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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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Keywords
- Alan Fox
- Cultural Studies
- Daddy Warbucks
- Desperate Success
- Fox’s Article
- Jo Littler
- Low Income Minority Neighborhoods
- media and society
- Meritocracy
- Meritocratic Discourse
- Meritocratic Dream
- Mommy Bloggers
- Neoliberal Meritocratic
- Plutocratic Elites
- Popular culture
- Prime Ministerial Personas
- Project Greenlight
- Public Sector Spending Cuts
- Reality Tv Show
- Social Inequality
- Social mobility
- Social reproduction
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCC Cultural studies::JBCC1 Popular culture
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies::JBCT2 Media studies: TV and society
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHB Sociology::JHBA Social theory
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JP Politics and government::JPW Political activism / Political engagement::JPWC Political campaigning and advertising
- thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History
- UK Version
- Universal Breadwinner
- Universal Breadwinner Model
- Universal Caregiver Model
Links
DOI: 10.4324/9781315712802Editions