A Nation of Employees: The Rise of White-Collar Workers and the Perceived Crisis of Masculinity in the 1950s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite later generations’ depiction of the long 1950s as a stable period, this era was a time of rapid social upheaval for middle-class white males. College educated, suburban living, corporate workers for the first time comprised a significant percentage of the labor population. The new white-collar male came under significant scrutiny from public intellectuals (sociologists, historians, anthropologist, magazine editors and anyone with means to shape public opinion and an aura of authority), and corporate work became incompatible with older forms of masculinity. The nineteenth-century ideal of the self-made entrepreneur, and independent farmer was no longer possible because hierarchical corporations emphasized group think and cooperative work. Social commentators believed that the new white-collar work was meaningless and no longer built character. Social commentators such as David Riesman, William H. Whyte Jr. and C. Wright Mills feared the loss of meaningful work created a passive male that lacked individuality and a conscious political outlook. This prompted a perceived crisis of masculinity since the traditional notion of the self-made man ideal could no longer be fulfilled by the new white-collar worker.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".