ABSTRACT
Professor Chinoy describes how organizational conditions affect the paring-down of career ambitions as automobile workers advance in age and seniority. Despite the cultural admonition to pursue large ambitions, automobile workers focus their aspirations on a narrow range of alternatives. The changing patterns of workers' aspirations therefore bear little resemblance to the popular stereotype of single-minded striving toward ambitious goals. Although working-class youth are encouraged to focus their aspirations into a long future and to make present sacrifices for the sake of eventual rewards, they are chiefly concerned with immediate gratifications. The typical attitudes of young nonskilled workers toward jobs, advancement, and the future persist until marriage or, perhaps, parenthood. Unlike the professional or the salaried officeholder, the factory worker does not see his present job as part of a career pattern which channels his aspirations and sustains his hope.
