Customer Reviews

Status Seekers

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3 star:		(1)
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A previous reviewer notes that the book is dated. It's true that comments about televisions (When you next see Oliver Stone's Wall Street, check out the tv in Bud Fox's NYC penthouse...) and ranch houses are a bit dated, but the book shows that the craving for status and acceptance simply doesn't change. The book was published in 1949, and with a little imagination one can easily replaced dated status symbols with contemporary ones. The author's findings regarding ethnic and religious groups is interesting, too, but I won't spoil the surprise. Funny to view these observations 61 years after they were published. Enjoy!

I was not entirely startled by how important a role class played in the 50s (two decades before my birth) but this was eye-opening in some ways - it seems that status played a larger role in peoples' lives then. Packard does a wonderful job of documenting all of this and it is certainly more interesting than your average sociological research book. Some of it is quite dated, some is still relevant, but overall it presents a good look at how life was 40 years ago. Recommended, if you can track down a copy.

I read this because Tobias Wolff mentioned it in This Boy's Life. He was exactly right about it. It is a manual for changing your class.

Since social class is basically a secret in the United States, it doesn't change very much -- the basic structure is pretty well intact since 1960. The list of prep schools he names, the hierarchy of religions; they're still valid.

He has some pretty powerful inights. For example, he predicted that, in the future (today) the major qualification for wage jobs would be the ability to endure boredom. GOOD CALL.

He says things about some groups (women, Jews...) that are a bit appalling in a modern context, but do paint a picture of the fifties that's worth pondering (this is not that long ago, after all).

His observations about the changing nature of business are very interesting.

The author explores the workings of American society's opportunity structure, specifically, how social class, status striving, and social mobility (upward, static, and downward) influence the behavior of people who live in and compete for resources in our stratified, free-market social system. The significance of, and impact of social class is not generally acknowledged in the U.S., thus Packard's book offers insights uncovered by way of surveys, polls, interviews, and in-depth investigations from various social science fields; in addition, for source material about the impact of class on social situations, he made several of his own informal, intensive investigations and brought together the findings of 150 American social scientists, primarily from the fields of sociology, psychology, and marketing research. In various parts of the book, he often refers to work done by the Lynds in their famous study, "Middletown," and by sociologist William Foote Whyte. Some of the investigated social situations, and how they are influenced by social class, include the following: how class differences form an invisible wall; how one's family origins influence or determine one's life chances; conspicuous consumption as a status signifier; the significance of dress codes; interplay of class with race and gender; how religious and political persuasion influence voting propensities; how received imagery (such as today's slick political TV ads), rather than careful thought, determines voting decisions; how appearance and image, rather than construction quality, determine the value of a house; some societal sources of marriage and family stresses; wives are more class-conscious than husbands; clubs and other social organizations; impact of class on stress and mental illness; school and educational attainment; upper-class college students and the "gentleman's C"; the ideal of American individualism versus team-player reality; cliques and snobbery in school; the upper class; the diploma elite; the working class(es); social hierarchy in corporate bureaucracies; occupational prestige; and social factors which determine who are likely to be friends. Although there have been some fundamental cultural shifts since the late 1950s - such as the effects of deindustrialization - I think most of Packard's insightful findings involving social class, status-striving, job specialization, and the increasingly caste-like class stratification of American society are as applicable today, perhaps more so, as they were in the 1950s. The book is reader-friendly and should be suitable for high school students as well as adults.

I read this with interest not because it describes today's society, but it certainly gives some background to why things are the way they are in America today. I found the description of how the social side of playing the "game" in the military was particularly interesting. Easy reading and provocative in some chapters (e.g. being Jewish and being excluded).