White Collar: The American Middle Classes

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White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes is a study of the American middle class

Middle class

Middle class is the group of people in contemporary society who are between the working class and nobility. This socioeconomic class includes professionals, highly skilled workers, and lower and middle management....
by sociologist C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills was an United States sociology. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship....
, first published in 1951. It describes the forming of a "new class

Class

Class may refer to:...
": the white-collar worker

White-collar worker

The term white-collar worker refers to a salaried professional or an educated worker who performs semi-professional office, administrative, and sales coordination tasks, as opposed to a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor....
s. It is also a major study of social alienation

Social alienation

In sociology and critical social theory, alienation refers to an individual's estrangement from traditional community and others in general. It is considered by many that the Atomism of modernity means that individuals have shallower relations with other people than they would normally....
in the modern industrialized world and cities dominated by "salesmanship mentality". The issues in this book were close to Mills' own background, his father was an insurance agent and he himself, at that time, worked as a white collar research worker in a bureaucratic organization

Organization

An organization is a social arrangement which pursues collective goals, which controls its own performance, and which has a boundary separating it from its environment....
, at Paul Lazarsfeld

Paul Lazarsfeld

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was one of the major figures in 20th-century American Sociology. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research, he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of research....
s , Bureau for Social Research at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights, Manhattan neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City....
. From this point of view it is probably Mills most private book. The familiarity with the studied object as a lived matter is obvious and the sympathy for the lonely person in the crowd

Crowd

A crowd is a group . The crowd may have a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a Demonstration , at a sports game, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area ....
,refers with no doubt to Mills himself and his own experiences.

As Mills wrote:.

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