Mark Pittenger. Class Unknown

Since the Progressive era, undercover investigations have been a popular means of depicting the poor. Middle-class investigators, posing as laborers and unemployed workers, descended into a class unknown as a way to gather social science data on the lives of its members and to foster cultural and psychological understanding across boundaries of difference. Mark Pittenger expertly explores this body of work in his engaging new book. He illustrates how historical attention to this overlooked method of inquiry reveals a middle-class culture striving to define and maintain itself in the face of structural and modern psychological pressures. Examined across the changing intellectual, economic, and social landscapes of a century, such investigations mixed contemporary views on class with ideas about culture, evolution, and race in ways that both simultaneously challenged and reinforced. Class Unknown makes important contributions to social science history and cultural studies of labor and should be a staple of upper undergraduate and graduate courses.

Class (philosophy) · Class analysis · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Middle class · Political science · Poverty · Progressive era · Race (biology) · Social class · Social science · Sociology · Work (physics) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies