Word: cobbs
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...Cobb, exploration chief for Shell...
...blatant social paradoxes, (Why should a master pipefitter call the mediocre school teacher next door "Mr." while the teacher calls him by his first name?), but more often the wounds are expressed by workers in ways so fundamental to their thinking that they themselves do not notice. Sennett and Cobb relate the example of a plumber working on a construction job who would not describe his accomplishment in the first person. When he found that the plans for a major plumbing installation were clearly faulty (though they had been made by a man with far greater income and status than...
...loss of "I"--something Sennett and Cobb found again and again--occurs in a world where things happen to people instead of the other way around, where all the important choices and opportunities are predetermined. Even when people began to talk about how little they felt "on top of things" their feelings would immediately be counter-balanced by the sources of their conservatism--by the modicum of security and the dreams that held together Howell's "settled" families and from which the "hard living" families had found the only immediately realizeable escape...
...psychological, internalized injuries Sennett and Cobb describe are forces which maintain the usually silent middle America that politicians extoll: forces which somehow fail to take hold fully in the hard living families. But though the hard living families in Howell's book have escaped from the conventional worker's world, they are no better off. They have traded a slow-paced life of hidden injury for a more exuberent life in which the injuries are more direct and economic. Neither Howell nor Sennett and Cobb begin to analyze what causes the against-the-mainstream behavior of the hard living families...
SENNETT AND COBB are far more ambitious. They recognize that the mechanisms of class may sometimes, fail to hold workers in--they treat the question of revolt and the "intensity of pent-up feeling" which revolt releases--but they do not consider the hard living families who give up on middle-class dreams and retreat from society rather than attack it. Yet their book goes far beyond other books based on interviews in that they attempt to create a comprehensive modern theory of class structure as it holds for the majority of people. Drawing together thoughts from philosophers and modern...