This 1972 book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, is a highly cited book (nearly 5,000 citations) by Sennett and Cobb. The work covers meritocracy, individualism and class / caste. Suggested to be a sociological critique of everyday life, and at the time of publication it may have been unique and inspired other similar investigations. A few notes:

“The power of class today is not that it makes individual psychology reflect behavior of the “system”. We reject, for instance, Marcuse’s idea that people on the bottom have tastes similar to those on the top, and therefore keep the Establishment alive. Rather, the way in which people try to keep free of the emotional grip of the social structure, unintentionally, systematically, in aggregate keeps the class order going.” (p. 258)

“The meanings a person makes and receives about what he or she does, center around this same issue of the social production of value. For that teacher, it is believing that teaching is a socially valuable activity (is that not what “doing good” means for the teacher-helping people to grow, but with an eye towards the larger society?), for the artist it is believing that art has value; while for the factory worker, for the janitor, for the clerical worker, is it believing that productive work is valuable. That is, for working people, it is work in general, as opposed to any specific skill, that is seen to give a person a sense of legitimacy, whereas for persons of higher class, it is a specific function that is seen as legitimizing. In either case, however the source of legitimacy in capitalist society comes primarily from what a person produces…” (p. 267)