Page 483 - Sociology and You

Chapter 13 Political and Economic Institutions 453
We’re worth fifteen dollars an hour because we’re producing a product that can be sold on the market that’ll produce that fifteen dollars an hour. . . . I don’t know if you want to [base a per- son’s value] strictly on education. You
can send someone to school for twelve years and they can still be doing some- thing that’s socially undesirable and not very worthwhile for society. I don’t know if they should get paid just be- cause they had an education. In my mind, yuppie means young unproduc- tive parasite. We’re gonna have an awful lot of yuppies here in Kenosha that say they are doing something worthwhile when, really, they aren’t (Dudley, 1994:169).
Due to the massive loss of high-paying factory jobs, Dudley contends that the blue-collar vision of success is coming to “the end of the line.” These workers have lost their cultural niche to a postindustrial world where work is based on education and the application of knowledge.
Dudley documents the blue-collar workers’ view of this new reality. From her extensive interviews, she constructs a por- trait of their struggle to preserve their cul- tural traditions in a world in which the type of employment on which these tradi- tions were built is decreasing. The penalty for not creating new cultural supports for a sense of social worth, Dudley concludes, will be life in a state of confusion with a sense of failure.
The shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy will necessarily result in plant shutdowns and layoffs.
Working with the Research
1. What is the focus of Dudley’s research?
2. What does Dudley’s conclusion mean for blue-collar workers in
terms of their way of life?
3. Do you think Dudley’s research methods are strong enough to
support her conclusion?
4. Do you believe that Dudley can be objective in this study of her hometown? Explain your answer.