ABSTRACT
But once we move forward from these ‘protoyuppies’ of the Progressive Era, agreement is overtaken by ambiguity. Despite decades of debate, there is not only no generally accepted definition but not even any agreement on what we might call a general definitional arena. This single social group is conceptualized in a variety of specific niches on the social totem pole, as illustrated by the array of different labels by which they are denoted. A part from the ‘new middle class’, the social science literature, is replete with concepts of a ‘new class’ (Bruce-Briggs, 1979), a ‘new working class’ (Miller, 1965), a ‘salaried middle class’ (Gould, 1981), a ‘middle strata’ (Aronowitz, 1979), a ‘working middle class’ (Zussman, 1984), a ‘professional managerial class’ (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979), and so on-not to mention the simple staid ‘middle class’ of old. In short, although these different concepts intersect, more or less, on the class map, there is no recognizable core around which the debate revolves. For the purposes of this paper, I am going to take as axiomatic the broad Marxist proposition that class is defined according to people’s relation to the means of production. I am not going to attempt to discuss or arbitrate between the diverse interpretations of what this definition means in practice.
