Oh hum! Now Its Meritocracy, is it?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 15, 2019
MY DEAR FRIEND, CHARLES, WRITES
The Markovits book is less political than an astute analysis of what is occurring in today’s workplace. His perspective catches me by surprise, but I think he nails a lot of what is going on. Some have characterized the book as a sociological masterpiece and I’m sympathetic with that view after my first read. I usually cool down and become more skeptical over time when I find a work this interesting, time will tell. But I have first-hand knowledge of what he is talking about with managers feeling that the competition for their jobs is so competitive that they feel they are being stalked by replacements. There is more microscope here than telescope.
MY RESPONSE
Meritocracy – a ruling or influential class of educated or skilled people, or "the relentless advance of the meritocracy." Google
2019: The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press)
THE MERITOCRACY TRAP: HOW AMERICA’S FOUNDATIONAL MYTH FEEDS INEQUALITY, DISMANTLES THE MIDDLE CLASS, AND DEVOURS THE ELITE by Daniel Markovits.
“Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy, one might even say, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.” Daniel Markovits’s Wikipedia
Sarah Leonard writes in The New Republic (September 5, 2019)
In 1958, sociologist Michael Young wrote a dark satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy. The term “meritocracy” was Young’s own coining, and he chose it to denote a new aristocracy based on expertise and test-taking instead of breeding and titles. In Young’s book, set in 2034, Britain is forced to evolve by international economic competition. The elevation of IQ over birth first serves as a democratizing force championed by socialists, but ultimately results in a rigid caste system.
The state uses universal testing to identify and elevate meritocrats, leaving most of England’s citizens poor and demoralized, without even a legitimate grievance, since, after all, who could argue that the wise should not rule? Eventually, a populist movement emerges. The story ends in bloody revolt and the assassination of the fictional author before he can review his page proofs.
This focus on meritocratic elites is apt at a time when those in charge of finance, tech, and politics have been widely discredited and disavowed by the electorate. Markovits’s dissection of elite culture and behavior (obsession with Ivy League credentials, competitive workaholism, exceptional wealth) is precise and unsparing. But perhaps just as revealing are his book’s weaknesses, not least its innocence of the realities of class struggle in the United States today—and of which fights will make society fairer and more equal.
Dear Charles,
Sarah Lawrence has got it right. The “spoiled brat” generation has wealth, prestige, entitlement, but that is not enough. They want it all. And Professor Markovits is telling them they are working too hard and the system is against them.
Now, how is that possible? When they are the system! The nepotistic system of management is passé. Small wonder middle management is acting like a bull in a China shop. They are atavistic and management is anachronistic as we know it.
What would you expect managers to do or how would you expect them to behave when under seige?
My sense is that Markovits’s commencement address at Yale was delivered to the choir. These obliging students and their brothers and sisters in industry, commerce, government, education, and politics sit on their IQ’s and wait for a miraculous system to show up to relieve them of the absurdity of their discomfiture.
Incidentally, the United States has always fed inequality, a kind of survival of the fittest or the best connected.
I addressed this very issue when invited to Toronto in 2002. This is the introduction to my syllabus:
The Conference Board of Canada
Toronto, Canada
February 22, 2002
Intellectual Capital and the Power of People –
The Next Competitive Advantage
Presentation of this Theme
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 22, 2002
“The Power of Organizational Development –
A View from the Efficacy of Practical Experience”
Overview
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once said his wife might have become a good writer, but college writing courses ruined her. The same might be said about organizational development, or OD.
OD has been promoted to the ranks of a profession, in fact an academic discipline, with a daunting curriculum at several major colleges and universities. The curriculum depends on behavioral and social sciences, computer science, Aristotelian logic, and the goodness of fit of Socratic sophistry.
Yet OD is not nearly as much a cognitive science as an intuitive process, where a posteriori or inductive reasoning (particular to the general) is more effective than a priori or deductive reasoning (general to the particular) as broad conclusions are inferred from individual observations.
OD practitioners have become increasingly in vogue as the Machine Age mechanistic organization structure continues to fail to generate the response time and the economies of purpose desired to maintain the rhythm and resonance of competition.
An assortment of professions from business, management, computer systems, engineering, finance, psychology, even mathematics and physics have attempted to seize control and mastery of the social dynamics of enterprise without notable success. This failure, in the main, also applies to OD.
OD practitioners, like these other adventurers, have failed to disengage the dominance of the 80-20 rule from its stranglehold on organization, that is, 80 percent of the productive work in most organizations is still accomplished by 20 percent of the workforce. In other words, the activities of 80 percent of the workers in any organization are likely to have a cumulative impact on the bottom line of 20 percent.
There are exceptions to this rule, no doubt, and they are often a product of unconscious ODism carried out by astute managers, or through the contracted services of alert OD practitioners. Whatever the case, OD displays these attributes:
(1) OD practitioners accept and are comfortable with the fact that the relationship of OD to the client is always that of an inside-outsider.
(2) OD practitioners don’t need to produce camera-ready cinematic recommendations, which both entertain and reassure the client, but they do need to produce intellectual and operational challenges when the biases and status quo stance of management are the inertia producing culprits.
(3) OD practitioners are observers as if filming history. Their camera zooms in on dolly tracks, and then cuts from close-ups to long shots, and back again, assembling thousands of bits of visual and auditory information into a montage that with spectacular accuracy records the experience and registers the central essence of the organization. Consequently, social engineering acumen is never enough when it comes to OD.
(4) OD practitioners are intuitive hunch players, and follow their hunches when others see no sense to their wondering, exploring, and conceptualizing until the flash of insight connects with everything.
(5) OD practitioners have no vested interest in operations, no ax to grind, no advocacy to protect. Wherever OD leads them is where they go, and they often don’t know where that is until they get there
(6) OD practitioners are not guided by logic, chronological schemes, comparing operations with what worked elsewhere. OD goes forward and backward in time, or steps outside of time (outside the box) as it suits them in pursuit of what is happening and why. Once this understanding is sensed, the work of OD is essentially over and it is up to operational personnel (meaning management and professionals) to make the most of the new insights.
The director of the CONFERENCE BOARD OF CANADA had read several published pieces of mine on the disappearing managerial class and the reluctance of the professional class to “take charge” and fill the void. [Those present didn’t want to hear that, so it was a wasted effort on my part.]
God! I am tired of sociologists, psychologists, educators and the whole elite system. “Houston, we have a problem!” Of course we do! And it is not a liberal or conservative problem, not a problem that will get anywhere close to a solution by spiking the fear of the underclass, the middle class much less the professional class. Meritocracy, indeed!
Nothing changes until and unless those complaining, including the good professor realize that they are part of the problem.
Always be well,
Jim
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