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Cited by 347Social and Cultural DynamicsElite Sociology and Global CapitalismAnthropological Studies and Insights

Against Meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility

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Littler, Jo·2017·Routledge eBooks
DOI 10.4324/9781315712802
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Abstract

Meritocracy today involves the idea that whatever your social position at birth, society ought to offer enough opportunity and mobility for ‘talent’ to combine with ‘effort’ in order to ‘rise to the top’. This idea is one of the most prevalent social and cultural tropes of our time, as palpable in the speeches of politicians as in popular culture. In this book Jo Littler argues that meritocracy is the key cultural means of legitimation for contemporary neoliberal culture – and that whilst it promises opportunity, it in fact creates new forms of social division. Against Meritocracy is split into two parts. Part I explores the genealogies of meritocracy within social theory, political discourse and working cultures. It traces the dramatic U-turn in meritocracy’s meaning, from socialist slur to a contemporary ideal of how a society should be organised. Part II uses a series of case studies to analyse the cultural pull of popular ‘parables of progress’, from reality TV to the super-rich and celebrity CEOs, from social media controversies to the rise of the ‘mumpreneur’. Paying special attention to the role of gender, ‘race’ and class, this book provides new conceptualisations of the meaning of meritocracy in contemporary culture and society.

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Authors
Littler, J.
Affiliations
Roskilde University (DK)
Corresponding author
Littler, Jo
ORCID
Littler, Jo
Venue
Routledge eBooks
Publisher
Routledge
Published
2017-08-16
DOI
10.4324/9781315712802
OpenAlex
W4256736754
Cited by
347
References
221
Citations by year
2026: 52 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 43 · 2023: 46 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 25 · 2018: 22 · 2017: 1
FWCI
22.09
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Routledge eBooks (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • City Research Online (City University London) (acceptedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Cultural Dynamics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
Keywords
meritocracy, neoliberalism, social mobility, social division, reality television, super-rich, social media controversy, gender, race, class, political discourse, organizational culture

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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