Of course, a person’s occupational status is not necessarily public knowledge. Perhaps, therefore, workers acquired goods in order to use them to project higher status than they actually had. However, status display of that sort only works in certain kinds of settings. In their Middletown studies, the Lynds ofer the very general Veblenesque speculation that as cities grow in size, so conspicuous consumption becomes more important. This is because increasing anonymity entails that “personal means of placing oneself in the group, involving considerations of the kind of person one is, yield to more quickly determinable, shorthand symbols, namely what one owns” (Lynd and Lynd 1929, p. 467).24 But the informants in Chinoy’s and in the Lynds’ studies inhabited relatively small towns (Lansing was smaller than Muncie, but both had populations of less than 100,000) with fairly cohesive communities, one major employer, and social and spatial segregation along class lines. In that kind of setting, it is likely that people would have a good sense of what others do for a living, making it dificult to successfully “fake” high status through ostentatious display of goods. Moreover, none of the workers interviewed in the Lynd and Chinoy studies say anything to indicate that the motivation for accumulating commodities is to shore up or improve their status position. To be sure, informants would perhaps not care to admit as much, even if it was true. Yet Chinoy emphasizes the marked degree to which his autoworkers had low self-esteem and were in general quite self-deprecating and resigned to their station in life. As noted, the industrial workers he interviewed felt very much fixed in their status and saw only very limited opportunities for social mobility. While they spoke of “getting ahead” to describe the accumulation of goods, there is no suggestion that they felt that accumulating things would improve their status in any deep and meaningful sense. It does not, therefore, seem likely that the point of the preoccupation with material accumulation that Chinoy draws our attention to was simply to gain position in the status hierarchy.
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
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