UCLA

Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Washington D.C., my dissertation examines the cultures, socialities and struggles of professional accumulation among aspiring think tank professionals, and how they are shaped by the hierarchies and competitive pressures of DC social worlds. I argue that being a member of the think tank professional class is not a natural attribute of persons, but rather an ongoing social process of becoming through which aspirants come to learn how to enact, inhabit and embody their professionality in everyday life. Focusing primarily on lower-status workers such as interns, I explore how aspiring professionals navigate desires and struggles for professional advancement within professional and employment hierarchies in which they are situated as relatively subordinated. Rather than simply sites for knowledge production, this dissertation shows that think tanks are institutional and social terrains for professional class formation and socialization, which both require and replicate subordination as central rites of passage. While think tanks are often understood to be defined primarily by their ideological-political orientation and function as policy knowledge producers, I show that social processes of becoming a professional subject within competitive hierarchies are central to understanding the role of think tanks as institutional actors that create and reproduce professional class worlds.

Throughout the dissertation, I highlight the ways that professional social formations structured by the imperative of professional accumulation create competition for prestige, status and advancement, and how this shape workers’ subjectivities, everyday practices, self-understandings and relationships with others in the social field. In response to pressures of accumulation and the desire for advancement, I attend to how workers not only craft and regulate their own professional subjectivities, but also construct and mediate symbolic understandings that hierarchically differentiate themselves from others. By showing how understandings and forms of professionality and expertise are structured by hierarchies of valuation, this dissertation also sheds light on how power, struggle and differentiation constitutively shape contemporary professional social worlds.