[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Relationship between Social Class and Work in American Culture
Like it or not, all of us are mainly defined, in any case in the eyes of others, according to an complicated set of criterion how much we earn, what we do for a living, who our parents are, where and how long we attended school, how we speak, what we wear, where we live, and how we react to the issues of the day. It all adds up to our socioeconomic class, our position in U.S. society. In a process as natural as sunrise, a few folks are consigned to the ranks of the chiefs, the rest of us to more middling places among the workers and drones. Many Americans are more than a little bewildered about just where they stand in the great hierarchy these days.
In part, they are echoing with the broad democratic tension that runs through the center of the nation's history and culture. To acknowledge any interest in class status or to spend much time thinking about socioeconomic ranking is to behave in some way vaguely un-American. More significant, Americans are responding to changes in the U.S. economic and cultural fabric and in the workplace that have distorted old-time class distinctions and, in many cases, redefined foundation status issues.
The sketch of America's class structure may have seemed simpler just a decade or so ago, when Rutgers University professor Paul Fussell published an extensively read primer on the subject. Fussell recognized nine separate socioeconomic classes, ranging from a privileged class, practically indistinguishable behind the tall walls of their mansions, to a miserable underclass, similarly indistinguishable in their hovels. In between, in Fussell's universe, were an effete upper class he found "impervious to ideas," an upper-middle class that had earned its status and looked with some disdain on those living off inherited money, a vast and essentially insecure middle class ever concerned about social indiscretions......
