White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The historic bases of white-collar prestige are now infirm; the areas in which white-collar people must seek to have their claims honored are agitated. Both sides of the situation in which they are caught impel them to emphasize prestige and often to engage in a great striving for its symbols. In this, three mechanisms seem to be operating:

I. In the white-collar hierarchies, as we have seen, individuals are often segregated by minute gradations of rank, and, at the same time, subject to a fragmentation of skill. This bureaucratization often breaks up the occupational bases of their prestige. Since the individual may seize upon minute distinctions as bases for status, these distinctions operate against any status solidarity among the mass of employees, often lead to status estrangement from work associates, and to increased status competition. The employees are thus further alienated from work, for, in striving for the next rank, they come to anticipate identification with it, so that now they are not really in their places. Like money, status that is exterior to one's present work does not lead to intrinsic work gratification. Only if present work leads to the anticipated goal by a progression of skills, and is thus given meaning, will status aspirations not alienate the worker. Status ascent within the hierarchy is a kind of illusionary success, for it does not necessarily increase income or the chance to learn superior skills. Above all, the hierarchy is often accompanied by a delirium for status merely because of its authoritarian shape: as Karl Mannheim has observed, people who are dependent for everything, including images of themselves, upon place in an authoritarian hierarchy, will all the more frantically cling to claims of status.