Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To understand the prestige of white-collar people we must examine the kinds of people among whom they successfully raise claims for prestige. For different groups do not honor white-collar claims to the same extent; in fact, their estimates often clash, and there is much ambivalence about white-collar prestige.
White-collar workers are city people; in the smaller cities, they live on the right side of the tracks and work ‘uptown'; in the larger cities they often live in suburbs and work ‘downtown. ' The city is their milieu and they are shaped by its mass ways. As the city has expanded, more and more of its inhabitants have been white-collar people. And it is in cities of differing size that they must raise their claims for prestige.