>>What's Wolfe's justification for over-representing the well-off if
>>the point is going after folks who think of themselves as "normal,
>>typical"? Folks who make, say, $30,000 don't think of themselves
>>as "'normal, typical' USers who uphold middle class values"?
>>
>>Yoshie
>
>i've already explained why--he was replicating another research
>project--well, as best one can do with ethnographic methods. they
>provide reasons there in that book regarding why they choose to look
>ONLY at the "middle classes" in white suburbia. they are making
>claims about the production and reproduction of US culture, and as
>such they are looking at the more (not the most) powerful among us
>who have the ability to influence what it means to be "ordinary,
>average" etc.: school teachers, social workers, therapists, real
>estate agents, middle level managers. all of these people do things
>in their jobs and elsewhere in which they represent to others what
>it means to be among the "middle classes". you will note that in
>Bellah et al., they refer to this group as the "middle classes".
>they are doing "culture" --the sociology of culture--and so are
>using cultural categories.
You may be trying to argue that Wolfe is presenting a study of the culture of the so-called "Professional/Managerial Class (PMC)," defined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich as consisting of "salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor...[is]...the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations" & its impact upon the culture of the other classes, but _nowhere_ in _One Nation, After All_ (nor in interviews he gave after the book's publication) does Wolfe claim that's what he is doing. That's why you can't present any textual evidence that supports your claim.
Besides, if Wolfe had taken such a keen interest in school teachers, social workers, therapists, & the like, he would have had to expand the lower-income end of his sample.
I'm not even introducing a question of whether the PMC, the New Class, & other concepts are even useful (to me, such concepts are mostly bunk).
Cultural studies of classes based upon cultural definitions of classes are likely to be tautological.
At 5:56 PM -0400 4/17/01, Kelley Walker wrote:
>wolfe isn't after identifications with production based notions of
>class--where people see themselves in relation to the economy. he's
>after how they see themselves in terms of being "normal, typical"
>USers who uphold middle class values. "ordinary, average" people in
>the middle!
Let's say you first define the middle class as those who "see themselves in terms of being 'normal, typical' USers who uphold middle class values," while defining "middle class values" the way Wolfe does. Then look up people who possess such a self-conception & listen to them sympathetically, without challenging their ideology. At the end of the interviews, your findings on "middle class values" are likely to be the same as what you thought they would be even before undertaking your project. That's because you can't have a cultural definition of a class without already saying much about the culture of the class in question.
Yoshie