The Competitive Personality Then and Now

If anything has changed in the theory of the "competitive personality" since Mills's time, it is that the kind of social personality it outlines is more ubiquitous and embodied more spontaneously.

“The Competitive Personality,” published in Partisan Review in the fall of 1946, contains C. Wright Mills’s discussion of a new type of worker, a sort of mutation of the white-collar employee about which Mills would later publish a groundbreaking sociological study. The competitive personality is an attempt to demonstrate how changes in competitive rela…