Mechanics of the Middle Class

Mechanics of the Middle Class: Work and Politics Among American Engineers by Robert Zussman offers a rich sociological portrait of engineers as a defining stratum of the American middle class. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in two contrasting industries—traditional metalworking and advanced electronics—Zussman examines how engineers navigate their dual identity as both labor and management. The book explores what engineers do on the job, what they know, and how they relate to authority, collective organization, and career mobility. In doing so, it situates engineers within broader debates on professionalization, proletarianization, and the politics of technical work, showing how their daily practices illuminate tensions between autonomy and control, expertise and hierarchy. Far from being mere technicians, engineers emerge here as central actors in the organization of industrial life and in the politics of the middle class. Zussman shows how their work connects questions of labor process to issues of citizenship, family, and community. He also traces the historical development of engineering, from its roots in craft and civil works to its role in modern research-driven corporations, highlighting the cultural and political meanings attached to technical knowledge. By combining detailed workplace ethnography with broader analysis of class and ideology, Mechanics of the Middle Class reframes the engineer not only as a builder of machines, but as a builder of social order itself. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.