All Barbara Ehrenreich wanted was a white-collar job at 50k a year plus benefits. Uh huh. Well, join a little club called America. In Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (Henry Holt, $24), this veteran social critic resorts to the same undercover tactics that she used in her best-selling Nickel and Dimed to explore life in Dilbert Country. Her goal: Land a cubicle and report from within.

To this end, she employs a team of job coaches who, for a mere $200 an hour, provide useless assignments (describe your fantasy job!), resumé advice and personality tests. But after a year on the trail the best she can muster are spots pimping the respective fruit of AFLAC (quack!) and Mary Kay. As both are independent contractor gigs (read: no benefits), she decides to pass. Given this failure, Bait and Switch is less an expose of corporate America than it is a politicized job seeker's diary.

After back-to-back undercover forays into milieus of different collars, one has to wonder if pretending to be someone she's not has an appeal that transcends mere journalism. Ehrenreich says it isn't so.

"It was very different in Nickel and Dimed," Ehrenreich explains from her home in Charlottesville, Va. "I easily got a job and it was, 'You gotta do this, you gotta do that.' You can't pretend to be a waitress. The food gets to the table or it doesn't. Now in Bait and Switch, there was a level of deception that was way beyond that. I had to have a fake resumé. I even had a different name to prevent recognition. Still, I thought this could be straightforward. I have skills… like the PR that I can do. I can write, I can do press releases. What I quickly found was that I was being coached and told and instructed to be something that I'm not. To be constantly upbeat, positive, perky, to have a 'winning attitude.' I'm not the only one acting here. Every job seeker is told to act a certain way."

While Ehrenreich ventured to job coaching sessions, executive boot camps and a host of networking events at regrettable exurban eateries with names like Roasted Garlic, she's never in a position to observe her fellow unemployed over the long term. What's missing in "on the job" immediacy, however, is often made up for in analysis. Take her distinction between blue- and white-collar job hunting. In the former, a pulse and a drug test can get you in the door. Not so in the corporate world, where employers expect an almost spiritual glee for work that does little but gnaw the soul.

For Ehrenreich the systemic rise in white-collar unemployment coupled with generous lashings of downsizing amounts to nothing less than the shattering of a social contract understood by generations.

"The idea of the corporation is a number of people coming together and acting as one body. I think it meant something like that well into the '70s. You were loyal to the company and it was loyal to you. HR departments saw themselves as helping hold on to and retaining good employees. Since the late '80s, it began with the wave of mergers and acquisitions; employees well up to the upper and middle levels are more likely to be seen as liabilities. How can we dispose of as many people as possible? It doesn't mean the net number of jobs diminishes, but it definitely means the relationship of mutual loyalty is gone."

The irony here is palpable, or at least it should be. Where dissident intellectuals once lamented the conformist oppression meted out and endured by versions of "the man in the gray flannel suit," now it seems they'd line his path with lotuses if only he'd come back. Perhaps perceived social stultification is a small price to pay for a security blanket.

Or as Ehrenreich puts it, the corporate world still requires abject sacrifice but without the one thing worth selling your soul for. "It's the same demand for total loyalty but with no security. It's no longer good enough to do a good enough job; you have to be passionate about your work, yet it's unrequited love."

Barbara Ehrenreich reads Wed., Oct. 5, 8 p.m., $6 simulcast seating only, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.