White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

THE professional strata are the seat of such intellectual powers as are used for income in the United States. In and around these occupations, which require specialized, systematic, and often lengthy training, the highest skills of the arts and sciences are socially organized and applied. They most clearly exemplify the rationalist ethos that has been held to be the characteristic mark and the essential glory of western civilization itself. So any changes in their social basis and composition would, in one way or another, be reflected in western society's level of technique, art, and intellectual sensibility.

In no sphere of twentieth-century society has the shift from the old to the hew middle-class condition been so apparent, and its ramification so wide and deep, as in the professions. Most professionals are now salaried employees; much professional work has become divided and standardized and fitted into the new hierarchical organizations of educated skill and service; intensive and narrow specialization has replaced self-cultivation and wide knowledge; assistants and sub-professionals perform routine, although often intricate, tasks, while successful professional men become more and more the managerial type. So decisive have such shifts been, in some areas, that it is as if rationality itself had been expropriated from the individual and been located, as a new form of brain power, in the ingenious bureaucracy itself.