ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the education of “white collar” workers. I use this term very loosely to include professionals, technical specialists in and around corporate headquarters, and managers-the foot soldiers of corporate power. I find this group particularly interesting because of the way in which they see themselves. In a society where the conventional wisdom states that we do not see ourselves in class terms, these workers, who make up about 15 percent of the labor force, do see themselves as a group separate from and with different interests than blue-collar workers. In many ways, this group’s self-image mirrors the traditional Marxist cosmology that the world was divided into the working class (or labor), the managerial class, and the capitalist class. This division of the world is, of course, problematic in that it ignores the fact that managers, like labor, are employees of capital. This leads to the general question that typically interests me. That is, by what processes do white-collar workers come to imagine their interests as linked to the interests of capital, rather than the interests of the broader working-class?
