Three interrelated processes:

(1) Industrialization: What are the characteristics of an industrial economy?

• The work is concentrated in factories = more and more people are working for someone else in a factory
• The workforce in concentrated in manufacturing
• Must have increasingly expanded markets = more places to sell the products that are produced
  • Markets are/were expanded through advertising
  • Mail order system; catalogs
  • The railroad is used to transport products
• More and more specialization in everything
  • For example, in manufacturing, someone make a part of a shoe, not a whole shoe
  • In the professions, a lawyer might specialize in only one area of law
  • As things become specialized, they become stratified = have more layers or classes
    • Upper class: independently wealthy or own factories or railroads
    • Middle class: new professionals such as lawyers, doctors, dentists, teachers, factory managers (while color workers are workers who do "clean work" -- they don't get dirty -- teachers, bank workers, etc.)
    • Between middle and lower classes -- part of both: "blue collar" workers: skilled workers without higher education but who need skills that the lower class workers don't need
    • Lower class: unskilled work such as factory line workers, domestic home workers, cleaning, etc.

(2) Modernization

• "Time-work discipline" = working by the clock; less autonomy
• Wage work
  • Better standard of living? For some yes, for some no
• A separation between home and work
• People are buying what they used to make or trade for with neighbors; now need money
  • At first, basic things: food, soap, candles, clothing, shoes, etc.
• Education changes
  • Some people become more highly educated
  • Education become more specialized
  • More general education is necessary; more standardization in public schools
  • More education and more types of education led to status being related to education

(3) Urbanization

• Cities grow
  • Immigration contributes to growth of (especially eastern) cities with manufacturing
• Markets grow, too, because of large numbers of people in the cities

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People's lives change:

• Wage work - standard of living
• Less autonomy
• People buying what they used to make
• Family size decreases
  • Fewer children needed as farm workers
  • Families have more desire for their fewer children to achieve more and get more education; can now imagine a "better" life for their children: more goods, more education, and higher status and class; a chance to be children and not live like adults (these opportunites not available to poor immigrants however)