Joan C. Williams, White Working Class (HBR Press 2017) — the asymmetric meaning of "hard work" and the disrespect dynamic

Claim: Joan C. Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017) supplies the political-economy framing of marketing-vendor resentment. The chapter "Why Does the Working Class Resent Professionals but Admire the Rich?" specifies the asymmetry.

Williams writes: "To working-class members of all races, valuing hard work means having the rigid self-discipline to do a menial job you hate for 40 years, and reining yourself in so you don't 'have an attitude' [...]. Hard work for elites is associated with self-actualization; 'disruption' means founding a successful start-up. Disruption, in working-class jobs, just gets you fired."

And the cohort name that lands hard: the professional-managerial-class figures "are the people who are ordering them around every day, often disrespectfully."

Source: Williams, Joan C. White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.

Confidence: Verified (primary text).

For Candid: Marketing vendors are recruited disproportionately from the professional-managerial class Williams names. The GC reads marketing-vendor authority claims through 40 years of being "ordered around disrespectfully" by precisely this cohort. The pitch needs to refuse the professional-managerial register, not lean into it. ("Disrupt your lead flow" is unintentionally a class declaration.)