How far merit selection? Social stratification and the labour market

Higher education non-completion, employers, and labor market integration: Experimental evidence

Theories of job assignment suggest that employers give a lot of weight to achieved educational credentials. But what if credentials are missing? We theorize how college non-completion affects the hiring chances, identify its causal effect in different labor market segments, and assess which factors facilitate labor market entry for dropouts. Based on a simulated hiring process with N = 1382 German employers who rated more than 10,000 fictitious CVs, we show that college non-completion is not a scar per se, but rather depends on the educational attainment of the competitors who constitute the labor queue, and on the degree of occupational closure which varies on a granular level between firms that hire for the same occupations. We also find that employers, when rating dropouts, attach most value to CV attributes that signal a high stock of job-relevant skills, such as good performance during college or an occupation-specific internship. We conclude by discussing implications of our work for research on the labor market integration of dropouts.

The Production of Merit: How Managers Understand and Apply Merit in the Workplace

In this article, we develop a process model that specifies how managers come to understand and approach the evaluation of merit in the workplace. Interviews from a diverse sample of managers and from managers at a U.S. technology company, along with supplemental qualitative online review data, reveal that managers are not blank slates: we find that individuals’ understandings of merit are shaped by their (positive and negative) experiences of being evaluated as employees prior to promotion to management. Our analysis also identifies two distinct managerial approaches to applying merit when evaluating others: the focused approach, in which managers evaluate employees’ work actions quantitatively at the individual level; and the diffuse approach in which managers assess both employees’ work actions and personal qualities, quantitatively and qualitatively, at both the individual and team levels. We further find that, as a result of their different past experiences as subjects of evaluation, individuals who experience mostly negative evaluation outcomes as employees are more likely to adopt a focused approach to evaluating merit, whereas individuals who experience mostly positive evaluation outcomes are more likely to adopt a diffuse approach. Our study contributes to the scholarship on meritocracy and workplace inequality by showing that merit is not an abstract concept but a guiding principle that is produced and reproduced over time based on individuals’ evaluation experiences in the workplace.

Merit selecting school leaders: Australian principals' perspectives

Purpose

This research paper explores the perspectives of Australian school principals in the state of New South Wales (NSW) regarding what they believe constitutes “merit” when selecting deputy principals, assistant principals (primary) and head teachers (secondary).

Design/methodology/approach

An online survey was utilised to collect qualitative and quantitative data from school principals across the state of NSW to investigate their understanding of, and approach to, the merit selection of their respective school leadership cadres.

Findings

Study findings indicated a statewide variance in the perceptions of principals when identifying merit for the purposes of recruiting school leadership teams. These findings question the widely held view that candidates compete for school leadership positions on a level playing field.

Practical implications

In practical terms, the findings indicate that NSW school principals would benefit from more intensive professional learning opportunities designed to enhance their ability to objectively identify and assess merit when selecting school leaders.

Originality/value

This study contributes to an enhanced understanding in an area where there is a paucity of research-based evidence focusing upon the perspectives of school principals regarding their understanding of meritocratic theory and its influence on their school leadership selection practice.

College as equalizer? Testing the selectivity hypothesis

Stratification research shows that occupational origins and destinations are weakly associated among individuals holding a college degree. The finding is taken to support the hypothesis that college equalizes opportunities and promotes social mobility. I test the competing hypothesis that the high level of social mobility reported for college degree holders results from the selectivity of this group. To control for selectivity, I reweigh a sample of college degree holders by the inverse probability of being a college degree holder conditional on observable characteristics of students before they enter college, including characteristics such as cognitive ability, personality traits, and beliefs about the future. Analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find no support for the selectivity hypothesis. These findings align with evidence based on indirect tests of the hypothesis, and indicate that college indeed appears to be an equalizer.

Institutional change and parental compensation in intergenerational attainment

Previous research has shown how institutional changes, such as educational expansion, have weakened parental influence on educational attainment. We extend this analysis to occupational attainment and put forth a parental compensation hypothesis: as the origin-education (OE) association weakens, parents act to compensate for this in order to maintain their influence on the child's occupational attainment. We should see this as a strengthened origin-destination association net of education (net OD). Further, we study whether these compensatory actions are triggered by changes in educational institutions and whether the institutional changes that reduce educational inequality are the same ones that prompt parental compensation. We have linked data from five waves of the European Social Survey (2002-10) with data on educational institutions matched to birth cohorts born 1941-80 in 25 countries. We find weakened OE and strengthened net OD associations, supporting our parental compensation hypothesis. Multilevel mixed effects regression analyses reveal that reforms lengthening compulsory education, and the increased access to and the attainment of higher education have had a positive influence on parental compensation. As a conclusion, a later school leaving age seems to secure increased parental influence on children's occupational attainment, while parents seem to have reacted to a lesser extent on the changes in higher education.

The path from social origins to top jobs: social reproduction via education

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the way in which cognitive and educational attainment mediate the link between social origins and elite social class destinations in mid-life. Using the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), we assess the roles of a range of pathways through which educational advantage may lead to occupational attainment: cognitive development; private and selective secondary schools; school level qualifications; and higher education, including institution and field of study. Whereas past research has shown a residual direct effect of social origins on class destinations, we find that, once a sufficiently detailed picture of educational attainment is taken into account, education fully explains the link between social origins and top social class destinations. In contrast, the gap between men and women in achieving top social class positions is in no part accounted for by education.

Parental Support and Youth Occupational Attainment: Help or Hindrance?

Although several concerns surround the transition to adulthood and youth increasingly rely on parental support, our knowledge about the implications of parental support for youth development and transition to adulthood is limited. This study fills this gap by conceptualizing development within a life course perspective that links social inequality and early life course transitions. It draws on a subsample of youth observed between age 18 and 28 from the Transition to Adulthood supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics 2005-2015 (N = 7,542; 53% female, 51.3% white). Mixed-effects models reveal that the more direct financial transfers youth receive, the higher their occupational status. Yet, indirect financial support parents offer through co-residence shows the opposite pattern. Among youth receiving monetary transfers, college graduates have particularly high occupational status; however, among youth living with their parents, college graduates have the lowest occupational status. Although different types of parental support may equally act as safety nets, their divergent implications for youths' occupational attainment raise concerns about the reproduction and possible intensification of inequality during this developmental stage.

The discourse of meritocracy contested/reproduced: Foreign women academics in UK business schools

This article provides insights into the role of minority employees in reproducing and contesting the discourse of meritocracy in contemporary organizations. It also discusses the effects the contestation of meritocracy, or the lack thereof, has on organizational power relations and on the situation of individuals who are the target of meritocratic policies. Empirically, we address the experiences of a growing category of workers—women academics of non-UK origin—employed within UK business schools. Based on the analysis of narratives focusing on the career trajectories of our research participants, we show how the belief in, and paradoxically the questioning of, meritocratic principles contribute to the reproduction of inequalities. We conclude that, as a result of the overarching perpetuation, and only limited challenging of, extant power relations in organizations, both the current definitions of merit and the application of meritocratic principles remain unchanged.

Disadvantaged through discrimination? The role of employers in social stratification

Sociologists have consistently demonstrated that a rather strong association exists between an individual's social class origin and their social class destination, even after controlling for educational attainment. One explanation for this persisting association which is rarely addressed in research in social stratification and mobility is the extent to which class inequalities in access to advantaged class positions are due to discrimination by employers. I set up a field experiment to test whether employers discriminate on the basis of class origin characteristics. I sent letters of job application for professional and managerial occupations to 2560 large UK companies, so as to compare the prospects of equally matched potential employees differing on a range of characteristics, some related to class of origin. The six treatment conditions in the experiment were: the name of the candidate, the type of school attended, the candidate's interests outside work, their sex, the university that they attended and their achieved degree class. Results suggest that employers do pay attention to the class origin characteristics tested here, and that candidates with a name, school type and interests associated with the social elite are more likely to receive a reply to their application than candidates with the equivalent non-elite characteristics. However, the treatment conditions do not, on the whole, have significant effects on the employers' responses in and of themselves. Instead, employers appear to favour particular combinations of characteristics while penalising others.