Against Meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility

by Jo Littler

‘talent’ to combine with ‘effort’ in order to ‘rise to the top’.

idea, practice and discourse of greater social equality

and marketising them.

The attempt to absorb the language of equality and identity politics into entrepreneurial self-fashioning has created lonely forms of selective empowerment,

is a device that can only be used individually; you go up the ladder alone’. Such an ‘alternative to solidarity’,

‘sweetens the poison of hierarchy’ by offering advancement through merit rather than money or birth, whilst retaining a commitment to the very notion of hierarchy itself (

The first problem

endorses a competitive, linear, hierarchical system in which by definition certain people must be left behind.

permanent state of competition

The second problem is that the contemporary logic of meritocracy frequently (though not always) assumes that talent and intelligence

are innate: it depends on an essentialised conception of intellect and aptitude. In other words, it primarily assumes an ability which is inborn and either given the chance or not to succeed. This notion of intelligence is overwhelmingly singular and linear. Its problems are powerfully critiqued in the magnificent multi-authored book Inequality by Design, which shows how a particularly narrow notion of intelligence, in the form of psychometric testing of IQs, structured ‘the bell curve’

The third problem with the contemporary idea of meritocracy is that it ignores the fact that climbing the ladder is simply much harder for some people than others.

There was more ‘room at the top’ for that particular generation at that particular time and in that

The fourth key problem with the contemporary ideology of meritocracy is its uncritical valorisation of particular forms of status, in the hierarchical ranking of professions and status it endorses.

singer or entrepreneur

housing estates,

The fifth key problem with the contemporary ideology of meritocracy, and

the one which moves us into the territory of considering why it has such currency and power, is that it functions as an ideological myth to obscure and extend economic and social inequalities. Recent