Academic literature on the topic 'Ideology of Meritocracy'

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the theory of meritocracy, according to which each individual has an equal opportunities, regardless of gender, race, and origin, to achieve social and professional success. The author has also attempted to answer the question whether in the current social reality, in which we deal with overeducation and academic diploma inflation, the meritocratic belief about the exclusive influence of individual talents and merits on social and professional success finds its confirmation in social practice. The genesis, essence and directions of criticism of the concept of meritocracy are presented. The article points out that the ideology of meritocracy, despite its egalitarian assumptions, which undoubtedly contributed to the democratization of education, especially at the higher level, confirms social inequalities.

The purpose of this study is to develop the American Meritocracy Myth Stress Scale (AMMSS), capable of assessing college students’ psychological stress within the context of the pervasive myth of meritocracy. This psychological stress stems from the association between their perceptions of their own hard work and social class mobility. Underpinned by the social class worldview model-revised, American meritocracy myth stress is conceptualized as the psychological stress that individuals experience when disequilibrium exists between the dominant and pervasive meritocracy ideology and their efforts to climb the social ladder through hard work. Three substudies were conducted for exploratory factor analysis (Study 1: n = 887); confirmatory factor analysis, validity, and measurement invariance (Study 2: n = 903); and 2-week test–retest reliability (Study 3: n = 37). The results of these studies provide empirical support for the AMMSS. We discuss implications for practice, advocacy, training, and future research.

Why are people motivated to support social systems that claim to distribute resources based on hard work and effort, even when those systems seem unfair? Recent research on compensatory control shows that lowered perceptions of personal control motivate a greater endorsement of external systems (e.g., God, government) that compensate for a lack of personal control. The present studies demonstrate that U.S. citizens’ faith in a popular economic ideology, namely the belief that hard work guarantees success (i.e., meritocracy), similarly increases under conditions of decreased personal control. We found that a threat to personal control increased participants’ endorsement of meritocracy (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, lowered perceptions of control led to increased feelings of anxiety regarding the future, but the subsequent endorsement of (Study 2) or exposure to (Study 3) meritocracy attenuated this effect. While the compensatory use of meritocracy may be a phenomenon unique to the United States of America, these studies provide important insight into the appeal and persistence of ideologies in general.

National data trends underscore the “problem” of Black male achievement. Beneath the causes and consequences are the ideologies used to frame the problem and its solutions. The ideology of meritocracy is routinely employed to rationalize educational disparities. This article examined how White male teachers, in a charter school designed to promote academic success among Black boys, made sense of boys’ academic achievement patterns. Interview analysis revealed the persistence of meritocracy, as teachers (a) located the problem within Black boys’ identities; (b) constructed race, masculinity, and social class as barriers to students’ academic success and teachers’ effectiveness; and (c) positioned themselves relationally away from their students and the problem itself. We discuss implications for the academic development of Black boys.

AbstractWe introduce and explore the notion of hegemonic dividend in the context of a country which does not have hierarchy attenuating means such as legal measures to protect workforce diversity. This paper explains the consequences of two hierarchy enhancing ideologies on workforce diversity in Turkey; meritocracy, an ideology that privileges merit, and ‘biat’, an ideology of subservience to the structures of power. We illustrate how these two ideologies operate as a duality, as meritocracy vanes with dire circumstances for workforce diversity in nation-branding efforts of Turkey. Drawing on Bourdieu and Gramsci, we illustrate hegemonic dividend in the increasingly hegemonic system in which journalism, as a state apparatus, is embedded in Turkey, where privileged few are sustaining and advancing their positions of power by appealing to and submitting themselves to the revisioned nation brand. We focus on the news industry as it commands a special position of power in terms of creating, modifying and controlling the discourses of a nation brand. We argue that failing to protect and promote workforce diversity with hierarchy attenuating measures exposes nation branding practices to discriminatory and hierarchy enhancing ideologies that negate efforts to achieve humanisation and democratisation of work.

The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. My aim was to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do so by arguing that material inequality, like other forms of inequality, has pernicious epistemic effects. Inequality results in anti-democratic flawed ideologies, such as the ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology underlying the division of labor, the subjects of the last two chapters. Propaganda plays crucial roles both in preventing us from recognizing these epistemic harms, in the form of demagoguery, and in repairing them, in the form of civic rhetoric.

Educational researchers have called attention to how neoliberal ideology has profoundly and detrimentally influenced public education systems, but less attention has been paid to how neoliberalism influences private educational institutions. This article examines the influence of neoliberal ideology on education in the USA through an ethnographic case study of a private Sudbury school, Central Valley Sudbury School (CVSS), whose radical unschooling philosophy positions itself in an oppositional stance towards public schools, which it perceives to be hopelessly beyond repair. CVSS represents the permeation of neoliberal ideology in education through its very existence as a private school in the growing alternative education industry. While Sudbury practitioners positioned themselves in opposition to the neoliberal policies and practices of public schools, at the micro-level of routine interaction at CVSS, neoliberalism presented itself through discourses of meritocracy and choice, individual autonomy, entrepreneurship, and education as a private good. Such a contradiction reveals that there may be more congruence between radical unschooling philosophies and neoliberal rationality than would first appear. The article contributes additional understanding to how schools—both public and private—reproduce key ideologies of the society in which they are embedded.

Engineering is often described as an enduring bastion of masculine culture where women experience marginality. Using diaries from undergraduate engineering students at four universities, the authors explore women’s interpretations of their status within the profession. The authors’ findings show that women recognize their marginality, providing clear and strong criticisms of their experiences. But these criticisms remain isolated and muted; they coalesce neither into broader organizational or institutional criticisms of engineering, nor into calls for change. Instead, their criticisms are interpreted through two values central to engineering culture: meritocracy and individualism. Despite their direct experiences with sexism, respondents typically embrace these values as ideological justifications of the existing distributions of status and reward in engineering and come to view engineering’s nonmeritocratic system as meritocratic. The unquestioned presumption of meritocracy and the invisibility of its muting effects on critiques resembles not hegemonic masculinity—for these women proudly celebrate their femininity—but a hegemony of meritocratic ideology. The authors conclude that engineering education successfully turns potential critics into agents of cultural reproduction. This article contributes to ongoing debates concerning diversity in STEM professions by showing how professional culture can contribute to more general patterns of token behavior—thus identifying mechanisms of cultural reproduction that thwart institutional change.

Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, that is, the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight? In this article, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such an ideology have been overlooked. To do so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths—and the two‐tier system itself—manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co‐constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work.

This thesis presents a case study of how curriculum differentiation operates at Lincoln High School, an urban public school in the Midwestern United States with a highly regarded International Baccalaureate (IB) program. I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the systems of beliefs and practices that structure Lincoln's tracking system. Like many American high schools, Lincoln has rejected the traditional practice of assigning all students to overarching curriculum 'tracks' on the basis of their measured aptitude, instead allowing students to choose between courses covering different content at different levels of difficulty in most academic subjects. The school thus offers an excellent opportunity to examine within-school stratification in light of the declining popularity of traditional tracking and the increasing degree to which students control their own coursetaking. Within-school stratification is particularly worthy of continued attention because it qualifies the mythology of the American dream, which holds that schools give students from all backgrounds an opportunity to achieve upward social mobility. I use interviews, observations, and document analysis to explore how curriculum differentiation structures academic and social hierarchies at Lincoln, what teachers and students believe about how to achieve school success and upward mobility, and how Lincoln reconciles its egalitarian ideals with the continued existence of de facto tracking. I argue that Lincoln's approach to curriculum differentiation strikes a tenuous balance between academic excellence and equity for all students. Although student choice dominates the course scheduling process, Lincoln's curriculum still bears many of the hallmarks of tracking: the IB structures a clear academic and social hierarchy of courses, and students tend to follow predictable patterns of coursetaking within each subject, with few opportunities for upward mobility. Nonetheless, teachers and students almost unanimously subscribe to the local achievement ideology, which holds that any student, regardless of prior academic achievement, can and should participate in the IB as long as he or she is willing to work hard. This radical promise of equal opportunity allows participants to characterize Lincoln as a force for equality and social justice. However, the school's continued reliance on sorting its students, even in the face of evidence that tracking reproduces racial and class inequalities, suggests that the achievement ideology serves primarily to legitimate stratification, not to undo it. These findings have important ramifications for research in tracking, detracking, and stratification, and for practice in all schools seeking to negotiate the tension between excellence and equity.

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O compromisso dessa tese é com o avanço no campo da análise da implementação de políticas educacionais, de desvelar os meandros dos processos de correlação de forças inerentes à dinâmica de confrontação entre ideias arraigadas na escola e ideias trazidas por novas políticas. O objetivo geral foi analisar a implementação do Ensino Médio Politécnico (EMP), buscando compreender os seus limites e possibilidades e as posições ideológicas presentes na defesa ou na recusa a esta reforma curricular implementada pela Secretaria de Estado da Educação do Rio Grande do Sul (SEDUC-RS) no quadriênio 2011-2014. A base teórico-metodológica da investigação constituiu-se no materialismo histórico dialético. O banco de dados esteve composto por documentos publicados pela mantenedora para a implementação do EMP, a legislação educacional vigente, entrevistas semiestruturadas realizadas com sujeitos formuladores e implementadores da política, na mantenedora e em quatro escolas do município de Porto Alegre. Para a interpretação e tratamento dos dados utilizamos princípios da Análise Documental. A tese está dividida em nove capítulos incluindo as considerações finais. Os resultados apontaram que: a origem dessa política está em fundamentos socialistas e da Educação Popular (EP); a pesquisa no Seminário Integrado (SI) e a Avaliação Emancipatória (AE) assumiram espaço central. Muitos trabalhos realizados pelos alunos tiveram orientação aproximada ao conceito de Trabalho Socialmente Necessário, cunhado nos primeiros anos da educação soviética, ajudando a formar sujeitos capazes de produzir uma consciência de que são capazes de fazer aquilo que se propõem enquanto seres humanos. A AE também gerou muita polêmica e embates ideológicos; as escolas que já tinham conhecimento e/ou experiências com os conceitos inerentes ao EMP obtiveram melhores resultados na implementação; a ideologia da meritocracia materializada nas práticas escolares, como na avaliação seletiva e classificatória e no conteudismo constituiu uma forte resistência a implementação. Entretanto, com o EMP, o Estado tentou mobilizar-se para formar sujeitos emancipados capazes de transformarem a sociedade, mas não conseguiu conquistar política e ideologicamente a necessária influência para consensuar com o todo da sociedade acerca da sua positividade, por não ter o sindicato como aliado ao, principalmente, não ter pagado o Piso Salarial Nacional no básico da carreira, também por ter encontrado um quadro de baixos incentivos à inovação pedagógica na rede, com um modelo de ensino calcado no currículo fragmentado, numa pedagogia bancária e numa avaliação seletiva e classificatória. Igualmente por barreiras na formação docente, aliada a uma histórica falta de investimentos na infraestrutura escolar. Outro motivo foi, por fim, a gestão da SEDUC-RS ter implementado a proposta sem um tempo maior para debates com as comunidades escolares; houve uma desacomodação e um processo de correlação de forças entre o novo e o velho dentro das escolas, sendo travado de certa forma um enfrentamento aos processos de exclusão escolar. Essa pesquisa ajuda a identificar os meandros dos limites e das possibilidades de uma política de reestruturação curricular que objetivou promover a emancipação humana no Ensino Médio, contra um secular modelo escolar meritocrático, objetivando em último grau a conformação da igualdade substantiva e da justiça social real.
The commitment of this thesis is with the advancement in the field of analysis of the implementation of educational policies, to unveil the meanderings of the processes of forces correlation inherent to the dynamics of confrontation between ideas rooted in the school and ideas brought about by new policies. The general objective was to analyze the implementation of the Polytechnic High School (EMP), seeking to understand its limits and possibilities and the ideological positions present in the defense or refusal of this curricular reform implemented by the State Secretariat of Education of Rio Grande do Sul (SEDUC –RS/ BRAZIL) in the quadrennium 2011-2014. The theoretical-methodological basis of the investigation was constituted in dialectical historical materialism. The database consisted of documents published by SEDUC-RS for the implementation of the EMP, current educational legislation, semi-structured interviews with policy creators and implementers, at SEDUC-RS and at four schools in the city of Porto Alegre. For the interpretation and treatment of the data we use principles of Documentary Analysis. The thesis is divided into nine chapters including the final considerations. The results showed that: the origin of this policy lies in socialist and Popular Education (EP) fundamentals; the research in the Integrated Seminar (SI) and the Emancipatory Assessment (EA) took center stage. Many of the works carried out by the students have had approximate orientation to the concept of Socially Necessary Work created in the early years of Soviet education, helping to form subjects capable of producing an awareness that they are capable of doing what they propose as human beings. The AE also generated much controversy and ideological clashes; the schools that already had knowledge and / or experiences with the concepts inherent to the EMP obtained better results in the implementation; the ideology of meritocracy embodied in school practices, as in selective and classificatory evaluation and in content, constituted a strong resistance to implementation. However, with the EMP, the State attempted to mobilize to form emancipated subjects capable of transforming society, but failed to conquer politically and ideologically the necessary influence to reach agreement with the whole of society about its positivity, for not having the Syndicate as an ally, mainly, not having paid the National Salary Floor in the basic of the teaching career, also for having found a scenario of low incentives for pedagogical innovation in schools, with a teaching model based on the fragmented curriculum, in a banking pedagogy and a selective and classificatory evaluation. Also by barriers in teacher training, coupled with a historic lack of investments in school infrastructure. Another reason was that SEDUC-RS management had implemented the proposal without a longer time for discussions with school communities; there was a dismantling and a process of forces correlation between the new and old within the schools, being, in a certain way, a confrontation with the processes of school exclusion. This research helps to identify the intricacies of the limits and possibilities of a curricular restructuring policy aimed at promoting human emancipation in high school, against a secular meritocratic school model, aiming ultimately at the conformation of substantive equality and real social justice.

Orientador: Armando Boito Junior
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas
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Resumo: Não informado.
Abstract: Not informed.
Mestrado
Mestre em Sociologia

This chapter examines what it means to take a human rights approach to women’s poverty and economic status. Special attention is given to structural sources of women’s poverty, the challenges a right-based framework presents to neoliberal priorities and values, and low-income women’s resistance to these forces. Synergies among economic and political conditions; ideology (e.g., individualism, meritocracy); classist, racist, and sexist stereotypes about poverty and low-income women; and welfare policies that subordinate and regulate low-income women are discussed. Emphasis is placed on understanding welfare rights activism and other anti-poverty/inequality collectives, with the goal of illuminating the social psychological factors that contribute to collective action, economic justice, and the promotion of a rights-based approach to women’s poverty.

This chapter shows how structural processes, policies, and national trends intersected with the particular history, geography, and reputation of the Boston area to produce the set of juxtapositions—between history and progress, tradition and technology, open-mindedness and exclusivity, meritocracy and equality—that characterized the physical landscape and political culture of the Route 128 suburbs and the political ideology of many of their residents. It reveals that homeowners' view of themselves in rural Lincoln and cosmopolitan Newton fueled grassroots activism on a range of liberal issues. This sense of individual and collective distinctiveness simultaneously made many residents see themselves as separate from, and not responsible for, many of the consequences of suburban growth and the forms of inequality and segregation that suburban development fortified.

During periods of local and national unrest, leaders engage in discussions surrounding the reexamination of old policies and the consideration of new policies. Their changes to policies and procedures may be symbolic to silence objections or performative to feign new awareness, but symbolic and performative changes will not lead to transformative change. So how does a nation fix a problem of which many of its citizens are mostly ignorant? How do organizations redress inequitable hiring practices when they believe America is a meritocracy where everyone has the same chance of succeeding? How do educational institutions restructure teaching practices when the predominately White teacher workforce continues to resist talking about race? Transformative change will require the unexamined power of Eurocentric culture and thought that normalizes the marginalization, oppression, and subordination of Communities of Color and other groups of people based on gender, class, and citizenship to be completely exposed and then abolished.

This chapter first examines how the logic of meritocracy in Singapore vacillates between its elitist and egalitarian dimensions. Drawing upon ethnographic data from an elite and a mainstream school, it then develops an analysis of how one specific area of the curriculum – critical thinking – embodies this tension, specifying distinct knowledges and competencies for different students. The chapter argues that even as critical thinking is taught to all students, what often remains obfuscated are the ways through which the ideology of meritocracy acts to selectively recontextualize both the form and content of the subject in the process of its transmission.