In or around the year 1956, the percentage of American workers who were "white collar" exceeded the percentage that were blue collar for the first time. Although labor statistics had long foretold this outcome, what the shift meant was unclear, and little theoretical work had prepared anyone to understand it. In the preceding years, the United States had quickly built itself up as an industrial powerhouse, emerging from World War II as the world’s leading source of manufactured goods. Much of its national identity was predicated on the idea that it made things. But thanks in part to advances in automation, job growth on the shop floor had slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, the world of administration and clerical work, and new fields like public relations and marketing, grew inexorably—a paperwork empire annexing whole swaths of the labor force, as people exchanged assembly lines for metal desks, overalls for gray-flannel suits.
It’s hard to retrieve what this moment must have been like: An America that was ever not dominated by white-collar work is pretty difficult to recall. Where cities haven’t fallen prey to deindustrialization and blight, they have gentrified with white-collar workers, expelling what remains of their working classes to peripheries. The old factory lofts, when occupied, play host to meeting rooms and computers; with the spread of wireless technology, nearly every surface can be turned into a desk, every place into an office. We are a nation of paper pushers.What it means to be a paper pusher, of course, seems to have changed dramatically (not least because actual paper isn’t getting carted around as much as it used to). The success of a show like Mad Men capitalizes on our sense of profound distance from the drinking, smoking, serial-philandering executive egos idolized in the era of the organization man. Many of the problems associated with white-collar work in midcentury—bureaucracy, social conformity, male chauvinism—have, if not gone away, at least come into open question and been seriously challenged. It would be hard to accuse the colorful, open, dog-friendly campuses of Silicon Valley of the beehivelike sameness and drabness that characterized so many 1950s offices, with their steno pools and all-white employees. On the surface, contemporary office life exudes a stronger measure of freedom than it ever did: More and more women have come to occupy higher rungs of the corporate ladder; working from home has become a more common reality, helping to give employees more ostensible control over their workday; people no longer get a job and stick with it, leading to more movement between companies.
At the same time, we are undergoing one of the most prolonged and agonizing desiccations of the white-collar, middle-class ideal in American history. Layoffs feel as common to late capitalist offices as they were to Gilded Age factories; freedom in one’s choice of workplace really reflects the abrogation of a company’s sense of loyalty to its employees; and insecurity has helped to enforce a regime of wage stagnation. In universities, the very phrase "academic labor" has become a byword for dwindling job protection. White-collar workers report experiencing higher levels of stress than their blue-collar counterparts do, and many work long hours without overtime pay. The increasingly darkening mood of frantic busyness—punctuated by bouts of desperate yoga—that has settled over American life owes much to the country’s overall shift to a white-collar world, where the rules resemble very little those of the world it left behind.
In other words, what the office has done to American life should be a topic of central importance. But there is still only one book, now more than 60 years old, that has tried to figure out what the new dominance of white-collar work means for society: White Collar: The American Middle Classes, by C. Wright Mills.
Few books inaugurate a field of study and continue to tower over it in the way White Collar has; its title alone is authoritative. It sums up and it commands. Even if we are not all white-collar workers now, white-collar work has become central to social life in ways so ubiquitous as to be invisible. Mills was practically the first to notice this and to explore its ramifications. His findings not only stand alone in the literature on the subject but loom over the others in its eerie prescience and power.
It helped his book that, as a personality, Mills, in his mid-30s when the book came out, was far from any dry middle-manager drone he analyzed, let alone the tweedy sonorousness of his Columbia colleagues Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Students who witnessed his arrival at class would see him dismount a motorcycle and adjust his leather jacket, lugging a duffel bag crammed with books that he would fling onto the seminar table. His unprofessorial style corresponded to an intellectual nonconformism. A scourge of the blandly complacent, "value neutral" social theory that formed the academic consensus of his day, Mills was also hostile to the orthodox Marxist accents that had been fashionable in the speech of the 1930s. Unfortunately, the dominance especially of the latter made it impossible to understand what class position white-collar workers belonged to, and what it meant. Under the most popular (or "vulgar") version of Marxism, the various strata of clerical and professional workers grouped under the heading "white collar" were supposed to dissolve eventually into the working class: In the terms of left-wing German sociology, they were a Stehkragen, or "stiff collar," proletariat.
Mills was unimpressed by all that. The more he looked at white-collar workers, the more he saw that their work made their lives qualitatively different from those of manual workers. Where manual workers exhibited relatively high rates of unionization—solidarity, in other words—white-collar workers tended to rely on themselves, to insist on their own individual capacity to rise through the ranks—to keep themselves isolated. The kind of work they did was partly rationalized, the labor divided to within an inch of its life. Mills constantly emphasized the tremendous growth of corporations and bureaucracies, the sheer massiveness of American institutions—words like "huge" and "giant" seem to appear on every page of his book. At the same time, so much of their work was incalculably more social than manual labor, a factor that particularly afflicted the roles afforded to female white-collar workers: Salesgirls had to sell their personalities in order to sell their products; women in the office were prized as much for their looks or demeanor as for their skills or capabilities.
What Mills realized was that, where backbreaking labor was the chief problem for industrial workers, psychological instability was the trial that white-collar workers endured, and on a daily basis.
by Nikil Saval, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert for The Chronicle Review
