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Chapter 3 focuses on students and parents in an iconic affluent public suburban secondary school. In this chapter, we trace how parents position their children for advantage beginning at an early age, a topic that takes center stage in our rendition of “class work” with respect to this particular group. Parents engage a great deal of “up front” class work, and assist their children in taking on identities as “selective college goers,” so that they may “lead from behind” at the point of college applications. We trace the ways in which students and parents enact and conceptualize their work in the secondary school as well as the ways in which the school, through its college culture and its system of tracking students, contributes to shaping student aspirations, expectations, and outcomes.

Chapter 4 picks up the same set of questions as chapter 3 among students and parents in a NAIS co-educational day school, tracing how students and parents enact and conceptualize their work in secondary school, and the ways in which they approach the process of preparing for college applications and admissions. We follow the students through the college application process in a highly detailed manner, with specific attention paid to all college related activities, including the work of the school counselors with regard to the top 20 percent of students in the class. In this chapter, we argue that the differences in class work that exist between parents and students in chapters 3 and 4 are tied to distinct differences in the discursive and material practices that become normative in a particular school sector. In the case at hand, differentially located parents and students (those in elite/affluent private versus elite/affluent public secondary schools) conceptualize and enact noticeably different “class work” at the point of college admissions, even though parent SES is largely comparable. Parents in the NAIS school more heavily monitor the college application process and students and parents constantly self-assess in order to select the “right” postsecondary destination.

This introductory chapter explores the intertwined histories of smoking and the working class, pointing out the ubiquity of smoking in twentieth-century workplaces despite its marginalized presence in histories of labor. Moreover, the chapter shows that, as cigarette smoking and subsequent nicotine addiction became significant components of many working-class lives in the twentieth century, smokers in a multitude of workplaces shaped, established, and defended the work cultures that sustained their need to use nicotine regularly during the workday. These developments at times accommodated or challenged employers' rules that limited or even banned working-class smoking practices outright. Worker demands for the right to smoke, and their abilities to cultivate spaces and times (sometimes clandestinely) for smoking, underpinned a new dimension of shop floor politics in the cigarette century.