Blue collar community

South Chicago is a large steel mill community with a predominantly working-class population. Like steel towns throughout the United States, South Chicago is made up of the ethnic and racial groups which have settled in industrial town over the last century. Blue Collar Community explores the complex social organization of this community-one thing completely dominated by heavy manufacturing. Willaim Kornblum and his wife moved into an apartment in South Chicago in 1968 and stayed for two and a half years. Kornblum spent some time working in a mill, helped with several political campaigns, and made friends in the neighborhood taverns. By participating in local activities, he was able to examine at close range the impacts of residential segregation, ethnic identification, age groupings, job status, and patterns of leisure style upon the social cohesion of the community. "Kornblum presents a concise overview", writes Morris Janowitz in the Foreword, "of the elaborate social organization of a locality which has been dominated by heavy manufacturuing for nearly a century. His underlying question is a version of the classic one in political sociology: why was there and is there no powerful working-class political movement which could be called socialist in the United States?"