Making a Workforce, Unmaking a Working Class: The Creation of a Human Capital Society in Houston, 1900-1980

• Main Author: Etheridge, Bryant Lucien
• Other Authors: Cohen, Lizabeth
• Language: en_US
• Published: Harvard University 2014
• Subjects: History; capital; capitalism; education; human; inequality; working-class
• Online Access: http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11646; http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274608

This dissertation explains how increased educational attainment became the most politically viable means of reducing economic inequality in the postwar United States. Using Houston as a case study, the dissertation argues that a heterogeneous group of people and organizations played a role in the creation of a society in which human capital development served the vital political function of structuring economic inequality: employers who sought to raise worker productivity at minimal direct cost to themselves and to wrest control of worker training from labor unions; ordinary Houstonians in search of economic security and opportunity, including black and Latino civil rights activists who used human capital development to dismantle the racial division of labor; and federal, state, and local government officials who used education to lower unemployment and spur economic development. === History