Introduction: The Labor of Culture

This introduction provides an overview of the The Making of the American Creative Class. It opens with a vignette narrating the successful unionization by white-collar workers at the Manhattan headquarters of the CBS network during the mid-1940s, which was exemplary of the larger movement of culture workers in mid-twentieth century New York that organized to challenge both the managerial prerogatives and ideological imperatives of consumer capitalism. The introduction also elucidates the book’s central premise, which is that its historical subjects—New York’s white-collar workers in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and design—were at the intersection of two major trends in the twentieth-century United States: the expanding production and circulation of a pervasive culture of consumer capitalism, and the transformation of the middle class from a social grouping of proprietors and independent professionals to one comprised primarily of salaried employees.

The Cashless Economy and its Effects Among the Salaried Employees in Chennai City

The government has implemented a major change in economic environment by demonetizing the high value currency notes of Rs.500 and Rs.1000 from 8th November 2016 and push India towards cashless future. The present study aimed to know about the awareness and acceptance of the cashless economy among the salaried employees in Chennai city. Data was directly collected from the online users and analyzed using percentages. The result of the study shows that the salaried employees are accepting and adopting cashless economy due to its comfort and transparency..

Switching to Self-Employed When Heading for Retirement

Self-employment allows individuals to extend their working lives instead of accepting forced retirement. This study examines transitions to self-employment after age 50 but before retirement age. The study is based on data from Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), in which 16,412 people from 18 countries contributed 24,583 observations. Multilevel analyses were used; the data were pooled into one dataset, in which individuals (first-level variables) were nested within countries (second-level variables). The results reveal that few employees choose to switch to self-employment between age 50 and retirement. Characteristics such as health limitations, marital status, and national unemployment rates affect these employees’ decisions to become self-employed. Given the wage gaps between salaried employees and self-employed and the few employment opportunities available to salaried employees after they reach the official retirement age, the transition to self-employment is a solution for those who need sources of income or wish to remain active after retirement age.

The Disruptive Knight

The centuries-long debate over the origins and status of ‘knight’ produced in several national historiographies the view that the European knight rose in status to become a noble during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The twentieth century challenged this view, suggesting that knights were not a coherent social group and that we have misunderstood what it meant to be knighted. It is argued here that knights up till the thirteenth century may well have formed an economic continuum in European societies, with most of them being salaried employees in households and not automatically of noble standing. What defined them as a social group was their dependency on the noble magnates who employed them and with whom they associated. There is also evidence of a military and civil ethos of knighthood which was their property, not that of the noble magnates.

Satisfaction an Antecedent of Word-of-mouth among Electronic Banking Users: A Study on Salaried Employees

The study attempts to investigate whether the satisfaction pertaining to the use of electronic banking (e-banking) channels has any impact on word-of-mouth (WOM) among specific group of population, that is, the salaried employees. A sample of 400 respondents was collected from the districts of southern Assam, India, based on post-stratified random sampling. After achieving good fit of the measurement model by confirmatory factor analysis, hypothesis testing was done using structural modeling to find the causal relationship between the constructs of the model. The results revealed that there is a direct positive relationship between satisfaction and WOM in e-banking among salaried employees. Evidences show that the salaried employees are maximum users of e-banking. Finding out the relationship between satisfaction and WOM among target population shall enable the banks to develop a niche-based strategy and attain feedback for increasing satisfaction.