Meritocratic Society Research Articles

Is Meritocracy Not So Bad After All? Educational Expansion and Intergenerational Mobility in 40 Countries

In the face of continued socioeconomic inheritance, the belief that the simple expansion of educational opportunities will create meritocratic societies has been met with skepticism. It is well documented that within expanding educational systems, class-advantaged families attempt to secure further advantages for their offspring. Conversely, for many, the modernist belief that educational expansion is a means to achieving a fairer society remains compelling. Studying trends in intergenerational occupational mobility in 40 countries from four continents, I examine whether educational expansion enhances occupational mobility, and whether such trends are counteracted by heightened persistence between social origin and destination within education groups. The results indicate that educational expansion over time, and the policies supporting it, are linked to improved intergenerational occupational mobility. Furthermore, this increased mobility through expanded educational opportunities is not negated by a strengthening of within-education elite persistence in occupational status, suggesting that occupational mobility patterns can genuinely change through educational expansion. The modernist ideology around educational expansion as a driver of social mobility may warrant renewed attention.

Measuring meritocracy: a study of Indonesian English teachers’ views on the role of effort in their own and their students’ success

ABSTRACT Meritocracy argues that people’s success in life should be based on their own effort, not their family background. Education plays a vital role here, providing opportunities for people of all ages to develop and demonstrate their merit. Although meritocracy is generally seen as positive, this article cautions that achieving a more meritocratic society can be problematic, that merit can be difficult to define, and that merit may be unfairly used to rationalize inequality. A survey study was presented involving 260 school teachers of English in various parts of Indonesia who were asked their views and experiences on meritocracy. Results suggest that many supported meritocracy and believed that it functioned fairly well in Indonesia for themselves, their own students, and students in Indonesia generally. The study makes an empirical contribution to a small but growing body of research on the role of meritocracy in education, especially in the Global South.

Do school grades matter for growing up? Testing the predictive validity of school performance for outcomes in emerging adulthood.

In putatively meritocratic societies, doing well in school is a pivotal precondition for accessing further and higher education, which, in turn, has a pervasive, long-term influence on adulthood development. Yet, doing well in school may also predict "real-life success" outside formal education settings and independent of the educational qualifications that a person attains. Such predictions are likely to become salient during emerging adulthood, a life period characterized by career explorations and social-emotional adjustment. Here, we tested the predictive validity of end-of-compulsory school grades at age 16 years in a U.K.-representative population cohort sample of up to N = 6,488, who were born between 1994 and 1996, for a broad range of occupational, financial, and social-emotional outcomes at age 23. End-of-compulsory school performance accounted for 1%-20% of the variance across occupational, financial, and social-emotional outcomes in emerging adulthood. Educational attainment attenuated these associations only slightly, with school grades at age 16 accounting for variance in emerging adulthood outcomes independent of later educational attainment. We found that school grades were equally predictive for boys' and girls' outcomes. In children from lower family socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, school grades were more predictive of their educational attainment, financial attitudes, and anxiety compared to higher SES children, with varying effect sizes (i.e., 0.3%-4.2%). Our findings suggest that school-leaving grades facilitate the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood, independent of educational attainment, and that they might enable children from low-SES families to compensate for some of their background disadvantages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How Segregation Ruins Inference: A Sociological Simulation of the Inequality Equilibrium

Abstract Why do many people underestimate economic and racial inequality and maintain that theirs is a meritocratic society? Existing work suggests that people are rationalizing, misinformed, or misled. This article proposes an additional explanation: Inequality itself makes economic and racial disparities difficult to understand. In unequal societies, individuals establish their networks at formative institutions patterned by class and race. As a result, they unwittingly condition on key causal pathways when making descriptive and causal inferences about inequality. We use a simple agent-based model to show that, under circumstances typical to highly stratified societies, individuals will underestimate the extent of economic and racial inequality, downplay the importance of inherited advantages, and overestimate the relative importance of individual ability. Moreover, we show that they will both underestimate the extent of racial discrimination and overestimate its relative importance. Because segregated social worlds bias inference in these ways, all individuals (rich and poor) have principled reasons to favor less redistribution than they would if their social worlds were more integrated.

The ideology of crisis in higher education

AbstractHigher education seems to be in a perpetual state of ‘crisis’. The many hundreds of books and papers containing this specific, or other relevantly similar expressions, convey a sense of fear and angst. Yet, what are these various crises about, and which values and beliefs are seen as threatened or ‘under attack’? This paper will provide an analysis of the ‘crisis’ literature and identify four major crisis themes – massification, marketisation, restitution and geopolitics, linked to their ideological basis and influences—including meritocracy, liberalism, restorative justice, and justice globalism. The second part of the paper analyses the massification crisis in Britain between the 1940s and the 1970s as a case example identifying how the principles of a meritocratic society played an influential role in the debate. It will be argued that the notion of ‘universities in crisis’ needs to be understood critically in terms of ideology and historically via the shifting and reshaping of such beliefs over time.

A theory of the skill-performance relationship.

The skill-performance relationship is a cornerstone of a meritocratic society. People are selected for schools, colleges and jobs based on the premise that more skillful individuals perform better. Scientific understanding of the skill-performance relationship demands that the effect of skill on performance is objectively assessed without subjective, social, and political considerations. One of the best areas for this analysis is sports. In many sports settings, the skill-performance relationship can objectively be examined at the technical, behavioral, psychological, and neurological levels. This examination reveals that skill and performance are inextricably intertwined. While skill affects performance, performance in turn defines and affects skill. To disentangle the previously confusing and interchangeable use of these key constructs, the paper presents a theoretical model specifying that ability and effort have their own direct effects on performance, as well as indirect effects on performance through skill possession and skill execution in cognitive and physical domains of human performance. Thus, ability and skill are not the same. Although skill is a key determinant of performance, recent theory and research suggests that successful performers are successful not just because of their skills per se, but because they take advantage of their skills by creating more occurrences of momentum, making them last longer, and using them to bounce back faster from streaks of unsuccessful performance. Thus, momentum is an important mediator of the effects of skill on performance.

Correlation between cognitive ability and educational attainment weakens over birth cohorts

Educational attainment is a key indicator of status and opportunity in meritocratic societies. However, it is unclear how educational expansion has affected the link between cognitive abilities and educational attainment. As a result, this study examines the correlation between cognitive ability and educational attainment across male birth cohorts in Norway. Utilizing administrative register data covering more than four decades, we investigate multiple measures of educational attainment and their connection to cognitive abilities. Our findings reveal a consistent decline in the correlation over time. These findings question the assumed shift towards meritocracy in educational systems and highlight a more complex relationship between cognitive ability and educational attainment.

Education in a democratic and meritocratic society: Moving beyond thriving to flourishing

Following multiple disruptions and crises, global education stakeholders grapple with the issue of how to prepare learners for a future wrought with uncertainty and unpredictability. During the COVID-19 pandemic that caused global school closures, disruptions to learning occurred in differing scopes and magnitudes across different countries. International organisations reported that some students have incurred a 1-to-3-year learning loss, which might have ramifications on their holistic development and, further down the line, their socioeconomic prospects. An equitable solution must be sought for the world to move beyond recovering to flourishing. This article attempts to elucidate the underlying principles of Singapore’s education system through Dewey’s concept of democracy and education, defined from an apolitical stance. For Singapore, democracy is also balanced with pragmatic meritocracy, which is upheld as a means to provide equal opportunities for all, regardless of socioeconomic background. This paper describes Singapore’s democratic and meritocratic society, setting the backdrop for an education system that seeks to develop its citizens into resilient, values-anchored, and lifelong learners ready to confront the challenges of the future.

Axiopsychological Differences of Men’s and Women’s Gender Displays in Modern Ukraine

The study aim was to explain the axiopsychological differences in young men’s and women’s gender displays in modern Ukraine.
 Methods. The methods for theoretical analysis, synthesis and conceptual modelling of an individual’s life processes in the axiological dimension were used. The sample for the empirical study covered 300 students aged 17 - 22 years and 12 psychological examining techniques were used; the obtained data were subjected to one-way analysis of variance.
 Results. Significant statistical differences were found for 22 compared characteristics, symmetrically distributed between males (110 people) and females (190 people). We has found that the quantitative balance of axiopsychological gender priorities does not mean their semantic similarity: the polarization of respondents’ gender displays was recorded; in particular, women’s self-presentation focused on the top-teleological (absolute subject) level of life (expression of spiritual values ​​and goals), and men’ self-presentation focused on the mono-subject (causal-instrumental, individualistic-pragmatic) level. The study highlights the issues of ensuring the real gender equality in Ukraine by building a meritocratic society.
 Conclusions. The article presents the axiopsychological approach in personology and gender psychology and reveals corresponding operations to form an applied (psychological examining) model, which allowed us to obtain relevant scientific results about significant differences between Ukrainian men’s and women’s gender displays.

The trouble with merit

The last few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest among both scholars and public intellectuals over issues associated with distributive justice and its gravitational orbit of concepts, including the idea of merit and the adjacent vision of a meritocratic society. Nevertheless, despite its centrality for conceptions of equality of opportunity, a merit-based allocation of advantaged social positions has been confronted by a range of objections. Michael Sandel’s book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? provides a nuanced examination of ‘the age of meritocracy’ and meritocratic rationality as its key characteristic. It dovetails an elaborated analysis of the troubled legacy of meritocracy with an in-depth elucidation of the various flaws and shortcomings it came to be associated with. This article aims to examine some of the distinguishing features of merit-based allocation of advantaged social positions and the main shortcomings this distributive mechanism has been associated with. The introductory section identifies the most distinctive characteristics of the merit-based allocation of advantaged social positions. The central section reconstructs some of the arguments advanced by Michael Sandel in his book The Tyranny of Merit (2020). The concluding section presents the motivational impulse for the book symposium on The Tyranny of Merit and the main issues arising out of the discussion between the commentators and Prof. Sandel.

A study of Italian young adults’ transnational mobility to Australia: The reproduction of unequal trajectories in the host society

AbstractIn this article, we examine the mobility patterns of a group of Italian young adults migrating to Australia in the search of new education, labour and lifestyle opportunities. The article represents a contribution to the study of the link between youth mobility and unequal trajectories through the elaboration of a new conceptual framework based on the theory of epistemological fallacy that points to the growing disjuncture between the expectations of individual autonomy and the unequal distribution of resources to achieve them. This conceptual framework contributes to elucidate the paradox of mobility that drives young people between the aspiration to mobility and the reproduction of the structural factors that influence their success. We draw on data from a mixed methods research project examining the mobility of Italian young adults to Australia. Participants imagined mobility as a way of exiting insecurities and precarities in their local context to a more open and meritocratic society, but the analysis of their trajectories in the host country reflects similar patterns of stratification as experienced in the context of origin.

The selective foregrounding of social structures in factual welfare television: a multimodal analysis

ABSTRACT Factual welfare television has been described as stigmatising and individualising – representing its participants as failures in a meritocratic society. This paper, however, revisits the 2014 British documentary Benefits Street and argues that it tends to humanise its cast, showing them as trapped in two social structures of benefits (i.e. the social security system) and street (i.e. the deprived local community). Using a multimodal critical discourse studies approach, the paper analyses the verbal, visual and sound tracks of the most popular episode to explore how these modes combine to portray the structure of benefits as stultifying, and the street as a restrictive community. These structures are selectively foregrounded at the expense of the wider, arguably more impactful structures of neoliberal austerity and welfare reform that characterised the political economy of Britain in 2014. The residents’ troubles, therefore, appear to be grounded in the two restrictive structures of benefits and street, and individualistic post-welfarism – surely implicated in their problems – becomes the solution.

Subverting the Monster

Subverting the Monster

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

Markets and communities: the social cost of the meritocracy

AbstractCritiques of the meritocracy have centered on its narrow definition and biased assessment of merit, its stigmatization of the unsuccessful, and excessive competition. This paper identifies a different mechanism that could have pernicious social and political consequences. Economic mobility sorts people based on certain ‘productive’ traits, separating them into classes, and thus alters social externalities. This sorting–separation–externalities mechanism can produce between-class polarization in social outcomes (e.g. alcoholism and drug abuse) and worsen aggregate outcomes over all classes, consistent with rising ‘deaths of despair’ in the United States (Case and Deaton, 2020,Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press). When traits are endogenous, transition out of a caste-based society produces an initial burst of economic mobility which dissipates over time. Thus, a dynamic meritocratic society devolves into a static class-based society. I set out an alternative model called the ‘experimental society’, which is less susceptible to these problems.

Deinstitutionalization Through Optimism: The Community Mental Health Act of 1963.

Deinstitutionalization Through Optimism: The Community Mental Health Act of 1963.

Examinations in Singapore’s bilingual policy

Singapore is a multiracial nation with three-quarters of the population comprised of ethnic Chinese people. The nation’s ‘English-knowing’ bilingual policy has resulted in a steady decline in Mandarin competency, causing much concern. While agreeing that prestige planning (related to the perceived status of the language) is lacking in Chinese language education in Singapore, some suggest that Singapore can leverage China’s economic success or strengthen the Chinese curriculum to arrest the problem. An understanding of the historical developments behind Chinese language policies is necessary to grasp the link between prestige planning and language-in-education in Singapore. This paper adopts a historical approach to show how examinations have been used as essential tools in Singapore’s meritocratic society to adjust the requirements of Chinese language education, directly affecting the learning of Mandarin and resulting in a shift from prestige planning to image planning (which relates to language identity). The primary sources used in this paper include transcripts of Parliamentary debates and reports from leading newspapers, both English and Chinese, which are critical to understanding the rationale of language policies.

Rawls and the Meritocracy Controversy

The article examines the views on justice of the American philosopher D. Rawls in the context of his polemics with the theories of meritocracy. It is noted that the Western society of the first post-war decades is precisely a meritocratic society in which the corresponding concepts arise. At the same time, thanks to the work of the British sociologist and politician M. Young, a critical tradition in understanding meritocracy has been formed. D. Rawls follows this tradition, arguing that the formulation of his principles of justice does not lead to a meritocratic society. From Rawls ' point of view, meritocracy socially and culturally impoverishes the lower class and as such aims to bring prosperity to the technocratic elite. At the same time, Rawls thinks pragmatically, not completely rejecting the idea of a “merit society” but trying to put it at the service of “the least successful”. The article also shows that modern Western society is largely anti-Rawlsian, due to the high concentration of wealth and the formed hypermeritocracy. Therefore, it is no accident that representatives of the intellectual elite of Western societies are extremely concerned about the problem of inequality today, and in general, this situation of inequality makes the concept of Rawls very relevant.

Law School Rankings and The Impossibility of Anti-Racism

The U.S. News and World Report Law School Rankings invoke ideas about excellence and high achievement in the legal academy, but under the surface, they also operate as a catalyst for systemic racism. They do this by capitalizing on system justification, a palliative evolutionary mechanism that forces all members of society, from privileged high socioeconomic groups to the disenfranchised, to buttress the societal status quo pervasively and unconsciously. These responsive desires to keep the status quo invoked by the rankings are the same ones responsible for the perpetuation of the caste system in India, and every other division of human societies into dominant and disenfranchised groups. This system justification is not subject to introspection because it operates through powerful unconscious mechanisms. As a result, consciously antiracist people do not experience dissonance when making institutional decisions based on the rankings, even though those decisions perpetuate deeply rooted structural racism. The only schools enrolling black students at the same level as their representation in the general population are the schools U.S. News ranks so poorly that they are not even assigned a numerical ranking, listed only as Tier 2 schools. This is because the metrics used to evaluate success are themselves racist metrics which devalue blackness and overvalue whiteness and wealth. Undoing this cycle of perpetuating and reinforcing racism requires the reexamination of fundamental assumptions on which our society is based. Assumptions like America being a meritocratic society and that we live in a just world perpetuate systemic racism. Mechanisms that mitigate the impact of systemic racism in legal education and beyond exist, but while corporations are now widely adopting these mechanisms and decreasing racial inequity, legal education is unlikely to follow suit because real antiracism in legal education will reduce institutional profitability.

Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes

Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original survey data to show that people of higher status taste differently at different levels of culture: more inclusively for genres and more exclusively for objects. Inclusivity at the level of genres is fostered through familial socialization, and exclusivity at the level of objects is fostered through formal schooling. Individuals’ taste configurations are mirrored in and presumably reinforce their adult social-structural positions. The results have important implications for understanding the subtle maintenance of status in an increasingly diverse and putatively meritocratic society.