Such workers are in a curious position. They are not owners—in other words, they are not entitled to the profits from the firm—but they are proxies, often, for the will of the owners. Indeed, a technical writer seems a perfect example of the double-edged nature of Taylorization for white-collar workers. The instructions that the speaker writes are the routines that other workers follow. Yet their production is itself scripted and routinized. With the development of the corporate form, the functional aspect of capital (command, organization, management) gets hived off to employees, and the single unifying consciousness that might have existed in the small firm, supervising every aspect of a production process, shatters into scores of small tasks and positions, each one correlated with some aspect of a process that can no longer be visualized in entirety. While the writer of the instruction manual might well grasp the totality of the work process, this overview is paradoxically inscribed within a singular, monotonous task. Hence, as Andrew Hoberek notes in his study of the white-collar middle class in postwar American fiction, workers like the speaker of “The Instruction Manual” tend to experience “mental labor [as] the site of both transcendence and disempowerment,” the former indexing a past life of petit-bourgeois entrepreneurialism and the latter a future life of thoroughly proletarianized drudge work.6 But whereas Hoberek wants to demystify white-collar pretensions to universality, I argue that such claims derive from real features of white-collar work, since these workers were, in fact, often both bosses and employees, as well as mediators between executives and simple subordinates. This does not make their experience universal, but it does give such workers a uniquely privileged viewpoint, however full of contradictions.