In an Age of Experts: The Changing Roles of Professionals in Politics and Public Life

(Paperback)

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Description

Since the 1960s the number of highly educated professionals in America has grown dramatically. During this time scholars and journalists have described the group as exercising increasing influence over cultural values and public affairs. The rise of this putative "new class" has been greeted with idealistic hope or ideological suspicion on both the right and the left. In an Age of Experts challenges these characterizations, showing that claims about the distinctive politics and values of the professional stratum have been overstated, and that the political preferences of professionals are much more closely linked to those of business owners and executives than has been commonly assumed.

Reviews

"Brint's important book ... tackles very large and complex questions about the changing roles of the professions in advanced capitalist societies... It continues lines of analysis that have been pursued since the classic turn-of-the-century works of sociology, and it does so with great success."--Contemporary Sociology "Brint's important book ... tackles very large and complex questions about the changing roles of the professions in advanced capitalist societies... It continues lines of analysis that have been pursued since the classic turn-of-the-century works of sociology, and it does so with great success."--Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Contemporary Sociology

Author Bio

Steven Brint is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the coauthor, with Jerome Karabel, of the award-winning study The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985.