Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In both entrepreneurial and white-collar patterns of success, movement upward has been subject to rather severe counter-tendencies during the course of the twentieth century. No one knows precisely whether the rate of upward mobility-the proportion of people who rise from one occupational level to another -has remained constant, declined, or gone up. That rate, however, depends upon a set of factors that at any given time determine the chances of those on each level to rise, fall, or hold their own.
In the past, certain well-known trends supported upward mobility in the entrepreneurial pattern. The most obvious of these were: the total economic expansion of a society of decentralized property; the physical spread of markets and the rise in volumes of production; the industrialization, which rested upon a private exploitation of unexampled natural resources in a steadily rising market. In short: , the American nineteenth century, when the entrepreneurial pattern of success seemed almost automatic.