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Abstract
In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation of values is communicated through a ubiquitous macrolevel discourse—which I coin the Working Class Promise—that elevates working class to the highest position in the social class hierarchy and fosters a strong commitment to maintain a working class value system and identity. However, this social construction is only a partial social construction. That is, these individuals do not question material, socioeconomic-based delineations of class boundaries (e.g., income, education level, occupational prestige). Consequently, their acceptance of structural class boundaries, combined with their high regard of working class values, positions social classes in ways that make the goals of the American Dream (i.e., class mobility) and the Working Class Promise (i.e., class maintenance) paradoxical. I argue that the paradox of social mobility that results from this partial social construction is the root of mobility-based ambivalences.
Acknowledgements
This research is an extension of her dissertation, which was directed by Patrice M. Buzzanell and funded by a Purdue Research Foundation dissertation grant.
Notes
1. The participants for this study represented 20 families from a small, blue-collar community in the Midwestern United States. They included a group of men (n = 21) who worked in blue-collar positions in the mining industry, their wives (n = 16) who held a variety of occupations from nursing to retail to factory work, and their adult sons (n = 12) and daughters (n = 13), who worked in a variety of industries, including financial, medical, engineering, education, military, and skilled trades. The older generation's ages ranged from their early-50s through their late-70s and the younger generation ranged from their early-30s through their early-40s.
I conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with each participant. As this was part of a larger study, questions focused on occupational history and occupational decision making, communication-based anticipatory socialization, and their on-the-job experiences. At the end of each interview (as to not sensitize participants to social class), I posed the question, “What does the term working class mean to you?” The interviews cumulated in more than 60 hours of recorded talk. I transcribed and verified their interviews. I replaced participants’ names with pseudonyms and cross-checked family members’ transcripts to ensure all real names were masked. Transcription resulted in more than 1000 pages of single-spaced text.
Data analysis was guided by grounded theory and methods (Glaser & Strauss, Citation1967; Strauss & Corbin, Citation1994). Glaser and Strauss (Citation1967) explain that grounded theory is an inductive approach to theory building that privileges data and allows themes and theory to emerge naturally, rather than testing data against a priori theoretical frameworks. It involves multiple, iterative, close readings of data, beginning at the point of data collection. I sensitized myself to issues of social class as I analyzed participants’ words. What does the term working class mean to them? How are they talking about class even when they are not being specifically queried about it? Throughout the iterative process of data analysis and open coding, I wrote memos that summarized relationships between emerging codes, captured my impressions and insights into the data, and elaborated on key conceptual issues (Glaser, Citation1978). I often returned to holistic accounts, reviewing case summaries and field notes, rereading entire transcripts, and listening to original recordings to gain a richer, more complete understanding of participants’ discourses.