White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

United States society esteems the exercise of educated skill, and honors those who are professionally trained; it also esteems money as fact and as symbol, and honors those who have a lot of it. Many professional men are thus at the intersection of these two systems of value and many businessmen strive to add the professional to the pecuniary. When we speak of the commercialization of the professions, or of the professionalization of business, we point to the conflict or the merging of skill and money. Out of this merging, professions have become more like businesses, and businesses have become more like professions. The line between them has in many places become obscured, especially as businesses have become big and have hired men of the established professions.

Yet, in so far as both business and the professions are organized in bureaucratic structures, the present differences between their individual practitioners are not great. The managerial demiurge involves both business and the professions, and, as it does so, individuals perform duties within specific offices, making money for the organization perhaps, but themselves receiving a salary. For the salaried agent the consequences of a businesslike decision react not directly upon his own bank account, but upon the profit position of the firm for which he works.