White-collar workers were introduced into the realm of modern social science at the end of the nineteenth century. The starting point was twofold: (1) the notion of a growing number of occupations, employments, and functions that shared many traits of the working class while at the same time differing in important aspects from manual workers as well as from the higher social strata; and (2) the exceptional rapid growth of these categories in the decades around the turn of the century, which even outdid that of the manual workers.
