E .

PA U L D U R R E N B E R G E R
DIMITRA DOUKAS

Gospel of Wealth, Gospel of Work:

Counterhegemony in the U.S. Working Class
ABSTRACT In this article, we marshal qualitative and quantitative evidence for a distinctive U.S. working-class perspective that criticizes
and dissents from the societys consumerist orthodoxy. On the basis of ethnographic and archival research in white central New York
and eastern Pennsylvania, Doukas suggested that the frugal, work-centered ideology of historical U.S. working classesthe gospel
of workpersisted as counterhegemonic in todays gospel of wealth consumerism. Durrenberger quantitatively tested for gospel
of work orientations and found confirmation among predominantly white central Pennsylvanian labor unionists. We argue that the
combination of methods warrants a more confident generalization and that the wage of whiteness needs to be assessed in regional
and historic context. We conclude that gospel of work values are widely held despite a century-long corporate-sponsored campaign to
promote consumerism and caution against assuming consumerist hegemony in the United States. [Keywords: quantification, ideology,
class, whiteness, methodology]

FINDING COUNTERHEGEMONY: ETHNOGRAPHY AND

QUANTITATIVE METHODS
Does everyone believe what they are told about the legitimacy and justice of the socioeconomic system that governs
them? The classic Marxist idea of false consciousness says
yes, thus accounting for apparent working-class acceptance
of oppressive regimes (Lukacs 1967). James C. Scott, however, warns that compliance with the norms of power may
not reflect consciousness because counterhegemonic views
lurk among subordinated groups in a hidden transcript,
an encoded challenge to the legitimacy of power, spoken
behind the back of the dominant (1990:xii).
In this article, we bring together qualitative and quantitative evidence for a hidden transcript among a subgroup
of working-class whites that dissents from the prevailing
consumerism of a dominant culture that discourages representations of class (Silverman 2007:523, 526). We discuss
ethnographic and historical evidence for a white workingclass counterhegemonic formation before discussing quantitative tests.
Our understanding of hegemony derives from Antonio
Gramsci (1976) and looks back even further to his source,
Karl Marx, who observed in The German Ideology, The ideas
of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas
(1976:59). Ruling ideas, or hegemonic ideas, rule, he noted

pragmatically, because rulers regulate the production and

distribution of the ideas of their age (Marx 1976:59).
Hegemonic ideas include notions of the legitimacy of
state power, understandings of wealth and why some have
more than others, concepts of social categories and the
rankings among them, and other ideas that inspire and
reinforce compliance with power. Counterideas come from
subordinate classes and, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984:254, 316)
suggests in Distinction, the subordinated part of the dominant class. Counterhegemonic ideas challenge ruling ideas.
There are constraints on hegemony because the dominant
group must make concessions to social conditions to negotiate its hegemony and win consent (Joseph 2006:5253).
As long as they do not actively challenge the ascendancy
of the ruling group, counterhegemonic ideas based on the
daily-life realities of the less dominant may remain in the
unexamined interstices.
In her ethnographic fieldwork in deindustrializing central New York State, Dimitra Doukas (2003) found, rather
than the expected working-class turn to the right, a
local ideology that harked back to the more egalitarian
political-economic orientations of the 19th-century United
States. The gospel of work ideologyin both Clifford
Geertzs (1980:123124) sense of representations of how reality is arranged and Eric Wolfs (2001:379, 1999) sense of

C 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 110, Issue 2, pp. 214225, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00027.x

Durrenberger and Doukas

power-laden or resistant chains of significationachieved
a measure of hegemonic status in the century before the
gospel of wealth, the ideology of the corporate era, forcefully promoted by major industrialists since the turn of the
20th century (Doukas 2003:6466; Goodwyn 1976; Trachtenberg 1982).
E. Paul Durrenberger was struck by this formulation as
an approach to a problem he was working on in his research
on labor unions. Working alongside Suzan Erem (Durrenberger 2001), he had already devised a quantitative test for
Katherine Newmans idea (1988) of a hegemonic meritocratic individualism but could not confirm Newmans
suggestion that working-class experience would inculcate a
less individualist, more structural perspective.
Durrenberger and Erem further observed that in negotiating the contracts that establish the conditions of
work, union members framed their arguments in terms
of household needs rather than markets or economics.
Did this represent assumptions congruent with the gospel
of work? Quantitative tests of the proposition found the
gospel of wealth poorly represented among all respondents and the gospel of work well represented among many
respondents.
Ethnographic data are often provocative but remain
tied to the particulars of a case unless further study warrants generalization. Although the work reported here by
no means exhausts the possibilities for future research, the
mutual confirmation of qualitative and quantitative data
allows us to more confidently propose a class-specific counterhegemonic formation and provides further testing for it.
After describing the ethnographic and analytical contexts
of the gospel of work, we discuss the quantitative methods
and results. We argue that the convergence of our results
warrants a challenge to the perception of consumerist cultural hegemony in the United States.
WHITENESS AND THE PEOPLE WE STUDIED
We studied white working-class people, most of whom live
in hinterland, or semiperipheral, manufacturing towns of
the northeastern rustbelt, where just a generation ago
their elders lived well on manufacturing jobs and a diverse mix of small businesses. They are, to paraphrase Bourdieu, from the subordinated part of the dominant (culturally defined) race. Although there is a great deal of regional distinctiveness, the populations we studied in New
York and Pennsylvania may be subsets of a larger demographic, defined by historical intersections of race and
class with geographies of industrialization and immigration.1 Along with Jane Adams and D. Gorton (2006), informed by J. K. Gibson-Graham and colleagues notion of
class processes (2001), we understand the multiple dimensions of identity to intersect under specific local and
regional circumstances that are conditioned by translocal
power. In a regional framework, the analytical questions
are not about the relative importance of one or another dimension of identity in the abstract but how they intersect

Wealth and Work

215

in the cultural and ideological formations of people in daily

life.2
By hinterland, we point to a geography of towns and
small cities that were historically autonomous of and remain weakly articulated to major urban centers.3 The pivotal contrast is to suburbs, satellites of major urban centers.
Although this distinction may not apply in the less compact, more newly Euro-American occupied geographies of
the West, the people we studied are white but not suburban. They do not fit descriptions of the suburban U.S.
center that Herve Varenne and his collaborators (1986)
tried to define. Nor do they fit the mold of suburban conflict
avoidance that Constance Perin (1990) and Carol Greenhouse (1986) highlighted.
Working-class whites in the northeastern rustbelt have
a long history with the labor movement, which has continued to place particular value on work, to press for keeping its
remuneration high, and to provide platforms for workingclass activism. It would be difficult to quantify activists as
a proportion of residents, but both of us have seen large
protests and other public manifestations of dissent in the
course of our research. In contrast to the reported passivity
of the suburban U.S. center, the people we studied did
rock the boat, sometimes at considerable personal risk.
Furthermore, although the people we studied live in
geographies of corporate disinvestment, they are not radically delocalized (Ortner 1999:990). They are, relative to
mobile white suburbanites, radically localized. Geographer
Lydia Savage says of the working-class whites she studied
in Worcester, Massachusetts, they are notoriously rooted
in place (Savage in press). The white working-class folk we
studied identify with place and have resisted the trend of
regional depopulation. Multigenerational geographic stability is another major difference between the people we
studied and the more mobile, placeless U.S. center.
Finally, the people we studied are economically and
politically weak, even to the point of disenfranchisement
on major issues of local resource use. Hinterlands, unlike
suburbs, are preferred sites for the growth industries of the
rustbelt: prisons and toxic dumps, as Janet Fitchen (1991)
reported for rural central New York. We could call these assaults on local resources environmental classism because,
like environmental racism, the practice relies on the political impotence of local residents.
The systemic underprivilege of the people we studied
has moved us to question some conclusions of whiteness studies. The white working-class people we studied
do not racialize whiteness. They naturalize it, taking white
for granted as the normal, unmarked condition, as has
been noted in other anthropological studies of workingclass whites (Savage in press, Smith-Nonini in press).
The problem we see arises from the theorizing of whiteness itself as a structural position of privilege and power
(Frankenberg 1993). Certainly the ranks of privilege and
power in the United States are predominantly white, a
predominance that rests on cradle-to-grave institutional

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American Anthropologist Vol. 110, No. 2 June 2008

racism. The observation that most powerful people are

white, however, does not warrant the conclusion that most
white people are powerful. If such a privilege exists, it exists
as a privileged starting position in a race that most whites
will still lose. This is the effect of class. In the postindustrial
hinterlands where everybodys white, the wage of whiteness (Roediger 1991) is unusually low. Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are mutually constituting in ways that are
isomorphic with states construction of subjects and capitals organization of labor (Brodkin 2000), but it remains
an empirical question exactly how this is done at different
times in different places. Clearly the dominant economic
system assigns deskilled, poorly compensated work to workers constructed as raceethnic, gender, and sexual inferiors.
Our observations confirm this systemic tendency. Industrialization in the northeastern United States took off in
a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) monoculture that
soon stigmatized the papist Irish and obtained the fruits
of their labor at the usual raceethnic discount. In the late
19th century, it was eastern and southern Europeans, whose
discounted labor fed the expansion of a newly centralized
corporate industrial order. Each stigmatized ethnicity faced
social ostracism and the violent enforcement of raceethnic
boundaries (Doukas 2003). In the wake of these conditions,
todays whiteness must be considered an achievement, although not necessarily of privilege.
Adams and Gorton (2006) offer an instructive comparative case from the shifting historical landscape of race
ethnic-class relations in the Mississippi Delta. Regional racespecific cultures, local resource control, and the state (esp.
in the 1860s, the 1930s, and the civil rights era) all figured
in shaping a local raceclass order in which the workingclass whites were a struggling, politically weak minority in
a county with a powerful black political machine (Adams
and Gorton 2006:303). In this case whiteness is racialized, by whites and blacks, but the tables of privilege are
turned. The local government refused to pave a road to the
white enclave Adams and Gorton studied and pressured
residents to rename the street they called Confederate Lane
(2006:305).
An implicit equation of whiteness and privilege can
lead to the stigmatization of poor and working-class whites
by a line of flawed cultural logic: to be privileged by race
and still not be affluent can only result from being multiply inferiorslow-witted, lazy, unfit (Bageant 2007); easily
duped, incapable of understanding their political interest
(Frank 2005)and thus worthy of contempt. This was the
view of Andrew Carnegie and other apostles of early corporate capitalism. It is a view that denies class.
Ethnographic evidence from Newmans (2000) study of
low-wage workers in Harlem to Carol Stacks descriptions of
the lives of urban African Americans (1974), and to black
and white rural southerners (Smith-Nonini in press), suggest that the cognitive and value orientations of both urban
and rural U.S. residents may be consistent with those we describe for the white hinterland of the Northeast. To move

this proposition beyond a suggestion, however, requires detailed quantitative as well as qualitative ethnography. We
cannot even claim to have studied a representative sample
of working-class whites. Our ethnographic and survey respondents were from historically similar but unrelated populations, working at the broad bottom of the nation-states
economic pyramid. We generalize beyond these populations only with care.
THE GOSPEL OF WORK
In his influential essay, The Gospel of Wealth (1889,
1900a), steel magnate Andrew Carnegie made his famous
social Darwinist assertion that the law of competition
governed social evolution: it may be hard on individuals
but, he declared, it is best for the race because it insures
the survival of the fittest in every department (1889:655).
Carnegie was arguing against the popular ideology of his
time that we call the gospel of work.
On the basis of self-sufficient, rural, agroindustrial production, the historical gospel of work melded a moral perspective with the political goal of broadly based prosperity.
Work was a sacred duty and a claim to moral and political
superiority over the idle rich (Doukas 2003; Gutman 1966;
Lazerow 1995). From the earliest days of the United States,
working-class producers of wealth, as they styled themselves, believed that they had a right to enjoy the fruits of
their own labor and not be dependent on an employer, as
they had been under British rule (Faler 1981; Ryerson 1978;
Wood 1991). De-emphasizing the religious aspects, U.S.
historians dubbed this view producerism (Kazin 1995).
Producerist arguments were behind the Whiskey Rebellion
of 1794 and the anti-Federalist successes of 1800 (Appleby
1984, 1992); the abolitionist economic arguments of the
1850s Republican Party (Foner 1970); the racially inclusive
Knights of Labor, a national political force of the 1870s and
1880s (Fink 1983); and the Peoples Party of the 1890s, the
most serious challenge to the U.S. two-party system thus far
(Goodwyn 1976).
Producerist working-man rhetoric has been co-opted
into nativist and fascist ideologies only by removing one
mainspring of the original.4 Producerism was anticapitalist. At the philosophical core of historical producerism was
the idea that labor, not capital, creates real wealth: capital, as the great producerist Abraham Lincoln once said, is
only the fruit of labor (Lincoln 1953:52). Producerism was
the language of 19th-century popular opposition to the
trusts, the disreputable ancestors of many of todays corporate giants (Bakan 2005; Doukas 1997; Lloyd 1894; Myers
1911; Tarbell 1966).
The fledgling corporate giants, their bankers, and their
political allies objected to producerist moral claims and,
starting in the 1890s, reached out with a new ideology that claimed, to the contrary, that capital, not labor, creates wealth and prosperity. Steel magnate Carnegie
was a leader of this cultural campaign. To the masses,
Carnegie (1900b) argued consumerism: the productivity of

Durrenberger and Doukas

concentrated capital, under the wise stewardship of the
fit, would so lower the price of commodities that the workers of tomorrow would live as well as the kings of the past.
To the elite, he argued that coddling the poor with high
wages was not good for the race (1900a). These views
quickly gained traction among the new corporate capitalist
elites (Hofstadter 1955) and became the ideological nucleus
of a long, well-funded campaign to transform U.S. culture
(Cole 2007; Doukas 1997, 2003; Fones-Wolf 1994).
Powerful coalitions of corporate interests made concerted efforts to transform the message of schools, universities, churches, and civic groups. Claiming that business
had solved the fundamental ethical and political problems
of industrial society and that harmony existed between
social interests and economic institutions, the new message discouraged collective action (Fones-Wolf 1994:67).
The law of competition, as Jules Henry (1963) and Jean
Lave (1988) have argued, found a place in public schooling, prying children and young adults out of orientations
to neighborliness and reciprocity that sustained the egalitarian sociability of the gospel of work.
Bringing together ethnographic and historical data
from the anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania and the
Valley of central New York with the fine-grain case studies of social history, old ethnographies (e.g., Lynd and
Lynd 1959, 1982; Warner et al. 1963), and accounts of the
era (Lloyd 1894; Myers 1911; Tarbell 1966; Veblen 1979),
Doukas (1997, 2003) shows a cultural sea-change breaking
across the 1890s United States, a mass consumerism that
would erase producerist values, especially frugality, from
the public sphere (Ewen 1976; Marchand 1986; Trachtenberg 1982).5 If the gospel of wealth clearly dominates, did
the gospel of work disappear?
THE VALLEY
In central New Yorks Mohawk River Valley, along the
old Erie Canal, is a living museum of U.S. industrialization, a small manufacturing region that locals and their
neighbors call the Valley. For three-quarters of a century, the varied enterprises of E. Remington and Sons led a
prosperous regional economy of manufacturing and agriculture. Remington-led enterprises produced agricultural
tools and machines, fire engines, iron bridges, streetcars,
bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, and many other
things, in addition to the arms and ammunition in which
their corporate successors specialized. When the Remingtons were forced into bankruptcy in the 1880s, the factories, foundries, and mills were divided and conquered by
the gun trust and the typewriter trust (Doukas 2003).
Under corporate rule, local manufacturing underwent
Taylorist de-skilling (Braverman 1974; Montgomery 1993;
Nelson 1980) and the familiar booms and busts of industrial economies (Harvey 1990; Lash and Urry 1987). Deindustrialization started in the 1960s and did most of its regional damage in the 1970s. At the time of fieldwork in
the mid-1990s, median annual income was $22,000 and

Wealth and Work

217

3035 percent of local households received public assistance (Doukas 2003:23). County unemployment rates float
a point or more above the official national figure, but this is
deceptive. Because one hour of labor in the reported week
qualifies as employment (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
2007:7), this figure vastly overcounts the employed (Zweig
2000).
For half a century, the Valley was radically divided between WASPs and white ethnics, a segregated society
with unequal tracks of schooling and occupation, separate churches, separate cemeteries, and turf battles in the
schools and public parks. In historical context, the achievement of whiteness meant overcoming the ethnic order of
the early 20th century and was not accomplished until after
WWII (cf. Brodkin 1998). Labor unions were a major vector of this social transformation, particularly the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO) campaigns of the 1940s
(Doukas 2003; Gerstle 1989). The United Mine Workers of
America (UMWA), with whom the Valleys remaining Remington workers affiliated in the mid-1990s, has been a leader
in organizing solidarity across raceethnic lines since the
1880s.
Working-class whites earn their livelihood with a mix
of public assistance, household provisioning (gardening,
part-time farming, hunting, and fishing), home-based and
other informal sector enterprises, part-time and temporary
service jobs, small businesses, a few remaining unionized
manufacturing jobs, and public sector work in schools and
government, the only secure jobs in the region (Doukas
2003). Times are hard, they say, yet women as well as men
continue, like historical producerists, to pride themselves
on hard work and hard-won skills.
Women are believed to be strong in the Valley. A feminist local historian explains this apparent gender egalitarianism as a legacy of family-farm agriculture, where both
spouses had to work shoulder to shoulder (Jane Spellman,
personal communication, September 1993). There were
bad women in local stories, but they were bad for the
same reasons men were bad: social climbing, hoarding, and
putting money before human kindness (Doukas 2003).
Hard work, frugality, and neighborliness are measures of respect and reputation in the Valley, where many
working people have survived an abrupt and bewildering
fall from middle-class security (Ehrenreich 1990; Newman
1988). Like their 18th-century forebears, working-class locals criticize elites for living off the work of others and not
working themselves.
Is this a special case or are class-specific, counterhegemonic values a more broadly distributed characteristic of
the working class as a whole? To answer this question, we
would need to know if producerist values have survived
or resurfaced elsewhere. Carefully conceived quantitative
methods can assess the distribution of ethnographically
identified patterns. Those workers who belong to unions
are one segment of the working class on which we have
quantitative data to make such an assessment.

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American Anthropologist Vol. 110, No. 2 June 2008

PAIRED COMPARISONS
Durrenberger and Erem (2005a) expected that, as Newman (1988) suggested, working-class experience would invalidate the tenets of middle-class meritocratic individualism. Durrenberger (2001) could not find evidence of either
meritocratic individualism or the hypothesized alternative
structural thinking among the union members, although
one paired comparison test suggested individualist rather
than structural modes of thought.
The classic example of a paired comparison is the question of which kind of animal is larger:

elephant
goat
mouse

goat
mouse
elephant

[Weller and Romney 1988]

We arrange the terms in pairs and assign one point to

the term that a respondent selects in each line. Elephant
would get the most points, goat would come in second,
and mouse would get no points. Suppose we did this with
100 people and all agreed. Then the table would look like
Table 1.
TABLE 1. Relative sizes of animals.

Elephant
Goat
Mouse

is larger than
"
"

Elephant

Goat

Mouse

0
0

100

100
100

This would suggest a worldview in which elephants

score 200, goats 100, and mice 0 points for size. This would
define a hierarchy of size: (1) elephant, (2) goat, and (3)
mouse.
This test allows us to determine whether there is a hierarchy of size, rather than assuming there is one. If there
were no agreement about whether goats were larger than
mice or elephants larger than goats, we would find about
equal scores, and we could not attribute a hierarchy of animal size to this worldview. Tests that ask respondents to
scale items assume a hierarchy a priori. The paired comparison question makes no such assumption.
The test of Newmans idea was part of a survey
of stewards in three Chicago locals. Arranging them in
all possible combinations of two, the paired comparison
asked which is most important for achieving success in
life:

Race
Gender
Hard work
Talent

Union stewards showed remarkable consensus across

divisions of race, ethnicity, gender, and industrial sector
that hard work and talent are more important than race and
gender. This evidence seemed to suggest that they think
in individualist rather than structural terms, but because

the value of hard work has a place in both meritocratic

individualism and the gospel of work, these results were
ambiguous.

TESTING FOR THE GOSPEL OF WORK

Durrenberger (2003) and Durrenberger and Erem (2005b)
reasoned that paired comparisons could be evidence for
different folk models, the explanations people develop for
their own behavior (Levi-Strauss 1963). Folk models are
parts of the systems they purport to explain and should be
assessed in terms of how well they accord with facts we can
know as well as their roles in wider systems (Durrenberger
1996:73).
After intensive ethnographic study and participantobservation as well as thorough consultation with union
members, delegates, and officers to formulate questions,
Durrenberger and Erem used an opportunistic random intercept method to administer a survey face to face to 226
members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
District 1199P at eight worksiteshospitals and nursing
homesin central Pennsylvania, a region similar to the Valley in its abandoned factories, rural poverty, and economic
history (Wallace 1980, 1988). Participants were mostly
white, female (84 percent), an average age of 43, and an
average of ten years worked at that site. To gain management permission to be on the sites, Durrenberger and
Erem were accompanied by the union representative for
each worksite. An introductory bold face paragraph indicated the approval of the union and Penn States IRB; explained that the purpose was to understand how different ways of organizing unions make a difference to members; guaranteed anonymity, confidentiality, and voluntary participation; and provided contact information of the
researchers. It continued, There are no right or wrong answers. Because different people have different opinions, everyone will not agree on the answers. This is not a problem. The best answers are your own true opinions. Names
of respondents were not recorded. Surveys were administered one on one, and the investigators were available to
discuss the survey with union members and answer any
questions.
One question was intended to ascertain the relative
importance of the gospel of work and the gospel of wealth:
If people buy stock and sell it later for more than they paid for
it, where does the profit come from? The responses were in
the form of paired comparisonsall possible pairs of:

other peoples work

good luck
good management team
natural economic forces make money grow

The survey requested respondents to circle the item on each

line that is the best reason for the profit.
An indication of adherence to the gospel of work
would be the selection of other peoples work, whereas

Durrenberger and Doukas

an indication of the gospel of wealth would be natural
economic forces make money grow. Selecting good management team would indicate the valorization of management over labor and the selection of good luck would
indicate that the respondent thought there were no knowable causal relationships.
The 198 people who completed this question overwhelmingly agreed (86 percent) that the best reason for
profit was other peoples work. Good management
team (81 percent) and natural economic forces (83 percent) are more important than good luck. There is less
agreement that other peoples work is more important
(58 percent) than natural economic forces (Chi square
= 4.5 with 1 df, s = .03); and even less that other peoples work is more important (45 percent) than good
management team (Chi square = 2.04 with 1 df, s =
.15). They were equally divided on whether good management team or natural economic forces was more
important.
Table 2 shows these relationships. If we sum the percentages as in the animal example, we find no clear hierarchy between work and management, but natural
causes falls lower than either and luck is least valued: (1)
work (189), (2) management (186), (3) natural (175), and
(4) luck (50). This would suggest that whether or not these
union members adhere to the gospel of work, they reject
the gospel of wealth.
TABLE 2. Reasons for profit.
Work Luck Management Natural forces Total
Work
Luck
Management
Natural forces

14%
55%
42%

86%

81%
83%

45%
19%

50%

58%
17%
50%

189
50
186
175

The Chi-square test can further assess whether there is

agreement about distinctions. If the value of Chi square is
sufficiently high, it indicates that people were selecting one
cause over another, indicating agreement. Alternatively, a
low Chi-square value suggests either disagreement or random choice: that is, about half for each cause with no systematic distinction.
Table 3 shows the Chi-square values for each pair and
confirms that people reject luck as a cause, are divided about
whether work is more important than management,
and agree that there is a distinction between work and
natural causes. If we pair this observation with the data
of Table 1, we can conclude that people think that work
is more important in line with Doukass ethnographic observations. This would suggest that respondents are thinking in terms of the gospel of work rather than the gospel
of wealth. However, even though the difference between
work and natural is significant, Table 2 indicates that
it is not large. There is little consensus. The survey asked
for political party affiliations, and the same lack of pattern

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219

TABLE 3. Chi-square and s values for paired comparisons of all

respondents.

Work
Luck
Management

Luck

Management

102.0 s = 0

0.2 s = .15
73.0 s = .00

Natural
4.5 s = 0.03
85.0 s = 0.00
0.0 s = 1.00

is evident for the 29 percent who indicated no preference,

the 46 percent who said they were Democrats, and the 25
percent who said they were Republicans.
District 1199P is known for its flat democratic structure. Contract negotiations are open to all members and
members select representatives for bargaining teams. The
survey asked whether respondents had served on their
worksites bargaining team. The 49 members (25 percent
of the respondents) who had served on bargaining teams
showed the same pattern as the whole sample. In other
words, being on the bargaining teams is not associated with
peoples views of how the economy works. Again, ambiguous results.

UNION CONSCIOUSNESS
The survey assessed another conceptual domain, union
consciousness or awareness, the apprehension of two distinctive sides in labor relations. The vehicle was a triads
test that asks respondents to select which of three items
is most different from the others, indicating a conceptual
similarity in the other two. Durrenberger developed this test
during his studies of unions in Chicago, and it has proven
to be robust in a number of contexts (Durrenberger 1997,
2001, 2002; Durrenberger and Erem 1999b, 2005a, 2005b,
2005c).
Daily concerns are brought to management through
elected members called delegates in 1199P parlance.
Other unions call them stewards. Union locals hire representatives who help stewards or delegates when they
cannot resolve grievances themselves. Management hires
supervisors and managers to oversee the work process.
Union members may think of themselves as belonging to
a union side along with stewards and representatives, as
opposed to a management side of managers and supervisors. Alternatively, they may see themselves as not especially related to either union or management but simply as the lowest people in a hierarchy of statuses, as being close to management and alien from their union, or
other possible configurations (Durrenberger 1997, 2001,
2002; Durrenberger and Erem 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1999a,
1999b).
The triads test for all combinations of three management and union roles looks like this:
manager
delegate

other worker
manager

union rep
other worker

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American Anthropologist Vol. 110, No. 2 June 2008

manager
supervisor
delegate
union rep
supervisor
supervisor
supervisor

delegate
union rep
other worker
other worker
union rep
manager
union rep

supervisor
manager
supervisor
delegate
other worker
other worker
delegate

Every line in which the respondent distinguished between union and management was scored 1. For instance,
in the first triad, a person who selected manager would be
assigned a score of 1. In the second triad, selecting manager would result in a score of 1. In the third line, supervisor would be so scored; in the fourth, manager and so
on. The highest possible score is 10. A score of 8 or higher
indicates union conscious. Lower than 8 indicates not
union conscious. If we examine the paired comparison
test results about causes of wealth in terms of union consciousness, we see a strong pattern of preferences. Table 4
shows the responses of those members who were not union
conscious. These totals translate into a hierarchy: (1) management (194), (2) work (186), (3) natural (169), and (4)
luck (56).

TABLE 6. Results of paired comparison test for the union-conscious

members.

Work
Luck
Management
Natural

Work
Luck
Management
Natural

Luck

Management

Natural

Total

16%
57%
46%

84%

81%
79%

43%
19%

44%

54%
21%
56%

181
56
194
169

Table 5 shows the associated Chi-square values and

significances: Table 5 confirms that non-union-conscious
members see management as more important than natural
causes, with work and natural causes about equally important as well as work and management. This suggests that
we are not seeing a coherent cultural domain except for
the insignificance of luck in the production of wealth. In
other words, a hierarchy based on the total values is not
statistically significant.
TABLE 5. Chi-square values and significance values for non-unionconscious members.

Work
Luck
Management

Luck

Management

Natural

51.0 s = 0

2.1 s = .15
41.0 s = .00

0.6 s = .44
37.0 s = .00
50.0 s = .00

Luck

Management

Natural

13%
54%
l36%

87%

79%
86%

46%
21%

55%

64%
14%
45%

Total
197
48
178
177

Table 7 shows the Chi-square values for those members

with higher union consciousness. Table 7 indicates that,
like the larger group and the low union-consciousness subgroup, union-conscious members reject the efficacy of luck
and are divided on the relative importance of management,
but, unlike the less union-conscious group, they agree that
work is more salient than natural forces. This is consistent
with the rejection of consumerist values and adherence to
the producerist folk model of economic processes related
to the gospel of work that Doukas described in New Yorks
hinterland.
TABLE 7. Chi-square and significance values for union-conscious
members.

TABLE 4. Results for the members who are union conscious.

Work

Work

Work
Luck
Management

Luck

Management

Natural

46.7 s = .0

0.6 s = .45
28.3 s = .00

6.2 s = .01
43.8 s = .00
0.8 s = .38

To gain some insight into the differences between the

union-conscious and non-union-conscious groups on the
critical question of natural causes and labor in the creation
of profit, we can compare the magnitude of disagreement.
Among those with less union consciousness, 58 selected
work whereas 50 selected natural causes. This is a difference
of seven percent and not significant by the Chi-square test.
However, 54 members with greater union consciousness
select work whereas only 31 select natural causes. This
is a difference of 27 percent and is significant by the Chisquare test.
We can therefore conclude that a significant majority
of union-conscious members think in terms of the gospel of
work, whereas among those with less union consciousness
there is no consensus on the matter. Although a majority of
the members surveyed (58 percent; see Table 2) agree that
work is more important than natural forces, the majority is
greater (64 percent; see Table 6) among those with higher
union consciousness than among those with lower union
consciousness (54 percent; see Table 4).
INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM

Table 6 shows the responses for the union-conscious

members. These values define the following hierarchy: (1)
work (197), (2) management (178), (3) natural (177), and
(4) luck (48).

Going one step further, Durrenberger and Erem assessed the

relative importance of individualistic and collective models
of union power with a question that asked what is most
important for being able to have the power to negotiate a

Durrenberger and Doukas

good contract? (see Durrenberger and Erem 2005a, 2005c).
This was a paired comparison with all pairs from among
these choices:

being willing and able to strike

having everyone in the industry organized
the speaking power of the negotiator
the legal skill of the negotiator
having friendly relations with management

Choice of the first two items indicates concepts of collective power, choice of the third and fourth indicates individualistic concepts, and choice of the fifth suggests an even
playing field. Few counted the fifth as significant. Here, the
most significant comparison is between being willing and
able to strike and the negotiators skills.
We assessed this choice against choices for the question about the causes of wealth. For those who selected
the individualist of legal skill, there is no agreement on
causes of wealth, except for a slight preference for management over work (Chi square = 4.9 with 1 df, s = .03).
This represents, we suggest, a management model for the
production of wealth that does not lean toward either the
gospel of wealth or the gospel of work.
However, those who selected the collective option of
being willing and able to strike agreed that work is more
important than natural forces (Chi square = 4.35, 1 df,
s = .04). This suggests that those with a more collectivist
understanding of the power of their union also agree on
the gospel of work and reject the management model of
their more individualistic fellow workers.
The following diagram illustrates these relationships:
Legal skill (individualist)

Strike (collective)

management/work
work = natural

management = work
work/natural

The individualists agree that management is more

important than work but find work and natural causes of
equal causal efficacy, whereas the collectivists find that
work and management are of equal efficacy but agree that
work is more salient than natural causes.
There is, thus, evidence that the gospel of work aligns
with union consciousness and collectivist orientation, but
it is not clear whether or not these respondents were choosing a coherent folk model of economy. Therefore, we reexamined our test data for the coherence of any single folk
model of the causes of wealth.

COHERENCE OF CULTURAL MODELS OF WEALTH

The question on causes of wealth assumes four possible folk
models of economic process:

random (luck)
management (management)
gospel of work (work)
gospel of wealth (natural)

Wealth and Work

221

If we eliminate the random model from the test, we are

left with 3 pairs:
1. good management team
2. other peoples work
3. other peoples work

natural economic forces

natural economic forces
good management team

The choice of one in each line would suggest one of

three models:

management
gospel of wealth
gospel of work

If people are thinking in terms of coherent models,

they would answer the questions consistently. Thus, a person who thinks that management is the key variable would
select that term in both pairs where it occurs (Questions
1 and 3), and there would thus be symmetry between the
questions: all people who chose management in Question 1 would do so in Question 3, and all who chose the
same response in Question 3 would do so in Question 1.
Such a pattern would indicate that even if there is disagreement within the group as a whole, there are three coherent
models. Table 8 shows all of the logical possibilities for three
coherent models.
TABLE 8. Logical possibilities for three coherent models.
Management Q1 Man. & Q3 Man. & Q3 Man. & Q1 Man.
Wealth
Q1 Nat. & Q2 Nat. & Q2 Nat. & Q1 Nat.
Work
Q2 Wrk. & Q3 Wrk. & Q3 Wrk. & Q2 Wrk.
Note: Q = question; Man. = Management; Nat. = Natural; Wrk. =
Work.

This is read as: If there is a management model, then

people who select management in Question 1 will also
select it in Question 3 and people who select management in Question 3 will also select it in Question 1. Table
9 shows the actual outcomes of the Chi-square test. We
can conclude that respondents choices give no evidence
for a coherent gospel of wealth model but do give evidence
for semicoherent management and gospel of work perspectives.
Work was a strong preference for the union-conscious
segment and slightly more important than natural causes
for all respondents. These data suggest resistance to the
dominant economic ideology among the union-conscious
subset and ambivalence about it among respondents as a
whole. On the third test about what is most important in
securing a good contract, respondents who chose the collectivist options (strike and organization) correspondingly
agreed that work is most important as the cause of wealth.
CONCLUSIONS
A long and hard-fought cultural revolution to instill values consonant with corporations has not fully succeeded
in winning the hearts and minds of U.S. working people.
Although the gospel of work may not have survived the

222

American Anthropologist Vol. 110, No. 2 June 2008

TABLE 9. Outcomes of three coherent models.

Result
Management
Wealth
Work

Q1 Man.
Q1 Nat.
Q2 Wrk.

&
&
&

Q3 Man.
Q2 Nat.
Q3 Wrk.

Result

yes
no
no

&
&
&

Q3 Man.
Q2 Nat.
Q3 Wrk.

&
&
&

Q1 Man.
Q1 Nat.
Q2 Wrk.

no
no
yes

Note: Q = Question; Man. = Management; Nat. = Natural; Wrk. = Work.

changes of political economy from the agroindustrial rural

economy of the 18th and 19th centuries to the militaryindustrial corporate capitalism of the 20th and 21st centuries as a coherent ideology, neither has it disappeared.
Quantitative tests for the older cultural system that Doukas
(2003) described revealed reservations about individualism and the natural causes of wealth that strike at the
foundation of the gospel of wealth and consumerist ideology, on which rest the legitimacy of competition.
If hegemony means subordinates adoption of dominant
ideas, the corporate cultural revolution has not succeeded.
Coupling ethnographic description with quantitative measures reveals the persistence of elements of the gospel of
work from a previous era. Considering that the gospel
of work has little or no presence in the mass-mediated
public sphere or academic respectability, this is a strong
showing.
When economist Nancy Folbre (2001:xi) studied the
time and effort that people put into taking care of one
anotherwhich is nonmarket production, or the invisible
work of womenthe Wall Street Journal labeled her a socialist. She articulates relationships among feelings of love,
the morality of obligation, and the calculus of reciprocity,
all of which play into the older, nonconsumerist, producerist culture. Such categories are invisible to economics but
not to the older formulation of producerism. We studied
populations who have not experienced the prosperity that
corporate-capitalist ideology guarantees. Our ethnographic
and quantitative findings agree that the white working people we studied do not agree that the workings of capital are
a natural force a` la the discipline of economics. They also
show, though, that the idea of managerial efficacy in the
production of wealth, consistent with the ideology of meritocratic individualism that Newman (1988) describes, is
well represented although not dominant.
The hegemonic ideology of the gospel of wealth justifies as a natural right the distribution of rewards to those
who control capital rather than work. All do not agree. In
local municipal politics and local union politics, we have
observed counterhegemonic values of the gospel of work
that are culturally heterodox to the point that both sides
believe the other to be unintelligible or nonsensical: hence,
the inability of the Bible of the gospel of wealth, the Wall
Street Journal, to apprehend Folbres research except as the
opposite of capitalismsocialism.
Combining cultural anthropologys humanistic and
scientific traditions, we have taken a historically contex-

tualized idea from ethnography and tested for it quantitatively in other populations. With this methodological
combination (and adequate support), we could map with
some precision the extent of the counterhegemonic views
we have been tracking. We suspect it would be widespread
not only in the hinterlands we discussed but also in urban
and rural areas in which people rely on their own work for
their livings. We suspect the hegemonic gospel of wealth
may be more prevalent in suburbs and among those who
subscribe to the ideology of meritocratic individualism to
justify their managerial privilege (Newman 1988). Historical perspective allows us to identify cultural continuity and
transformation, and regional perspective permits us to concretize the multiple dimensions of identity in the actual
conditions of everyday life in which people gain their livelihoods and negotiate their identities.
The subordinates we studied are members of the dominant race, but we have found significant remnants of an
once coherent historical culture, rather than a white ideology. We have discussed data on union members. All
union members are workers but only a small minority of
workers are union members. Doukass ethnographic work
suggests that the gospel of work is not confined to union
members. If we were to predict the survival of gospel of
work values outside the rustbelt, in places where they
historically existed, we would have to include all races in
the once-populist South (Goodwyn 1976). We think this
pattern does not correspond to racial categories or political
labels such as Republican and Democrat. Considering the
geographic mobility of the U.S. working class, there is no
region we could eliminate from future study.
As Scott (1990) suggests, the etiquette of compliance
with power may hide ideological noncompliance. What
we have called the gospel of work is also hidden by differential access to national media (Ginsburg et al. 2003).
Blocking input from below surely enhances the appearance of successful hegemony, but anthropological analysis,
combining qualitative and quantitative methods, can cut
through appearances to the objective diversity of nonelite
perspectives.

E . PAUL DURRENBERGER Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park,

PA 168023404

DIMITRA DOUKAS
dimitra.doukas@gmail.com

Durrenberger and Doukas

NOTES
Acknowledgments. Paul Durrenbergers research in Pennsylvania
was supported by a grant from the NSF.
1. The first of the paired comparison tests reported below were
administered to urbanite union members in the Chicago area. The
results were ambiguous.
2. This analysis relies on the framework for regional analysis proposed by Mexican anthropologist and historian Claudio LomnitzAdler (1991, 1992).
3. Before the development of anthracite coal in the 1850s, the
United States had no major fuel resource, so much of early U.S.
manufacturing depended on water power. Steep inland valleys
were ideal locations; urban centers on coastal plains were not
(Chandler 1972).
4. Many Internet sources emphasize the nativist or fascist
versions without deeper investigation into historical cultural roots (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producerism,
http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/producerism.html,
http://www.amazines.com/Producerism_related.html
[all
accessed January 6, 2008]).
5. An adequate list would be exceptionally long. Studies most relevant to this argument include Faler 1981, Fink 1983, Foner 1970,
Goodwyn 1976, Gutman 1966, Johnson 1978, and Ryan 1981.

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