On the Problematic of Meritocracy

Abstract

The present study deals with the problematic nature of contemporary meritocracy. Meritocracy appears today as procedures or practices that are used to differentiate between people on the basis of their qualifications and their acquired or (supposedly) innate qualities, and they can be used to justify the exclusion of some people. The common understanding is that meritocratic procedures are fair in their exclusion. They discriminate based on skills and qualifications, not based on the gender, ethnicity, etc. However, many things are left unquestioned when demanding or implementing meritocratic procedures. These include, for in-stance, the division of labour and the system of values attached to different jobs; division of access to education; and the merit system’s conception of human beings and their abilities. The aim of this dissertation is to call the attention to these matters and clarify why and how they create social problems. The dissertation consists of four articles and an introductory chapter. The introduction goes over the history of the concepts of merit and meritocracy and its links to 19th and 20th century eugenics and the beginning of IQ testing. Phi-losophers have condemned meritocracy as a political order but it persists as a social practice. Sociology is utilized in illuminating how meritocracy with the closely connected ideal, equality of opportunity, fail to meet their promise of creating a fairer society and help produce the individuals’ failures they claim to reflect. The merit based mode of activity that meritocracy advocates is chal-lenged with the help of Hannah Arendt’s concepts of amor mundi, love of the world, and action, which enable conceptualization of acting for the sake of the action itself, without preconditions or demands for excellent results. Article I presents and analyses Dominique Girardot’s theory of the ide-ology of merit. With the help of this conceptualization, the link between meri-tocracy and social inequality can be revealed. The articles II and III deal with the relationship between merit and recognition relations. Article IV is an empir-ical study on Finnish music school students’ experiences of merit based exclu-sion.