I see a work by Ruby Payne listed above. I've successfully used Ms.Payne's "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" to enhance my understanding of middle class thinking and norms--kind of reverse engineering, as I didn't grow up in the kind of middle class that is her baseline; and I'm too much of a nerd to believe, for instance, that talking loudly is inherently bad. It helped me make some sense out of certain puzzling behaviors on the part of middle-class authority figures that had come across as patronizing, disloyal, arbitrary, rigid and self-serving. I could see them as more functional when the framework within which they originate was set against both poverty and wealth frameworks.
