GOING TO WORK<i> by Lisa Birnbach (Villard/Random House: $15.95) </i>

Reviewers hailed Lisa Birnbach’s “acerbic” wit when she published “The Preppy Handbook,” her guide to ivy college culture, in 1983. But Birnbach’s biting tone actually conceals considerable affection for her subject, illustrating how subtle the spoof can be as an art form. By making fun of certain character traits, satire welcomes them into our culture; to laugh knowingly at a cartoon or character sketch, in other words, is to participate in an act of inclusion. In “Going to Work,” Birnbach forgoes any pretense of condescension, showing herself to be our leading celebrator/satirist of yuppie culture. Birnbach says she profiled these 50 companies (from MCI to MTV) in order to “visit the most vital sources of creativity, social change and culture.” “I wasn’t looking for ‘dirt’ and I didn’t find any. . . . We’re friends, the business community and I.”

In practical terms, this means Birnbach got most of her information from corporate public relations departments. It is an approach that occasionally mars this text, leading Birnbach to ape corporate lines (“Delta . . . wants to be the best American airline”) and to omit information (such as starting salaries) that could have been gleaned from a few employee interviews. But for the most part, Birnbach’s breezy approach allows her to do what she does best: vividly and playfully portray social rituals. As in “The Preppy Handbook,” she portrays yuppiedom’s odd conception of sophisticated party conversation: “For Watty Piper’s ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ say, ‘It’s a charming little book, but most of all, I learned a lot about myself’ . . . . For Vincent Van Gogh, say, ‘he was a tortured genius. Don McLean sang a song about him.’ Say, ‘talk about painterly!’ ” Birnbach’s prose, while purple, creates entertaining profiles out of subjects that might otherwise have been considered too ordinary to appear in a newspaper’s business sections and too unspectacular to be covered in life-style pages.