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Against Meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility
Meritocracy today involves the idea that whatever your social position at birth, society ought to offer enough opportunity and mobility for 'talent' to combine with 'effort' in order to 'rise to the top'. This idea is one of the most prevalent social and cultural tropes of our time, as palpable in the speeches of politicians as in popular culture. In this book Jo Littler argues that meritocracy is the key cultural means of legitimation for contemporary neoliberal culture - and that whilst it promises opportunity, it in fact creates new forms of social division.
Against Meritocracy is split into two parts. Part I explores the genealogies of meritocracy within social theory, political discourse and working cultures. It traces the dramatic U-turn in meritocracy's meaning, from socialist slur to a contemporary ideal of how a society should be organised. Part II uses a series of case studies to analyse the cultural pull of popular 'parables of progress', from reality TV to the super-rich and celebrity CEOs, from social media controversies to the rise of the 'mumpreneur'. Paying special attention to the role of gender, 'race' and class, this book provides new conceptualisations of the meaning of meritocracy in contemporary culture and society.
Against Meritocracy is split into two parts. Part I explores the genealogies of meritocracy within social theory, political discourse and working cultures. It traces the dramatic U-turn in meritocracy's meaning, from socialist slur to a contemporary ideal of how a society should be organised. Part II uses a series of case studies to analyse the cultural pull of popular 'parables of progress', from reality TV to the super-rich and celebrity CEOs, from social media controversies to the rise of the 'mumpreneur'. Paying special attention to the role of gender, 'race' and class, this book provides new conceptualisations of the meaning of meritocracy in contemporary culture and society.
236 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 2017
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April 8, 2018
A friend of mine at work lent this to me and recommended I read it and it has taken me a ridiculous amount of time to finish. In fact, I’ve read two books recommended in it along the way and another by Littler that I haven’t reviewed, but also found to be an interesting take on Foucault’s Biopolitics – something else I’m going to have to find time to read one of these days. This book, if you can get hold of it, is definitely worth reading and worth reading in one go, rather than piecemeal as I’ve read it. The only problem is that as an academic book it is obscenely expensive – a real pity, as this is precisely the sort of book that more people should be able to read. It is accessible and very interesting.
You might be wondering how it is possible to be against meritocracy. This might even sound a bit like being against motherhood and apple pie, as Americans are supposed to like to say. If we are to be against people being rewarded on the basis of merit, surely that means we want to see people rewarded on the basis of some arbitrary trait, birth or skin colour or their genitals, and surely that would be worse. There is a book by Alain de Botton called ‘Status Anxiety’ whose main thesis is that people today are so overcome by anxiety because we live in a meritocracy in which our personal success or failure is totally down to us. This is because a meritocracy only provides for equal starting places in the race of life, guaranteeing that we will not end up crossing the finish line together. This means that being one of life’s losers can’t be blamed, as it was in the past, on the disadvantages we faced along the way. Rather, what a meritocracy demands of us is a recognition that our actual place in society, and how this becomes incontestably manifest, is only due to how well or how poorly we do in life. Our society’s myths almost invariably are about those overcoming the odds to succeed due to their best efforts. Therefore, our character is manifest to everyone, not merely ourselves, in our success or failure – and we have no one but ourselves to blame for how well or poorly we do. Meritocracy implies differential outcomes – it implies winners and losers – and, unfortunately, it also implies many, many more of the latter than of the former.
I was about to launch in on a history of the term meritocracy – but you can read the author herself provide that here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentis... – which is handy, as it saves me looking up the names of people she mentions along the way. The main point I want to make is that the original uses of the word were all negative – Young’s novel is dystopian and is set in a world not too much unlike our own.
The point I want to stress here is that being ruled by those with the most merit is based on the assumption that merit is something that is singular and utterly simple to assess. That is, merit is something quite different from everything else we might want to measure and assess in life that we might otherwise think of as being multi-faceted. You know, like intelligence or health– things that we have spent decades seeking to postulate and measure, but that people still argue that they don’t even really exist. And I’m not even talking about vague ideas like kindness or morality, that we haven’t spent all that much effort seeking to measure, but that might be ultimately what makes us human and so, perhaps ought to be measured more than intelligence or health or merit.
The point I’m trying to make here (and perhaps getting a little off the point) is that merit is asserted as being obvious, but that it is measured tautologically, that is, merit = success = merit. There is a feeling that we can’t say what merit is until it succeeds, but then if this is the case why do we need a word like merit at all if all it means is success?
At one point in this book she gives another equation for merit – merit = ability + effort. This is the version we are likely to prefer, I think. We all know people who have lots of ability, but who never made the effort to achieve the greatness that should have been theirs. And we also know people who put in lots of effort, but never achieve anything at all, lacking the basic ability their effort required. The merit equation seems to explain both of these types of people and their ultimate failure.
And merit has become the only explanation our society accepts for success today that has any merit in itself. In fact, it has become hilarious watching the kinds of people who claim that their own success is purely due to their own merit. Take Trump, for instance. During the election he responded to someone saying he only became rich because he had a rich father – and he was suitably outraged saying his father only give him a very small loan of a couple of million dollars. It is hard to imagine why people didn’t fall about laughing when he said this.
In Australia we have a very similar example in Gina Rinehart – who for a while there the richest woman in the world. Her father left her a series of iron ore mines. But she claims the reason why she is now so wealthy is due to her own efforts and business acumen, and that the business left to her by her father was in such disarray that really she is solely responsible for its and her own success. The little issue of being her father’s daughter, of inheriting his wealth and mines, of the connections and support all this gave her – none of that is at all relevant for her.
What I find most remarkable about all this – for both of them – is their obvious need to assert their success has been solely due to their own efforts and abilities, and for them to ignore and erase any advantages they might have had other than those derived from their skills and efforts.
I read a fascinating article today (https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/n...) that said that our current government in Australia will fight the next election by finding ways to give more to the older people in the population – essentially stealing from the young to give to the old. And that this isn’t just an Australian phenomenon, but is happening across the world. It is leading to a divide between old and young in voting patterns – with the radicalisation of the young the reason why Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the US have done so well. That the young are better educated and at least as hard working as their parents, but have received none of the rewards for their efforts or skills. That is, the very opposite of what meritocracy pretends to offer. In fact, the more our society says it is a meritocracy, the more you need to look away from all of the clear examples that it is anything but. For instance, the endlessly growing inequality due to wealth being massively transferred to the hyper-wealthy, the near impossibility of social mobility today, particularly in the US, but increasing everywhere due again to growing hyper-inequality. Meritocracy is being increasingly seen for what it is – a lie to keep people in their place by assuring them that their place is the one they have ‘earned’, rather than being due to the caste they were born into. The lie being people need to never demand what they do not deserve and that since the system is perfectly fair, to receive anything more than you currently receive is simply theft.
There are lovely bits to this book. The best for me is the idea that the ladder is the perfect metaphor for a meritocracy. That is, only one person can climb it at a time while there is consequently only one path to success. This fits so perfectly with neoliberal notions of how the world works – the road being narrow with many falling by the wayside. But, if the world is to have a future we need to move away from stupid notions like this. If our society is incapable of allowing more people to succeed, then the society needs to be changed, simple as that.
She provides a lot of examples from popular culture that show how this horribly narrow definition of what merit is, is being constantly reinforced in our consciousness by television programs. The Apprentice (something I’ve never seen) is as good an example as any of this idea – but just about any ‘reality’ TV program (I’ve never seen any of these either, by the way) would do. The point of these shows is that someone is voted off every week, there are an abundance of failures. For the contestants to succeed they need to kill or be killed. These shows are the ultimate expression of the idea that success is for the few and failure for the many. If there was ever an idea whose time had come to be reframed, surely, then, it is the idea of meritocracy.
Towards the end of the book she ties in the relationships between meritocracy, gender and race. That is, how merit is used to justify all of the discrimination and disadvantage that exists in the world today – and since merit is only evident once it is realised in success, this argument appears to be self-reinforcing. White males are on top because of merit – do you need proof? Well, who are on top?
Really, this is a wonderful book – it challenges what I take to be one of the primary lies of our age.
You might be wondering how it is possible to be against meritocracy. This might even sound a bit like being against motherhood and apple pie, as Americans are supposed to like to say. If we are to be against people being rewarded on the basis of merit, surely that means we want to see people rewarded on the basis of some arbitrary trait, birth or skin colour or their genitals, and surely that would be worse. There is a book by Alain de Botton called ‘Status Anxiety’ whose main thesis is that people today are so overcome by anxiety because we live in a meritocracy in which our personal success or failure is totally down to us. This is because a meritocracy only provides for equal starting places in the race of life, guaranteeing that we will not end up crossing the finish line together. This means that being one of life’s losers can’t be blamed, as it was in the past, on the disadvantages we faced along the way. Rather, what a meritocracy demands of us is a recognition that our actual place in society, and how this becomes incontestably manifest, is only due to how well or how poorly we do in life. Our society’s myths almost invariably are about those overcoming the odds to succeed due to their best efforts. Therefore, our character is manifest to everyone, not merely ourselves, in our success or failure – and we have no one but ourselves to blame for how well or poorly we do. Meritocracy implies differential outcomes – it implies winners and losers – and, unfortunately, it also implies many, many more of the latter than of the former.
I was about to launch in on a history of the term meritocracy – but you can read the author herself provide that here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentis... – which is handy, as it saves me looking up the names of people she mentions along the way. The main point I want to make is that the original uses of the word were all negative – Young’s novel is dystopian and is set in a world not too much unlike our own.
The point I want to stress here is that being ruled by those with the most merit is based on the assumption that merit is something that is singular and utterly simple to assess. That is, merit is something quite different from everything else we might want to measure and assess in life that we might otherwise think of as being multi-faceted. You know, like intelligence or health– things that we have spent decades seeking to postulate and measure, but that people still argue that they don’t even really exist. And I’m not even talking about vague ideas like kindness or morality, that we haven’t spent all that much effort seeking to measure, but that might be ultimately what makes us human and so, perhaps ought to be measured more than intelligence or health or merit.
The point I’m trying to make here (and perhaps getting a little off the point) is that merit is asserted as being obvious, but that it is measured tautologically, that is, merit = success = merit. There is a feeling that we can’t say what merit is until it succeeds, but then if this is the case why do we need a word like merit at all if all it means is success?
At one point in this book she gives another equation for merit – merit = ability + effort. This is the version we are likely to prefer, I think. We all know people who have lots of ability, but who never made the effort to achieve the greatness that should have been theirs. And we also know people who put in lots of effort, but never achieve anything at all, lacking the basic ability their effort required. The merit equation seems to explain both of these types of people and their ultimate failure.
And merit has become the only explanation our society accepts for success today that has any merit in itself. In fact, it has become hilarious watching the kinds of people who claim that their own success is purely due to their own merit. Take Trump, for instance. During the election he responded to someone saying he only became rich because he had a rich father – and he was suitably outraged saying his father only give him a very small loan of a couple of million dollars. It is hard to imagine why people didn’t fall about laughing when he said this.
In Australia we have a very similar example in Gina Rinehart – who for a while there the richest woman in the world. Her father left her a series of iron ore mines. But she claims the reason why she is now so wealthy is due to her own efforts and business acumen, and that the business left to her by her father was in such disarray that really she is solely responsible for its and her own success. The little issue of being her father’s daughter, of inheriting his wealth and mines, of the connections and support all this gave her – none of that is at all relevant for her.
What I find most remarkable about all this – for both of them – is their obvious need to assert their success has been solely due to their own efforts and abilities, and for them to ignore and erase any advantages they might have had other than those derived from their skills and efforts.
I read a fascinating article today (https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/n...) that said that our current government in Australia will fight the next election by finding ways to give more to the older people in the population – essentially stealing from the young to give to the old. And that this isn’t just an Australian phenomenon, but is happening across the world. It is leading to a divide between old and young in voting patterns – with the radicalisation of the young the reason why Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the US have done so well. That the young are better educated and at least as hard working as their parents, but have received none of the rewards for their efforts or skills. That is, the very opposite of what meritocracy pretends to offer. In fact, the more our society says it is a meritocracy, the more you need to look away from all of the clear examples that it is anything but. For instance, the endlessly growing inequality due to wealth being massively transferred to the hyper-wealthy, the near impossibility of social mobility today, particularly in the US, but increasing everywhere due again to growing hyper-inequality. Meritocracy is being increasingly seen for what it is – a lie to keep people in their place by assuring them that their place is the one they have ‘earned’, rather than being due to the caste they were born into. The lie being people need to never demand what they do not deserve and that since the system is perfectly fair, to receive anything more than you currently receive is simply theft.
There are lovely bits to this book. The best for me is the idea that the ladder is the perfect metaphor for a meritocracy. That is, only one person can climb it at a time while there is consequently only one path to success. This fits so perfectly with neoliberal notions of how the world works – the road being narrow with many falling by the wayside. But, if the world is to have a future we need to move away from stupid notions like this. If our society is incapable of allowing more people to succeed, then the society needs to be changed, simple as that.
She provides a lot of examples from popular culture that show how this horribly narrow definition of what merit is, is being constantly reinforced in our consciousness by television programs. The Apprentice (something I’ve never seen) is as good an example as any of this idea – but just about any ‘reality’ TV program (I’ve never seen any of these either, by the way) would do. The point of these shows is that someone is voted off every week, there are an abundance of failures. For the contestants to succeed they need to kill or be killed. These shows are the ultimate expression of the idea that success is for the few and failure for the many. If there was ever an idea whose time had come to be reframed, surely, then, it is the idea of meritocracy.
Towards the end of the book she ties in the relationships between meritocracy, gender and race. That is, how merit is used to justify all of the discrimination and disadvantage that exists in the world today – and since merit is only evident once it is realised in success, this argument appears to be self-reinforcing. White males are on top because of merit – do you need proof? Well, who are on top?
Really, this is a wonderful book – it challenges what I take to be one of the primary lies of our age.
September 5, 2019
A good book on the myth of meritocracy.
An interesting side thought occurred when I read this book. I once saw an advertisement about a young child who wore bad shoes to his school. His friends noticed it, and it turned out that this kid secretly goes off to work as a parking officer after school hours. He was paid Rp2.000 per car, and he slowly managed to save enough to buy new shoes.
Why is this glorified? Why does the occurrence of hard work in this case is seen as something good, something to strive upon? Should not all school children have good shoes instead? I think this is just another prop on the idea of meritocracy.
An interesting side thought occurred when I read this book. I once saw an advertisement about a young child who wore bad shoes to his school. His friends noticed it, and it turned out that this kid secretly goes off to work as a parking officer after school hours. He was paid Rp2.000 per car, and he slowly managed to save enough to buy new shoes.
Why is this glorified? Why does the occurrence of hard work in this case is seen as something good, something to strive upon? Should not all school children have good shoes instead? I think this is just another prop on the idea of meritocracy.
November 26, 2019
Meritocracy as an ideology is a key contributor to the success and tenacity of neoliberalism, as a seemingly 'fair' means through which competition is expressed and extended.
Meritocracy as a term has a very short life (60 years or so) and in its early days it was a word with negative connotations, as time went by it started being used as a key term of neoliberalism.
Meritocracy is a myth perpetuated by society that reinforces individualism and hides social inequalities by placing all the responsibility of the outcome of one's life on the individual ignoring that there's not a level playing field.
Meritocracy as a social system is therefore a structural imposibility, and, as a cultural discourse, it is a damaging fiction.
Meritocracy as a term has a very short life (60 years or so) and in its early days it was a word with negative connotations, as time went by it started being used as a key term of neoliberalism.
Meritocracy is a myth perpetuated by society that reinforces individualism and hides social inequalities by placing all the responsibility of the outcome of one's life on the individual ignoring that there's not a level playing field.
Meritocracy as a social system is therefore a structural imposibility, and, as a cultural discourse, it is a damaging fiction.
January 2, 2024
Informative read that makes good use of cultural and social theory to discuss the structural impossibility of meritocracy as a social system whilst serving as a damaging piece of fiction as cultural discourse
The author argues that the popular myth of meritocracy has become a key means through which plutocracy perpetuates, reproduces and extends itself via cultural legitimation for contemporary capitalist culture as embodied in neoliberal capitalism
The author argues that the popular myth of meritocracy has become a key means through which plutocracy perpetuates, reproduces and extends itself via cultural legitimation for contemporary capitalist culture as embodied in neoliberal capitalism
August 3, 2018
A watery mush of emotions with enough quotes to make the book smell of tax sponsored sinecure and a good pension plan for life courtesy of the government. This book brings nothing more to the table than the title: against.
December 8, 2023
Cred că m-a ajutat enorm că s-au folosit atâtea exemple practice ca să pot înțelege mai bine anumite noțiuni.
Totodată se regăsesc întâmplări mediatizate pe care le-am auzit probabil toți.
Este descrisă ideea meritocrației de la geneza în prezent, precum și folosirea acesteia în discursurile politice dar și emisiuni de divertisment și TV.
O lectură mai mult practică pe care toată lumea ar trebui s-o parcurgă ca să înțeleagă cum funcționează lucrurile în societate.
Totodată se regăsesc întâmplări mediatizate pe care le-am auzit probabil toți.
Este descrisă ideea meritocrației de la geneza în prezent, precum și folosirea acesteia în discursurile politice dar și emisiuni de divertisment și TV.
O lectură mai mult practică pe care toată lumea ar trebui s-o parcurgă ca să înțeleagă cum funcționează lucrurile în societate.
April 20, 2021
Good book for thoughts
I actually like this book a lot. I forgot just how persuasive the media could be. Better yet, I forgot the hunger and drive the elite have in achieving greatness. This book just reinforced my thoughts on 'do you really need that?' while shopping painlessly online. Very well-written.
I actually like this book a lot. I forgot just how persuasive the media could be. Better yet, I forgot the hunger and drive the elite have in achieving greatness. This book just reinforced my thoughts on 'do you really need that?' while shopping painlessly online. Very well-written.
Read
May 17, 2021A neat job of framing the faults of meritocracy in the neoliberal context developed over the past 50 years. There are better and worse forms of meritocracy, and it's important not to lose sight of why meritocracy appeals, but we seem to have been left with a form of meritocracy for which the ladder is the perfect symbol: narrow and individualistic.
December 21, 2022
Very detailed.
Meritocracy was a concept that began to be pushed around the water cooler in the 1970s. This is the most careful study of the concept I have yet read. Extremely thorough history. Not for everybody.
Meritocracy was a concept that began to be pushed around the water cooler in the 1970s. This is the most careful study of the concept I have yet read. Extremely thorough history. Not for everybody.
June 28, 2023
Worth Spent and money for the Book
I like the narration and example to point with the theory.
Actually I was able to connect with my Indian context. It was very useful to understand Meritocracy as a policy on work.
I like the narration and example to point with the theory.
Actually I was able to connect with my Indian context. It was very useful to understand Meritocracy as a policy on work.
September 29, 2020
Very thought-provoking, but also feels a little uneven and dependent upon subscribing to an underlying view which is ultimately proved at the end.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews