Jo Littler is a Reader in the Centre for Culture and Creative Industries in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London. She is the author of Radical Consumption: Shopping for change in contemporary culture (2009) and co-editor, with Roshi Naidoo, of The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of `Race¿ (2005).

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Ladders and Snakes

Meritocracy as plutocracy

What¿s wrong with meritocracy? Five problems

Meritocracy as social system and as ideological discourse

How this book is organised

Part one: Genealogies

Chapter one: Meritocracy¿s genealogies in social theory

Never start with the dictionary

Early genealogies, histories and geographies

Ladders and level playing field

Socialist roots and critique

Social democratic meritocracy

The critique of educational essentialism

`Just¿ meritocracy? The beginnings of neoliberal meritocracy

Meritocracy in the neoliberal meritocracy

Chapter two: `Rising up¿: gender, ethnicity, class and the meritocratic deficit

See where your talent takes you

Partial progression and painful ladders: mid century welfare

Pulling rank: problems with welfarist `rising up¿

Selling 1968

Parables of progress: luminous media fables

Not so cool: unequal employment

Selling inequality: post-feminism, post-race¿.post-class?

Neoliberal justice narratives

The egalitarian and the meritocratic deficit

Chapter three: The movement of meritocracy in political rhetoric

Meritocratic feeling

Thatcherism in Britain

Major meritocracy

Blairism and beyond

Aspiration Nation

Tragi-comedy: Bojös `hard work¿

Blue-collar billionaires: Farage, Trump and the destabilisation of merit

Theresa May and the Middle England meritocrats

Aspiration for all?

Meritocracy vs. mutuality

Part two: Popular parables

Chapter four: Just like us? Normcore plutocrats and the popularisation of elitism

Meritocracy and the extension of privilege

The 1%, the new rentiers and transnational asset-stripping

Normcore plutocrats

Normcore aristocrats

The kind parent

Luxury-flaunters

The new rich are different

Chapter five: #Damonsplaining and the unbearable whiteness of `merit¿

#Damonsplaining and externalised white male privilege

Post-racial meritocracy

The racialization of merit: people

The racialization of merit: products

The racialization of merit: production

Trying to shut women up

Calling out the myth of postracial meritocracy

Externalised and internalised neoliberal meritocracy

Chapter six: Desperate success: Managing the mumpreneur

Doing it all

Child labour

Desperate success

Entrepreneurial Man

Magical femininity

The mumpreneur and the branded self

Disaggregation and alternatives

Conclusion: Beyond neoliberal meritocracy

Failing to convince

The journeys of meritocracy

What¿s the alternative?

Changing the cultural pull of meritocratic hope

Alternatives to the ladder

Index