This panel explores significant intellectual, political, and institutional developments that shaped highly-educated, white-collar forms of work since the 1930s. These include the emergence of the white-collar internship, the proletarianization of white-collar legal service work, and the late-twentieth-century vogue for high-tech sectors, all of which were, in differing ways, shaped by and implicated in transformations of managerial practices, political liberalism, and political economy.
Moving chronologically, the papers highlight the origins of white-collar internships in New Deal and World War II-era public-private administrative training programs that emphasized values of flexibility, individual vocation, and bureaucratic restraint; the development of corporate law-firms and legal work as large-scale sites of hierarchical and increasingly deskilled labor deployed to unleash the financial sector; and, by the late twentieth century, liberals’ reinvention of technocratic practices of governance in service of Silicon Valley and remaking the class basis of the Democratic Party.
Key themes cutting across these papers include:
-the ways in which new forms of work and business practices reciprocally shaped new cultural and political values
-the combustible relationship between white-collar work, career aspirations, and vocation despite or, often, because of its discontents
-tensions between elite ideas about work’s intrinsic value and compensation and shifting scales of management, corporate capitalism, and the broader political economy.