

ABSTRACTIn 1934, Esquire used the prospective publication of Langston Hughes’s “A Good Job Gone” as a foundational event in the creation of the magazine’s readership. Esquire sought to interpolate a consuming male audience by soliciting feedback on the magazine’s features and surveying its readership’s response to the potential publication of Hughes’s story. In so doing, Esquire shaped a community of reading that was influential to the developing culture of the professional-managerial class. Though the Hughes episode played a distinct role in the creation of Esquire’s community of reading, “A Good Job Gone” actually complicates the masculinity project proffered by Esquire.

Middle-class Meritocracy and Neoliberal Technologies of the Self at an Indian Business School

We examine the intersection of Indian middle-class discourse of merit with neoliberal technologies of the self among MBA students at an Indian business school. This middle- class discourse of merit propelled by familial expectations, invokes hard work, educational achievement and global aspirations. Neoliberal technologies of the self manifest as rationality, responsibilization and enterprising selves. These technologies of the self intersect with and animate discourse of merit to produce a hollowing-out of individuals and cultures of hyper-masculinity and ethical somnolence. In doing so, we contribute to critical management education by illustrating how discourse of merit is deployed to justify and normalize moral indifference and aggression among the soon-to- be professional managerial class. We also contribute to understanding the discursive registers by which Indian middle and upper classes shore up privilege and the role of business schools in the reproduction of widening social inequalities.

The Making of Nickel and Dimed: Barbara Ehrenreich and the Exposé of Class in America

This article examines the career of journalist and critic Barbara Ehrenreich. Born to a mining family, Ehrenreich’s experience of upward mobility formed the biographical context for her critique of professional ideology—a critique at the heart of her entire career. Her diagnosis of the New Left’s failure and the New Right’s triumph emerged from her analysis of the “professional-managerial class.” Her journalism amounted to an effort to translate across the cultural gulf between the proletariat and the professional class in which she counted herself a reluctant member. Her bestseller Nickel and Dimed was the culmination of this project.

White-Collar Masochism: Grove Press and the Death of the Managerial Subject

This essay examines the US literary publisher Grove Press from 1951 to 1970. During this period, Grove promoted an aesthetic that Susan Sontag termed the “new sensibility,” one that valued impersonal sensations over personal expression. Grove thus became a key mediator between humanism and antihumanism, publishing many of the major literary works cited by poststructuralist thinkers. This editorial sensibility found its roots in the class character of the press, which was headed by affluent radical Barney Rosset. Drawing on close readings of key publications, as well as of editorial discourse such as advertising and marketing surveys, this essay argues that the masochistic fantasies of self-shattering featured in Grove’s publications allowed its imagined audience of professional-managerial class radicals to appear to transcend their economic positions. In the pages of Grove publications, white-collar masochists styled themselves as revolutionary suicides or self-destructive saboteurs squandering the human capital of the organizations in which they worked. Nevertheless, this imaginative solution failed to overcome the press’s own class contradictions, which came to a head during the unionization drive and feminist protest occupation of Grove in 1970.

The Kerner Commission and the Irony of Antiracist Politics

The Kerner Commission and the Irony of Antiracist Politics

Between Labor and Capital: The Labor of American Bodybuilding

IntroductionWhether it's in the gym or with your diet, being an is about consistency and giving everything you got 24/7, 365 days a year.... Approaching the business of bodybuilding like it's your job-and it ain't a white collar gig with a corner office. It's back-breaking day in and day out.Universal Nutrition, Animal FlexWhile the contrast bodybuilding company Universal Nutrition establishes between cushy paid work, on the one hand, and arduous gym labor, on the other, may seem idiosyncratic for a supplement advertisement, it echoes the idealization of physical that permeates bodybuilding culture. Indeed, throughout bodybuilding magazines, online forums, training videos, and gym conversations there pervades a romantic vision of weight lifting as manual evinced in the way bodybuilders talk about their training and their bodies. Unlike physical exercise and sports whose goals may include anything from strength to general health, or mastery of a skill, the objective of bodybuilding is to forge, on, construct, carve, hammer, chisel, and build the shape and size of one's muscles.1 In bodybuilding, there are no practices or games: only workouts.Some scholars observe that bodybuilding makes a shrine of labor (Klein, Man Makes Himself 327); yet, little criticism on bodybuilding takes as its focus.2 Even less scholarship situates bodybuilding and its history in economic contexts.3 Contributing to theoretical and empirical work in both these areas, this project begins by expounding the emergence of in bodybuilding's cultural imagination at the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on its social function for middle-class men who were cut off from physical labor. Then, using history to read the present, it discusses both why bodybuilding persists as a cultural form as well as the utopian threads latent in its ideas and practices. The goal here is not only to add a much needed framework to bodybuilding scholarship but also to offer fresh insights about embodiment and subjectivity, which extend our understandings of the body, and the relationship between capitalism and its cultural forms.The Rise of American BodybuildingTo understand the middle-class phenomenon of bodybuilding in the late nineteenth century it is germane to first consider issues of class and during this period. Corporate violence, coercion, mergers, centralization, vertical and horizontal integration, patents, price cutting, developments in transportation and manufacturing technology, interstate deregulation, the expansion of the telegraph, and the less restrictive charter laws enacted by state governments in the years following the Civil War allowed many of the 25,000 plus corporations formed between 1790 and 1860 to extend their reach, comer markets, and grow to unprecedented sizes (Gomory and Sylla 103-04; Trachtenberg 84-86; Porter 43-60). While an indepth exposition of the changing nature of capital accumulation and in the Gilded Age is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to recognize that monopoly capital required new positions to meet its evolving structural needs.4 These juggernauts of capital-while not wholly obliterating the accumulation strategies of antebellum factory owners, family businesses, artisans, and entrepreneurs-brought more and more people, particularly the white sons of well-to-do businessmen and prosperous farmers, into the occupations of advertising, accounting, engineering, public relations, management, and other whitecollar fields (Trachtenberg 82-86; Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 18-19). This group of mental laborers, described by historians as the thinking strata of the bureaucratic corporation, the new working class, the professional-managerial class, and the burgeoning middle class, consisted of workers who neither owned the means of production nor physically produced material objects. As both the brains contributing to capital expansion and the mediators between and capital, this group of professional and managerial workers increased eightfold from 1870 to 1910 (Hofstadter 218; Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 18-19). …

Social Mobility in a High-Inequality Regime

Are opportunities to get ahead growing more unequal? Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), it is possible to provide evidence on this question, evidence that is suggestive but must be carefully interpreted because the samples are relatively small. The GSS data reveal an increase in class reproduction among young and middle-age adults that is driven by the growing advantage of the professional-managerial class relative to all other classes. This trend is largely consistent with our new “top-income hypothesis” that posits that rising income inequality registers its effects on social mobility almost exclusively in the divide between the professional-managerial class and all other classes. We develop a two-factor model in which the foregoing effects of the inequality takeoff are set against the countervailing effects of the expansion of mass education. As the model implies, the trend in intergenerational association takes on a convex shape in the younger age groups, with the change appearing to accelerate in the most recent decade. These results suggest that the takeoff in income inequality may account in part for the decline in mobility.

American Little Magazines of the 1890s and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class

The craze for (fadazines we called them) was at its high noon. It was in that miraculous year of our Lord, 1896, and whoever could get possession of printing press in the United States was helping to burden the news-stands with monthly rubbish, filled with cheap satire and sententious pretension. Art was running amuck through Posterdom, Literature was staggering blindfold, in drunken spree, and every dog was having his day in journalism. Gelett Burgess Bayside Bohemia WHILE THE 1890S IS LARGELY ASSOCIATED with the revolution and the birth of the mass-market magazine, Burgess's comments point to the existence of the contemporaneous efflorescence of more experimental and amateurish form of print that he calls the fadazine. His portrait of the prolific nature of the movement, one in which he, himself, participated, is hardly exaggerated. Although accounts as to numbers vary, ranging from nearly three hundred titles identified in bibliographies of the period by F. W. Faxon to the over eleven hundred claimed by Elbert Hubbard, major figure in the movement (Joseph Addison 78), there were certainly hundreds of such publications issued in the period between 1894 and 1903, all across the country, from major urban centres such as New York to smaller cities and towns, including Wausau, Wisconsin, and Muskegon, Michigan. Although these publications took their place alongside mass-market on the newsstands, they presented themselves as defiantly different from mainstream magazines in various respects. They were small in size and number of pages, artistically printed and/or oddly designed. They were linked with the in literature, art, and social and cultural movements, ranging from Arts and Crafts, aestheticism, decadence, symbolism, and art nouveau to the new thought movement, the social gospel, communitarian living, health and diet fads, radical and progressive political movements, and others. Finally, they were styled as idiosyncratic and rebellious, status frequently registered by their titles, subtitles, and mottoes. Among these were The Freak, The Whim, The Knocker, and The Iconoclast (Faxon, Bibelots, A Bibliography). The Wet Dog, meanwhile, touted itself irreverently as a paper for those with money to burn and Pot-Pourri was an illustrated vagary of paper and ink conducted by (Faxon, Ephemeral Bibelots 126, 125). In addition to Burgess's terms, fad magazine and fadazine, this new and unusual print phenomenon went by other names like freak magazine, fadlet, ephemeral, and bibelot, including, occasionally, the term now more commonly used, little magazine. Although these magazines tended, in the period, to be regarded as all of piece, defined predominantly by their bold appearance and rhetorical posturing, it is helpful to distinguish among three key forms: aesthetic little magazines, periodicals of protest, and hybrid magazines. Aesthetic little magazines were those devoted wholly or predominantly to literary and/or artistic subject matter. This class included magazines featuring mix of fiction, poetry, and critical essays and commentary, as well as ones of more specialist nature, such as those focusing on the graphic arts or bibliophilic and book collecting interests. The Chap-Book, magazine founded by Harvard undergraduates, was the best known of this type, setting the standard for the type as well as initiating the little magazine movement as whole. By contrast, periodicals of protest, term taken from the subtitle of the leading publication of this type, The Philistine, were those wholly or predominantly concerned with social and/or political topics or alternative lifestyles and movements. Hybrid magazines, meanwhile, combined literary and artistic interests with topical political, cultural, and/or social commentary. Despite their prolific nature and the obvious ways in which they anticipate the experimental, avant-garde, and radical modernist little magazines of the 1910s and 1920s, these 1890s American precursors have suffered from scholarly neglect. …

Coming Up Short: Knowledge Limits and the Decomposition of the Professional Managerial Class

The failures of knowledge to assure a desired outcome, and the gains made by those who bet against it, point to a larger paradox. The rise of the professional managerial class whose specialized expertise would reign in a knowledge society has continued apace yet seen their autonomy wither and mastery fade. The formation and decomposition of this now prevailing class entwines the fate of those engaged in financial services and academic labor, where knowledge was to be formulated, instructed and applied. The question of this larger entanglement, the interdependencies and principles of association that would give the notion of class substantive meaning point to a circumstance in which knowledge cannot rule itself and the collision of knowledge claims creates a generalized condition of volatility that both disperses and binds diverse kinds of human agency. Hence, rather than treating crisis as a momentary break-down in the normal state of affairs, the antinomies of the financial logics of risk management, derivatives and securitization disclose a critical turn in the course of our social surround, the terms in which it might be evaluated, and the sense of time and space through which its changes are negotiated and contested.

Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class

Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the postmodern turn of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come to displace any working-class elements in what pass for mainstream left political parties. Reflexivity, and what I call vulgar Foucauldianism, while dressed up as activism, seem instead to represent above all the consciousness of this class. In its place, the essay proposes a politics combining support for social movements and a prefigurative politics in the academic sphere.