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Title: Institutional Change and the Making of an Entrepreneurial Middle Class

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2007

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Abstract: The rapid transformation of the American South in the wake of the Civil War offered one of the most propitious institutional circumstances for the formation of an entrepreneurial middle class. Despite claims to the contrary by social historians and postbellum boosters, Census microdata reveal however that the numbers of the petite bourgeoisie actually declined in the Lower South between 1860 and 1900. Drawing on structural, institutional, and Marxist accounts of class formation, this paper probes why the middle class did not expand more vigorously in response to the demise of the Old Southern system of chattel slavery. Empirical analyses suggest that the new South erected greater barriers to middle class entrepreneurship among Northerners, foreign immigrants, and emancipated blacks than those in evidence during the antebellum period. Nevertheless, those individuals who did gain entry into the entrepreneurial class enjoyed a more clearly defined relationship to productive assets and greater material wealth than any other major social faction in postbellum Southern society. Paralleling earlier institutional studies of organizations, the paper underscores the importance of myth and ceremony--over mere numerical prevalence--in the making of an entrepreneurial class.

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Authors: Ruef, Martin

Conference Name: Cornell-Mcgill Conference on "Institutions and Entrepreneurship"

Publisher Location: Ithaca, New York

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

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