White-Collar Blues

Nationally specific but globally relevant, White-Collar Blues shows what happens when an occupational prestige system spreads worldwide. Yavaş’s theoretically ambitious and beautifully executed study of the transnational Turkish middle class is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how young professional-managerial employees become ensnared in soul-sucking career sectors and what it takes to get out. -- Amy J. Binder, coauthor of <i>The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today</i> Rejecting the static structures of classical social theory, White-Collar Blues reframes social class as a product of organizational practices and relationships. Class is not a position but a relational accomplishment, and ironically the “winners” in the transnational middle class find themselves disappointed, exhausted, and trapped, toiling for firms that exploit their ambitions in jobs they find meaningless. -- Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, coauthor of <i>Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach</i> Based on illuminating fieldwork in New York City and Istanbul, White-Collar Blues tells the stories of the “exhausted and trapped” professional employees of transnational corporations. An astute analysis of elite disappointment as the global market dream turns into a nightmare. -- Cihan Tuğal, author of <i>The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism</i> White-Collar Blues asks what happens when ambitious young workers succeed in landing “good jobs” at powerful transnational firms. The result—widespread feelings of exhaustion, frustration, and alienation—reveals a great deal about the reward structure that global corporations have established across so much of the modern world. An indispensable intervention in the debate over the future of work. -- Steven Peter Vallas, coauthor of <i> The Sociology of Work: Structures and Inequalities</i>