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Due to structural sexism, women frequently encounter barriers that result in lower rankings on performance indicators such as productivity data and appraisals by others. The fairness literature offers unclear predictions about the extent to which observers would judge allocations that fail (vs. attempt) to account for such structural barriers as fair. We suggest that past conceptual discussions and empirical designs did not factor in the causal ambiguity embedded in information about structural barriers and the variance in how individuals interpret such information. Hence, we propose that beliefs in the causes of success, anchored in the endorsement of meritocratic ideals, shape fairness judgments by determining the weight given to performance indicators and structural barriers. Such effects emerge in the presence of information about structural barriers in the context of the decision, a feature that is absent from past studies. We discuss our theory and findings in the context of calls for bridging organizational fairness and social justice research and for a nuanced understanding of people's responses to violations of the meritocratic ideal within organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American meritocratic ideology positions sports as level playing fields in which individuals, regardless of their background, can ascend with the right combination of ability and effort. Yet few studies challenge the sport-meritocracy ideology by empirically examining the socioeconomic backgrounds of college athletes (Allison et al., 2018). Studies of youth sport participation show that community-level income shapes athletic opportunities suggesting class is a strong barrier to physical activity (NWLC, 2015; Sabo & Veliz, 2008; Tompsett & Knoester, 2022). Class inequalities are exacerbated in sports with robust privatized youth systems like baseball (Klein et al., 2020; Post et al., 2022). Utilizing a unique quantitative dataset of NCAA Division I college baseball players (n = 19,987), we consider the extent to which a community's socioeconomic levels and racial demographics shape the chances of someone becoming a college baseball player. We compare college baseball players' hometown income levels and racial demographics to their home state and to U.S. averages. We also consider differences across competitive divisions (i.e., Non-Power 5 vs. Power 5). Findings show that college baseball players--regardless of conference affiliation--commonly come from affluent, nonminority cities, with high education and income levels, indicating that socioeconomic status is a significant predictor of college athletic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two ways, broadly speaking, that one might conceive of meritocratic education. On a standard, ‘narrow’ conception, a meritocratic approach to education is one which distributes certain educational goods and opportunities according to merit. On a second, ‘broader’ conception, however, meritocratic education is an educational system suited to a commitment to meritocracy – where ‘meritocracy’ refers to a particular conception of distributive justice. In this article, I argue that these two conceptions are incompatible with each other, and so the standard ‘narrow’ conception of meritocratic education is, in fact, incompatible with a commitment to meritocracy, at least given the typical way of understanding meritocracy. Of particular importance is that while meritocracy, as a view of distributive justice, requires a commitment to equality of opportunity principles, the narrowly meritocratic conception of education does not. The reason has to do with differences in the underlying justifications of the merit-based principles in each: Meritocracy appeals to moral desert, while the educational desert that is grounded by one’s merits is best thought of as a kind of institutional desert. Thus, I will argue, while meritocracy (and so the broad conception of meritocratic education) is constrained by a fair equality of opportunity requirement, narrowly meritocratic education is not. Recognizing the relationships between meritocracy, meritocratic education, and equality of opportunity, I argue, sheds considerable light on disagreements in the debate over equality of opportunity in education.

English features prominently in global communication as part of the knowledge economy in Indonesia and worldwide. Meritocracy represents a key concept within the rhetoric of this economy, as it promises that how well people do in life is not determined by external matters, but mostly by how hard they try. Included here is how hard they study English, and how well they perform on measures of English proficiency. No previous research has, however, considered English teachers' beliefs about the role of English in meritocracy. This is perhaps surprising given that the literature has increasingly highlighted the role of teachers as changemakers. To explore this issue, the present study considered the views of 260 English teachers in Indonesia. Findings revealed statistically significant correlations between teachers' beliefs in meritocracy for their own careers and for their students, on the one hand, and their views of English as a tool for success, on the other hand. This study not only makes an empirical contribution to the limited literature on the role of meritocracy in language education, but also advances conversation on language education from a multilingual and multicultural perspective by addressing the limits of meritocracy through Global Englishes with a translanguaging orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular explanations of inequality as the result of individual failings rather than structural processes are powerful cultural mechanisms that legitimize and reproduce inequality in the United States. How might individuals' experiences of downward or upward mobility shape the explanations they give? We argue that perceived experiences of economic mobility may not only shape how Americans understand economic inequality but may also impact their beliefs about social inequalities more broadly. Using proportionally representative survey data of 1110 U.S. residents, we find that those who perceive that they currently occupy a lower economic class than when they were growing up (i.e. they experienced subjective downward mobility) were more likely than class-stable individuals to reject individualistic explanations of economic inequality and embrace structural ones. By contrast, the upwardly mobile were more likely to reject structural explanations. We find that mobility is similarly related to the likelihood of giving individualistic or structural explanations for race and gender inequality as well. Downward mobility is also associated with greater support of redistributive policies related to economic as well as gender and race inequality. These findings suggest that economic mobility may influence popular explanations of inequality and support for redistributive policy not only related to class inequality but for multiple axes of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an ethnographic study conducted in French pre‐kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms, investigating how education establishes and reinforces relations of sociocultural dominance. Building on Bourdieu and Passeron's concept of symbolic violence, we seek to uncover the mechanisms through which school socialization encourages the acceptance of the hierarchies it generates. The data suggest that this persuasion relies on set of interrelated processes: Schools organize the unequal profitability of family cultural practices and knowledge, obscure the realities of learning, and foster a meritocratic myth that naturalizes these inequalities. Moreover, children actively participate in their own subordination without realizing it. By documenting these processes, the study provides critical insights into how everyday schooling practices not only perpetuate social inequalities but also shape early on the idea that students form of themselves as both students and individuals and intensify concerns about self‐worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forward a selection principle and an optimization configuration method for short-circuit current-limiting measures to address the increasingly severe short-circuit current-exceeding problem brought about by the high-speed development of large power grids. Firstly, we introduce the function principle and the advantages and disadvantages of various short-circuit current-limiting measures in the power system and give the selection conditions of generalized short-circuit current-limiting measures. Then, we adopt the hierarchical analysis method (AHP) and entropy weighting method (EWM) to evaluate the weights of the indicators of the short-circuit current level, the line-loading level, the active loss, and the economic cost; perform the selection of multiple short-circuit current-limiting schemes after the combination of the assigned weights; and describe the generalized process of engineering used to solve the problem of short-circuit currents exceeding limits. We then provide a generalized process with which to solve the short-circuit current-exceeding problem in engineering. Finally, we take the actual large-scale power grid as an example, propose multiple short-circuit current-limiting schemes for a 220 kV power grid, and carry out the selection of optimal schemes to verify the validity and reliability of the study. The results show that this process plays an important role in controlling the short-circuit current of the power system, maintaining the safe and stable operation of the power system and improving the power system's grid structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream media reports on the rise of “nepo babies” have brought renewed attention to the advantages that famous and well-connected parents can provide. Drawing from a sample of 331 in-print and online articles, we apply a cultural frame analysis to study news media discourse around nepotism with a focus on how celebrity children are represented and whether these representations support or refute an ideology of meritocracy. We find that nepotism is often framed in one of four ways. First, and most commonly, nepotism among celebrity children is rendered defensible through allusions to hard work and sensationalized accounts of celebrities’ lives and lifestyles. Second, nepotism is objected to for the uneven privileges that celebrity parentage can provide. Third, a minority of articles contextualize privilege and produce order. The remaining frames presented a degree of indifference, which functioned to normalize nepotism. Together, most frames reinforce the American ideology of meritocracy, suggesting that hard work and talent explain the success of celebrity children, while hiding structural inequalities and the insidiousness of privilege from view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class‐based perspectives on the persistent social gradients in health within modern welfare states largely focus on the adverse consequences of unfettered neoliberalism and entrenched meritocratic socioeconomic selection. Namely, neoliberal‐driven economic inequality has fuelled resentment and stress among lower‐status groups, while these groups have become more homogeneous with regard to health behaviours and outcomes. We synthesise several sociological and historical literatures to argue that, in addition to these class‐based explanations, socioeconomic inequality may contribute to persistent social gradients in health due to elite class self‐interest—in particular elites' preferences for overdiagnosis, overprescription and costly high‐technology medical treatments over disease prevention, and for increased tolerance for regulatory capture. We demonstrate that this self‐interest provides parsimonious explanations for several contemporary trends in U.S. health inequality including (A) supply‐side factors in drug‐related deaths, (B) longitudinal trends in the social gradients of obesity and chronic disease mortality and (C) the immigrant health advantage. We conclude that sociological theories of elite class self‐interest usefully complement theories of the psychosocial effects of neoliberalism and of meritocratic social selection while answering recent calls for research on the role advantaged groups play in generating inequalities in health, and for research that moves beyond technological determinism in health sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the study of sport coaching as the body of knowledge and praxis is well established, very few studies have unpacked sport coaching through a sociological work and/or labour lens. Drawing on the findings from a larger institutional ethnographic study exploring gender, work, and professionalization in sport coaching within the Canadian university sport system, this article highlights the ways in which the Canadian university sport coaching environment constructs and normalizes overwork, such that sport coaches often experience worker precarity. Given the emphasis within the university sport environment on performance, and/or the need for sport coaches to win in order to keep their jobs, this article highlights how coaches have internalized their constant work efforts as 'just part of the job'. Key findings demonstrate the deleterious effects of nonstop work on sport coaches both within and outside of their working environments. This article concludes by emphasizing how in the contemporary political-economic context of Canadian university sport, where meritocracy is a powerful and prominent player and where winning matters most, sport coaches are often always overworked and undersupported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the proliferation of television broadcasts that focus on the lavish lifestyles and consumption of "rich kids." However, flaunting inherited wealth is an accountable activity within UK society that claims to be based on meritocratic values. Whilst wealthy individuals are a source of public spectatorship, they are also attributed with contributing to economic inequality and inhibiting social mobility. This study draws on social psychology to examine media representations of wealthy heirs accounting for their wealth in popular programmes about the "super rich." Forty-one and a half hours of non-subscription UK television data from 2016 that included the term "super-rich" was analysed. Drawing on Discursive Social Psychology, heirs were found to be managing an ideological dilemma of accounting for their inherited privilege while in a (supposedly) meritocratic environment. Heirs use four interpretative repertoires to negotiate their unmeritocratic position: (1) having a fair go, (2) unintentional privilege, (3) constructing wealth as "family money" and (4) sharing wealth with loved ones. These interpretative repertoires downplay privilege by redefining ownership, highlight any work they do, construct them as aspirational and present them as lacking agency. The presentation of heirs in entertainment documentaries maintains the illusion of meritocratic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media narrative around the exceptional rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes is crafted out of the ideological interplay between the logics of American neoliberal capitalism and popular feminism within the microcosm of Silicon Valley—itself machinated by venture capital, fueled by libertarian techno-determinism, and Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In appropriation of feminism. Holmes's celebrity, coinciding with the proliferation of national discourse around the "gender problem" in STEM, placated neoliberal and popular feminism's calls for representation in a space that, per these ongoing discourses on diversity and inclusion, needed her visibility. Holmes's media visibility grafted over the void of women's representation within the notorious boys' club of Silicon Valley under the American veneer of meritocracy. Holmes's celebrity making, subsequent unmasking, and continued retelling through various fictional portrayals point to the inherent tensions in neoliberal logics and the superficiality of visibility, furthering the erasure of structural, material, and intersectional inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that schools often justify student performance differences using meritocratic ideals. One potential consequence of such ideals is the legitimization of outcome inequalities across various spheres, including those traditionally associated with equality and redistribution. In this study, we argue that the promotion of meritocratic values during school age can shape students' beliefs about meritocracy and influence their views on market-based access to health, pensions, and education. Using data from the 2017 National Study of Civic Education in Chile, which includes 5047 eighth-grade students from 231 schools, we estimated a series of multilevel models (lme4 library, R version 4.1.3) to test our hypotheses. Our findings show that a significant proportion of Chilean students agree with market justice principles—more so than adults. Most students endorse meritocratic views, particularly the notion that effort should be rewarded, which strongly correlates with market justice preferences: students who believe in meritocracy are more likely to justify inequalities based on financial capacity. At the school level, market justice preferences are higher in high-status schools but lower in schools with higher academic achievement. Furthermore, the conditional influence of meritocratic beliefs diminishes in schools with higher socioeconomic status and performance levels. These results suggest that the association between meritocratic beliefs and market justice preferences is already established at school age and is shaped by the school environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is widely recognized that a country's bureaucratic structure significantly influences economic growth, its subnational variations remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, this paper introduces a unique model to quantify the collective career incentives of subnational leadership in China. By adopting machine-learning techniques that incorporate 250 individual features, this study derives a predicted probability of promotion as a proxy to measure an official's career prospects. The individual career prospects are subsequently transformed into collective career incentives through an inverse-U-shaped relationship between the two. The empirical findings indicate that from 1997 to 2015, Chinese provincial governments achieved higher economic growth rates when a larger proportion of officials held mid-range rankings in terms of career prospects. This study also finds that the better economic performance stemmed from the collective career incentives of provincial leadership, rather than those of the supreme leaders of the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper explores the way in which elite students from Germany and Romania understand the role of talent, effort, and structural factors in shaping educational success and failure. The image of a successful student aligns with the requirements of the selection processes, with Romanian students emphasising effort, and German students projecting an image of effortless achievement. Although most students acknowledged structural inequalities played into the selection processes, they did not seem to doubt the intelligence and skills of those who were selected to the most prestigious tracks and streams. By exploring the way in which students at prestigious universities talk about success and failure, this paper captures some ways in which they resist reproducing meritocratic discourses, and other ways in which they perpetuate the myth of meritocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racialized inequalities in organizations and workplaces are reproduced not only by the discrimination of non‐whites but also by behaviors among whites aimed at counteracting and resisting initiatives and measures aimed at achieving racial equality. On this background, the purpose of the present study was to empirically investigate expressions of white fragility, white counterreactions, and institutional resistance in organizational contexts in Sweden, as well as how these processes relate to system justificatory ideologies such as colorblind racism and meritocracy. In doing so, the study used a cross‐sectional design and a large sample (N = 2774) of adults from the Swedish labor market to test hypotheses about the investigated concepts. The results of the study provided support for the hypotheses that white fragility, white counterreactions, and institutional resistance are relevant concepts to the understanding of the racial dynamics and the reproduction of racialized inequalities in organizations also outside the North American context (in this case Sweden). In addition, the study shows that white fragility is positively associated with colorblind racism and belief in meritocracy and highlights the role of these ideologies in legitimizing and maintaining workplace inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs latent class analysis (LCA) as a novel methodology to investigate the multidimensional nature of meritocratic beliefs, addressing the limitations of traditional unidimensional approaches. Using data from the International Social Survey Program 2009 for the United States, Finland, and China, this study demonstrates several advantages of this multidimensional approach. First, LCA effectively identifies dual consciousness, where individuals simultaneously endorse meritocratic and structuralist explanations of social stratification. The analysis reveals three distinct narratives explaining social stratification: purely meritocratic beliefs, predominantly meritocratic beliefs, and dual consciousness. While all three subtypes consider merits highly important, they differ in their perceived importance of structural factors. Second, LCA facilitates cross‐national comparisons, unveiling qualitative typological variations in meritocratic beliefs across countries. Unique country‐specific subtypes or patterns emerge: Finland exhibits purely meritocratic beliefs, the United States shows predominantly meritocratic beliefs, and China demonstrates a dominance of dual consciousness. Although dual consciousness exists in all three countries, its prevalence varies significantly—dominant in China, moderate in the United States, and least in Finland. Third, this study reveals that the effect of education on meritocratic beliefs varies across the three countries. Education strengthens individual meritocratic beliefs in the United States, weakens them in Finland, and shows no significant effect in China. These findings highlight both within‐country and across‐country heterogeneity of meritocratic beliefs, underscoring the importance of a multidimensional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of rising global inequality, public concerns for inequality have been declining. This paradox of inequality has been explained by the rise in meritocratic beliefs in some developed countries. Untested in South Africa, the most unequal society, this study aims to report on these issues by investigating the impact of meritocratic and nonmeritocratic beliefs on redistribution preferences in South Africa. Using the International Social Survey Programme data for 2009 and 2019, we find that contrary to some developed countries, meritocratic beliefs have declined despite persistent high inequality. Nonmeritocratic factors like sex and race are perceived as less critical for personal success, while bribery and political connections gain prominence. Results reveal that stronger meritocratic beliefs correlate positively with redistribution preferences, whereas nonmeritocratic beliefs have minimal impact. This challenges the notion that high inequality intensifies meritocratic beliefs and reduces demand for redistribution, suggesting the need to consider South Africa's unique historical and socioeconomic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to selected new trends in metaethics, ethics, political philosophy, and the practice of philosophy with the use of artificial intelligence. It consists of five parts. In the first part, I analyze the meaning of the question about new trends in analytical philosophy. In the second part, I present the latest trends in metaethics. In the third part, I briefly characterize the ethics of artificial intelligence. The fourth part, devoted to political philosophy, includes a presentation of the latest publications on meritocracy. The article concludes with considerations about practicing philosophy in the age of artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does believing that "effort doesn't pay" in society shape how people view dishonest‐illegal transgressions? Across five studies, we show that when people view societal success as non‐meritocratic—that is, more dependent on luck and circumstances than on hard work—they are more lenient in their moral judgements of dishonest‐illegal transgressions. Perceiving society as non‐meritocratic predicted greater justifiability of dishonest‐illegal transgressions in the United States (Study 2), and across 42 countries (N = 49,574; Study 1). And inducing participants to view society as non‐meritocratic increased justifiability of others' dishonest‐illegal transgressions, via greater feelings of sympathy (Studies 3 and 4). Next, we investigated the contours of these effects. Perceiving societal success as non‐meritocratic rather than based on hard work causes people to view dishonest‐illegal transgressions as more justifiable if they are perpetrated by the poor, but not the rich (Study 4), and if the dishonest‐illegal transgressions are related to economic striving, such as money laundering and dealing illegal drugs (Study 5). In sum, when people see a social system as unfair, they show greater tolerance for dishonest‐illegal transgressions perpetrated to circumvent the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore has prospered since independence by developing its human resources under a distinctly Singaporean meritocratic system. Recent developments in public discourse, and findings from interviews with leading Singaporean personalities, however, point towards the system's increasing undesirability. Among other problems, our study participants blame the system for worsening class divisions in society; for damaging the mental well-being of students; and for leading to a narrowing of society's definitions of success while leaving Singaporean workers unprepared for challenges of the future economy. Our paper shows that for Singaporeans to be ready for these challenges and to find purpose and meaning in the future economy, the current meritocratic systems require reform. We argue for a new kind of political decision-making to allow Singaporean society to reorder its basic values and priorities towards a more democratic, inclusive and compassionate meritocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gallantry medals are invested with deep significance not only by the armed forces but also by civilian society. In the last decade, there has been a debate in sociology about whether the medallic regime has become post-heroic or whether it has professionalized. This article contributes to these debates by focusing on the topic of fraudulent medals. Fake medals are very rare; there has been one proven case in the United Kingdom in the last 20 years. However, precisely because fake medals are the exception, their pathologies illustrate the processes by which medals are actually awarded with particular clarity. This analysis of the fake medal shows that gallantry awards have professionalized; in the UK medals have become more meritocratic, recognizing skill not status. The awarding process is also more objective. Yet, its very professionalism is ironically vulnerable to a specific type of fraud by skilful but cynical citation writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to "identify the dimensions and components of the talent management model in the Isfahan Department of Education. Given to exploratory nature of the patterns and existing frameworks in the current study, the methodology of the current study is qualitative and based on an inductive approach. Meanwhile, it is applied based on the objective and interpretive from the study's philosophical viewpoint. Based on this description, to obtain talent management requirements, semi-structured interviews with experts such as managers of the education department was conducted by designing different questionnaires to assess their deep understandings, attitude, and beliefs regarding the subject of education. For this purpose, discussions with 22 university professors, experts, and managers of the education department of Isfahan province were held regarding the talent management subject, its requirements, and necessities, and the conclusion of these interviews was prepared as a list of talent management dimensions at the education department. Then, the input and output dimensions of talent management were specified. Finally, the final model of talent management at the Department of Education was designed and provided after some amendments. In the end, organization strategy, management of talents conflict, succession, meritocracy system, strategic management of human resources, rules, and regulation, managers support, organizational culture as a talent management input, and improvement of personal efficiency, personal maturity, human force agility, personal satisfaction, emotional commitment, perceived justice, comparative advantage acquirement, adjustment with global changes, increased beneficiaries' satisfaction, improved organizational efficiency, individual and organizational excellence as talent management output were extracted. Further, some recommendations were proposed to improve the condition of talent management in the Department of Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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What concepts do people use to construct narratives about how to get ahead in contemporary society? To what extent do these narratives reflect distinctive constellations of beliefs? What are these constellations and is their usage contingent on social position? With these questions in mind, we used the qualitative data associated with the American Voices Project to systematically explore and map constellations of beliefs. Adopting a natural language analysis, we identify linguistic patterns that signal the relative importance of different get-ahead outlooks as cultural frames. These outlooks include not only traditional meritocratic factors, but also a range of nonmeritocratic influences, including nonrational factors such as luck and religion. Our analysis identifies three distinctive versions of meritocracy—frustrated, complex, and detached—in how people describe their life trajectories. Our findings suggest that the idea of meritocracy hides meaningful variations and nuances in the ways people construct visions of what meritocracy means and how it is constituted.

What concepts do people use to construct narratives about how to get ahead in contemporary society? To what extent do these narratives reflect distinctive constellations of beliefs? What are these constellations and is their usage contingent on social position? With these questions in mind, we used the qualitative data associated with the American Voices Project to systematically explore and map constellations of beliefs. Adopting a natural language analysis, we identify linguistic patterns that signal the relative importance of different get-ahead outlooks as cultural frames. These outlooks include not only traditional meritocratic factors, but also a range of nonmeritocratic influences, including nonrational factors such as luck and religion. Our analysis identifies three distinctive versions of meritocracy--frustrated, complex, and detached--in how people describe their life trajectories. Our findings suggest that the idea of meritocracy hides meaningful variations and nuances in the ways people construct visions of what meritocracy means and how it is constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might it mean to reimagine brown‐girl‐as‐failure to brown‐girl‐as‐success? This article draws on findings from an empirical research study of academically successful teenage girls from Aotearoa New Zealand. In this paper we focus on what it means to be an intelligent and successful young brown woman in the context of the contemporary white‐centering of meritocratic success, and the oppressive narrative that brown girls are not bright. Using a creative methodology, Laurel Richardson's collective storying and Patricia Leavy's fiction‐based research, the paper engages in forms of creative analytic practice and new knowledge representation, which prioritize authentic voice and understanding of the young women participants' lived experiences. Collective stories were used in the study to challenge existing public discourses of girls and success, including the white‐centering of such depictions, and to create narratives that participants could identify with, particularly those that were often unspoken but widely experienced. Using collective stories in the study offered a space of resonance with participants who could engage with the stories during the research process and contribute to their (re)storying. The interplay between the theoretics of methodological creativity and the symbolic violence of a colonial positioning of successful girlhood offers a novel contribution to girlhood studies. Through collective storying and a further interweaving of poetic voice, the disruption of the narrative of deficit offers remembering and revalidation of brown success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many rural youths in China receive a poor-quality, strict and exam-oriented education. In everyday and professional discourses, incorporating live-streaming technologies in rural schooling is tied to promises of improved educational quality and a narrowed urban‒rural education gap. Reflecting a dystopian ideology of meritocracy, this article investigates how live-streaming technologies transmit suzhi (human quality) education and downplay the exam-oriented education with which rural students and teachers are familiar. The authors argue that the two educational vehicles for meritocracy work together to channel students to a seemingly meritocratic pathway of social mobility but funnel rural students to an inferior educational track according to their rural registration and lower-class backgrounds. The online version of suzhi education complicates and even exacerbates the already fierce educational competition that rural students face. Rural students' low aspirations and their teachers' apathy towards live-streaming classes challenge the purportedly transformative effects of live-streaming technologies in China's rural schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-studies fifty-seven interviews with working-class voters conducted between 1958 and 1960 for Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver's Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England (1968). It uses these interview transcripts as a window into aspects of the mid-twentieth-century vernacular, specifically vernacular understandings of the social order. It argues that a powerful meritocratic ideology runs through the interviewees' responses, articulated through the concept of 'brains'. This discourse revered academic and professionalized forms of knowledge, arguing that they should form the currency of social mobility and the criterion of good political leadership. Hierarchies premised on class, race, and gender could be reinforced if they were perceived to reward those with 'brains' and criticized if they did not. However, this vernacular ideology was circumscribed by two other vernacular concepts: 'breeding' and 'knowingness'. 'Breeding' celebrated the knowledge that came from elite experiences associated with family and upbringing. 'Knowingness' celebrated the knowledge that came from the experience of working-class life. These two concepts set a limit on the appeal of a vernacular meritocracy that based itself around 'brains'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette examines "Central," the penultimate episode of Lulu Wang's Expats, a television adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee's bestselling novel The Expatriates, which follows the lives of several privileged American women living in Hong Kong. The feature-length special episode shifts the focus onto two foreign domestic workers who are employed by the show's wealthy female protagonists. In redirecting attention onto these two female migrant workers, "Central" challenges viewers' investments in the protagonists' lives and the genre of women's prestige television that celebrates their class status as being won through "meritocracy and neoliberal self-reliance." Further, Wang uses the "special episode" and the creative liberties that streaming has afforded for such a format not simply for representational purposes but to underline the geopolitical forces and class hierarchies that structure these women's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines, from an epistemic perspective, the ideal of democratic meritocracy that has been advocated by a group of scholars known as 'Confucian meritocrats' in East Asia for nearly two decades, but which has thus far only been treated by Western political theorists as a kind of wholesale epistocracy designed specifically for a non-Western cultural context. In particular, I focus on two aspects that help to institutionally distinguish democratic meritocracy from the kind of wholesale epistocracy most enthusiastically supported by epistocrats: the meritocratic selection process consisting of a set of non-electoral mechanisms and the combination of meritocratic institutions with democratic ones. I argue that each of them could be understood as having its distinct epistemic value which, taken together, may render some versions of democratic meritocracy epistemically superior to both epistocracy and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on narrative accounts of French business school staff and faculty about their experiences and observations of actions taken by different organizational actors in response to a trigger event, we theorize the intricate connections between organizational practices conducive to sexism and the persistence of silence around such practices. Specifically, empirical investigation demonstrates how managerial practices such as the allocation of organizational tasks and valorization of individual contributions prompt organizational members to assume a variety of stances toward gender issues. The enactment of these stances in various interactions provokes organizational counteraction in the form of sanctions, the establishment of a hermetic and formulaic communication regime, and public reinforcement of meritocratic narratives. This results in silence around organizational sexism manifesting as a collective and individual inability and unwillingness to react. This study contributes to a broader and rapidly developing literature on sexism in academic settings and the phenomenon of silencing in organizations by shedding light on the mechanisms of its persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men are privileged economically, politically, and socially, yet some deny this. Previous research suggests that denial of privilege can help to manage the discomfort associated with a privileged identity, but we propose that it serves primarily to preserve privilege. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 911 Australian participants) we show that denial of male privilege is not unique to men and that it is strongly predicted by anti‐egalitarianism, even when controlling for gender and other variables known to predict attitudes toward inequality (facets of right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation). In Study 1, a multiple regression model accounted for 59% of the variability in reported male privilege awareness, with anti‐egalitarianism contributing 47% of the explanatory power. In Study 2, the explanatory power of anti‐egalitarianism was more modest (26%) and similar to that of gender (27%), and both also positively predicted claims of female privilege. This suggests that rather than simply reflecting unawareness of male privilege or being a way to manage a privileged identity, denying the existence of male privilege and claiming that women are privileged helps to preserve gender inequality by presenting it as a just result of meritocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors consider the intersections of philosophy and education. Extending the concept of a minor pedagogy first presented by Mazzei and Smithers (2020), the authors reorient thinking toward more equitable and just pedagogy as a cultivation of difference. This paper has three major sections. In the first two, the authors review Deleuze and Guattari's (1986, 1987) concept of the minor, and then connect this to the concept of a minor pedagogy. The final section explores the work of a minor pedagogy as continuous variation with the potential to engender difference. Given that racialized neoliberal efficiency and accountability movements have perpetuated injustice across generations, the work of educational practice that contests this must be practice that slips from these major grips to produce new, more just, worlds. Minor pedagogy produces educational justice through everyday shifts in the conditions of our collective possibility, shifts that manifest difference in ways that reject re-form in the pursuit of the not yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper underscores the role that structural barriers play in climate change research in Edinburgh, Scotland. By employing an intersectional gender analysis we stress how unequal power relations underly our understanding of climate change, influence the quality and nature of climate research and responses developed. Using semi-structured and unstructured interviews with women and men working in climate change, we identify the shared experiences of individuals who face gendered barriers in climate science and policy, examine their perception of privilege, and their consequent perceived success in climate change research. Our findings stress the relationship between the concept of meritocracy, the underrepresentation of women and marginalized groups in science, and the reproduction of systematic barriers to contribute to the climate debate.We stress the importance of relationships and networks in supporting and encouraging marginalized voices to succeed in participating in climate change research and science more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal education is key to socioeconomic transformation. Master's degrees are the minimum formal education credential high-skilled employers require worldwide. Nations and regions that want to engage effectively in global political and socioeconomic transformation support higher-level formal education as part of their sustainable development strategy. Higher education produces imaginative and critical thinkers who can solve citizens' problems. Higher education leads to better jobs, higher wages and a higher standard of living. In Africa, tertiary institutions and universities have considerably fewer students than primary schools. Sub-Saharan Africa's gross enrolment ratio is significantly below the world average. Uganda's Gross Enrolment Ratio is lower than the African average. Despite the increased demand for higher education in Uganda, meritocracy, equity, fairness and inclusion are skewed by location, gender, creed, political affiliation and socioeconomic level. In this paper, we use systematic literature review methodology to analyse the illusions of meritocracy in Ugandan higher education, and propose resilience reinforcement as a policy and practice buffer to improve poor socioeconomic strata access and success in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Objective: To evaluate the relationship between police cadets' facial traits and their subsequent promotional success. Methods: Using archival police academy photographs, we use a two-phase experiment to evaluate the impact of facial traits on future promotional success. First, respondents (n = 507) view randomly selected photographs of cadets (observations = 15,669) and evaluate them for facial traits and perceived leadership ability. Second, respondents are presented with random dyads of differentially promoted recruits, and choose one based on the highest perceived leadership ability. We compare those leadership evaluations to the subsequent promotional success of the cadets featured in the photographs (observations = 5739). We employ Bayesian multilevel modeling throughout both phases. Results: Facial traits are the primary driver of subject perceptions of leadership ability, and those perceptions successfully predict promotional success later in the cadets' careers. When selecting for leadership potential based on police cadet photographs, respondents predict correct promotional choices at levels well above chance as measured by an AUC score of.70. Further, respondents' evaluations successfully discriminate both between no promotion and lieutenant promotion, and sergeant versus lieutenant promotions. Conclusions: Promoting the most capable police officers is a critical feature of public service. Our findings cast a degree of doubt on the purportedly meritocratic foundations of police promotion and selection. Extra-legal information, such as facial features, predicts later promotional success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary documents how federal funding agencies are changing the criteria by which they distribute taxpayer money intended for scientific research. Increasingly, STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) funding agencies are requiring applicants for funding to include a plan to advance DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) in their proposals and to dedicate a part of the research budget to its implementation. These mandates undermine the academic freedom of researchers and the unbiased generation of knowledge needed for a well-functioning democracy. Maintaining excellence in science is fundamental to the continuation of the U.S. as a global economic leader. Science provides a basis for solving important global challenges such as security, energy, climate, and health. Diverting funding from science into activities unrelated to the production of knowledge undermines science’s ability to serve humankind. When funding agencies politicize science by using their power to further a particular ideological agenda, they contribute to public mistrust in science. Hijacking science funding to promote DEI is thus a threat to our society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding education and vocational training systems in terms of their traditional foundations and structural logic points to the need to connect them with social problems and to localise the objectives of reforms or reform approaches in the respective national context. In this article we want to shed light on three aspects, which are themselves intertwined and whose systemic or structural correlates can take on different shapes against the background of national differences regarding the respective traditions of VET. They can be conceived as "tertia comparationis", i. e. comparative aspects or points of comparison in comparative research. Specifically, our article is about the value of vocational education in relation to school-based and academic education, the positioning of VET in the tension field caused by structural boundaries within the education system, and finally wewill look at the seemingly opposite, quasi-corrective tendency to think of vocational and university or of vocational and school-based general education as "hybrid" by bringing the different sub-systems together instead of separating them from each other. Using the example of England and Australia, reform approaches in this regard will be made visible and possible implications for German vocational training will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do home ownership and house prices impact the shaping of individual perceptions on inequality and belief in meritocracy? We argue that home ownership and rising asset prices increase the salience of an individual's own relative economic position, which in turn facilitates belief in meritocracy. We expect that, when house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy and defend their position by rationalizing that income distribution in society is fair and that economic success and failure are primarily determined by individual efforts. Our analysis of both a Korean panel survey and a cross-national survey finds strong and robust evidence of the asset price effect. Our findings suggest that the housing price effect on economic ideology is a general pattern, which implies that there are social and political consequences to the asset price effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities are expected to strive for excellence but also for gender balance. Narrow interpretations of excellence in universities hinder women's advancement in academia. In this paper, we ask if there are ways that these policies may be reconciled. Excellence is an "empty signifier" that must be filled with meaning. We have investigated how Heads of Departments enact "excellence" and gender balance in hiring processes in four Norwegian universities. Many HoD argued for broadening excellence criteria and framed excellence as a collective rather than an individual concern. This allows for reconciling top-down institutional demands for excellence and diversity while catering to local needs. Thus, our paper suggests that in a context where increased diversity among faculty is called for, this may open up a space for critical reflection about the criteria for assessing academic quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of the International Baccalaureate (IB) has grown impressively on a global scale. In Latin America, the IB has been mainly introduced in private schools that cater for the most affluent sectors of society and, consequently, has been mostly interpreted as contributing to processes of social reproduction and the widening of inequalities However, since the mid-2000s the IB has been promoted in state schools in countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica and in the City of Buenos Aires in Argentina. This paper analyses the enactment of the IBDP in public schools in Costa Rica and Peru drawing on a mixed methods multiple case study. It shows how, in countries with significant socioeconomic disparities, the possibility of offering the IBDP to students at public schools was mostly justified as a matter of equity, understood as opening access to an educational programme that was only available to the most privileged sectors of society. By problematising the notions of privilege and eliteness, we discuss the complex relations between inequalities and educational opportunities and question the extent to which these programmes are affecting social structures in Costa Rica and Peru. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 40 years since federal employment equity initiatives were launched in Canada, they have faced persistent backlash. This backlash is grounded in and fueled by conceptualizations of justice and equality that are rooted in ideologies of individualism and meritocracy. Here we draw on 140 qualitative interviews with members of six professions from across Canada, who self‐identify as Indigenous, Black or racialized, ethnic minority, disabled, 2SLGBTQ+, and/or from working‐class origins, to explore tensions between concepts of justice grounded in group‐based oppressions and those grounded in individual egalitarianism. Though affirmative action and employment equity opened up opportunities, people were still left to fight for individual rights. This push to individualism was intensified by persistent hostile misperceptions that people are less qualified and in receipt of 'unfair advantages.' Through discursive misdirection, potential for transformative institutional change is undermined by liberal discourses of individualism and meritocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical aim of this paper is to articulate a novel analytical framework that makes sense of our interlocutors' apparently conflicting claims about the reality of meritocracy in China. The theoretical argument is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Chinese high school, where teachers and working-class students live under the shadows of the demanding and high-stakes university entrance exam (the gaokao). How is it possible to preserve the outwardly inconsistent positions (1) that the gaokao is egalitarian and, thus, fair and (2) that students' much wealthier counterparts have significantly higher probabilities of success when compared to poorer students? This article argues for the possibility of dynamism in epistemic standards, suggesting that belief in structural systems like meritocracy might be founded in cognitive attempts to maintain the aims of ethical life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, Daniel Markovitz's book titled "The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite," published by Penguin Press, is thoroughly evaluated in the context of the dynamics of the meritocracy trap and the two distinct phases it contains. The first phase corresponds to a period when the education system and the labor market were open to everyone. During this phase, human capital could be equally invested in through education. However, from the 1970s onwards, the spread of automation due to technological transformations eliminated this advantage for the middle class, either displacing middle and low-skilled workers from the labor market or condemning them to lower wages. While the middle class was replaced by automation, the elite class began to own the high-skilled and consequently high-yielding jobs created by automation. In this transformation, the education systems once again revealed their elitist structure, creating a new elite educational option that was only accessible to wealthy families, strongly linked to elite jobs in the labor market. The study also discusses the potential of artificial intelligence technologies to move these dynamics into a third phase. The proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies has dynamics similar to those that moved the meritocratic system into the second phase, greatly strengthening automation. Therefore, this study discusses how artificial intelligence technologies can be used not merely to strengthen automation but to focus on employment and enhance the skills of particularly middle and low-skilled workers in workplaces, complementing human labor and increasing overall productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In academic contexts, failure, as compared to success, is likely to threaten self-esteem and thus, to increase the risk of psychological disengagement from one's studies. The goal of the present research is to examine whether belief in school meritocracy (BSM) increases (vs. decreases) the effect of academic performance on self-esteem and psychological disengagement. In two pre-registered studies, university students reported their BSM. Their self-esteem and psychological disengagement were assessed following a manipulated (Study 1, N = 465) or actual (Study 2, N = 375) academic performance. Results indicated that, in both studies, BSM was positively related to performance self-esteem and negatively related to psychological disengagement. However, BSM also increased the effect of performance (manipulated or actual) on psychological disengagement. Indeed, failure led to more disengagement than success, but more so at a high level of BSM than at a lower level of BSM. The double-edge effects of belief in meritocracy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of the current crisis of democracy affecting multiple Western societies, largely stemming from social discontent rooted in the inequality characterizing these so-called neoliberal market and consumer societies, this essay explores the hypothesis that such social resentment and the referenced institutional crisis stem from two mechanisms implemented by the elites. These mechanisms are not only designed to ensure and perpetuate their privileges but, more importantly, to exercise control and discipline over society through: the breaking of communal bonds through extreme individualism and consumerism (1), and the internalization of failure and the justification of inequality through meritocracy (2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]