This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and "professional" employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth.  Relatively, it is nowhere near so large as the old petty bourgeoisie which, on the basis of independent entrepreneurship, occupied as much as half or more of the population in the pre-monopoly stage of capitalism.  It embraces in the United States today perhaps over 15 but less than 20 percent of total employment.  Its rapid growth as a partial replacement for the old middle class, however, makes its definition a matter of special interest, all the more so since its purely formal character is similar to that of the clearly proletarianized working-class population (279).