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This chapter surveys the economic, work, and lifestyle habits of the “professional-managerial” class—those strata of citizens who have traditionally been thrift's most consistent and enthusiastic boosters. Evidence resists the popular impression (and caricature by social critics) that this group is today among the most consumerist of Americans. It is shown that although members of this class are relatively more likely to think of their consumption as an opportunity for self-expression, this is neither crass materialism nor does it lack in strenuous forms of self-restraint. It is also shown that rather than material scarcity, the most precious, and by far the rarest, resource in their lives is time. Thus, far from a riot of hedonism and permissiveness, these Americans are, on the whole, a highly disciplined group. Due to the increasing pressures of global capitalism, which has seen the professional-managerial stratum become a truly worldwide phenomenon, it appears they have to be disciplined if they want to stay competitive.

The social democratic state rises from the Great Depression and Second Word War. And up to the 1970s, the capitalist economies grow enormously, at the same time that social rights were recognized and the welfare state implemented. The tax burden and the state apparatus grow to face the new social and developmental activities taken on by the state. With the social state emerges plural or public opinion democracy. Political elites diversify, including increasing representatives of the professional middle class. Capitalism also diversifies, and we can detect four models of capitalism: the Anglo-Saxon market model, the European social model, the Asian developmental model, and the Latin American mixed model of capitalism. Particularly in the later two models, a developmental bureaucracy rises.

This chapter examines the political, social, and economic milieu of Silicon Valley's established professional middle class. In particular, it considers the ways in which these middle-class professionals channeled frustration about their eroding security and status into a politics of nostalgia for a pre-“New Economy” past, a critique of a “new entrepreneurial” present, during the boom and subsequent bust. In analyzing the political implications of this “cultural politics of class,” the chapter reveals expressions of adult middle-class anxiety and political entrapment that influenced young people's styles of self-definition and aspiration management. It also discusses the attitudes of middle-class adults toward the lifestyle and ethos of younger professionals whom they felt were usurping an older, middle-class order.

Chapter 1, “Anything but Country” (along with parts of chapter 2), examines the dynamics of the dislike of country music and the prevalence, since about 1970, of representations of both country music and the white working class in terms of political conservatism and racial and sexual bigotry. The chapter analyzes several commonplace, contemporary cultural representations of a monolithic white working class driven by bigotry. These representations often use country music as proxy for the working-class bigot. I also highlight the professional middle class's role as the narrating class in America's knowledge economy, interpreting and narrating all levels of American life—including working-class existence—in academic, media, and other channels.

This chapter approaches Lost in America (1985) as a comedic investigation into the contradictions of middle-class life. Starting with the film's skewering of yuppie angst and its complicated relation to the hippie counterculture that somehow gave rise to yet was also betrayed by this newly discovered sociological group, the chapter argues that Lost in America is ultimately about the difficulty of imagining professional labor that can generate value outside of the capitalist marketplace. Taking the film's recurrent allusions to Easy Rider (1969) as a form of meta-filmic commentary suggests that Lost in America serves as a meditation on Brooks’ own efforts to pursue an alternative American cinema.

As implied by the statement made by William Watts Ball—editor of The State—World War I signified hope not only for the African American reformers in South Carolina but also for the whites who saw themselves as reformers as well. All of these reformers opted to achieve a progressive South Carolina that would generally develop improved standards of living through a prosperous economy, rehabilitation for prisoners, and other such indicators. However, Ball also pointed out that the whites who perceived themselves as leaders would experience disturbance in spite of how the expected changes would prove to be constructive. The white reformers comprised mainly of middle-class professionals who had a common goal of advancing South Carolina. This chapter illustrates how these white reformers advocated changes that they prescribed and would gain control of as they also attempted to ensure social dominance.

This chapter examines the metamorphosis of the black Huntingtonians varied responses to rising Jim Crowism during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Benefiting from increasing affluence, kin and augmented family networks, strong religious convictions, and education, Huntington’s black working class, in conjunction with working class blacks throughout the Ohio River Valley, engaged in a variety of tactics and strategies to progress. It contends that in building institutions, entering into the public space, and agitating for political inclusion black Huntingtonians formed the “building blocks” for self-improvement, community formation, and racial uplift. In the process, they transformed Huntington into a regional black socio-cultural hub, produced an embryonic black professional class, and further strengthened black Huntingtonians’ cultural, social, and political linkages with the region’s African American population.

Rashbehari Avenue, and the cluster of streets and lanes behind it, located in south Calcutta, emerged as a neighbourhood preferred by modern Bengali middle-class professionals from the early twentieth century, when some of the leading members of this class bought land and built houses there. Eager to get away from the conservative and claustrophobic environs of their old north Calcutta roots, this new generation of English-educated professionals like lawyers, college teachers, and medical practitioners, fashioned a culture of their own—a blend of both their past Bengali literary and musical traditions, and the newly acquired Western social values and behaviour pattern. By the mid-twentieth century, this part of the city expanded further south with the influx of refugees from the then East Pakistan following the 1947 Partition, which changed to a large extent the class character of the demographic composition of its residents.

For over a half century, perhaps the best scholarly work exploring African American life in large, industrialized, northern cities with expanding populations has been St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). However, a formal history examining businesses as part of an institutional structure, the role of a professional class, religion and the church, and political organization was never undertaken in Black Metropolis. The present volume presents the contributing factors that produced the contemporarily recognized dynamism of the period between 1920 and 1929 as well as the many impediments encountered. Hindsight has produced a view of life in this vibrant area of settlement, one that was not yet the “ghetto” that future historians in the 1960s would envision and write about.

This chapter discusses print culture history in Ireland. In 1660, a print culture, primarily although not exclusively English, had become well known in multilingual communities across early modern Ireland. It was present in both mature oral and scribal cultures. However, a lack of evidence makes it difficult to accurately determine the levels of literacy in Ireland, especially amongst the Gaelic Irish. It has been suggested that there was a significant percentage of the reading public in Ireland, consisting of the elite, professional, merchant, and various trading classes.