“Credentialism” as the dubious legacy of meritocracy

The very first political principle I found myself warming to as a teenager was that of “equality of opportunity” and that came from my reading of The Conservative Enemy – a programme for radical reform in the Sixties (1962) by Anthony Crosland author of the definitive revisionist “The Future of Socialism” (1956) which was one of the strands which had made a young socialist of me.

Although I read with fascination the early issues of New Left Review which started to appear in 1960, I was very much a middle-class revisionist. My family may have lived in a large mansion in the West End of a class-ridden Scottish shipbuilding town but we were penniless - the house was owned by the Church of Scotland since my Dad was a Reverend and earned what was called a “stipend” (just under 2,000 pounds a year). Unusually, he also became a councillor (then Bailie) as a member of the “Moderate (or Progressive)” party which acted as a balance between the town’s right-wing Liberal party (composed of lawyers, accountants and shopkeepers representing the town’s sugar and shipbuilding interests) and the Labour party representing the town’s workers.  

It was this awareness of straddling different worlds which very much made me who I am – and finds expression in the theory I’ve been advancing recently that people who change worlds (whether geographical or intellectual) are more creative. 

But, as always, I’ve gone off at a tangent - so “revenons aux moutons”. It was Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Meritocracy” which took me back to the Sixties – since his starting point is Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) which was actually a satire on an idea which, forty years later, had become a toxic aspiration.

Sandel’s target is “credentialism” – 

the way that academic qualifications are now required for all top jobs

-       the resentment and humiliation this has created in those without educational qualifications

-       the hubris exuded by the successful and

-       the damage to democracy created by the amoral technocratic elite which now controls our lives

Reading it brought the sudden, awful thought that 60 years of government interventions do not seem to have brought any great change to UK social conditions –

·       Most of the current UK Cabinet are public schoolboys

·       Most of the higher civil service are educated at private schools which charge huge fees

·       Most of the sociological research points to the intensification of social privilege

Which raises the even worse possibility that the fatalists and postmodernists are correct in their argument that social interventions are to no avail. One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted a book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers: 

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment. 

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three. 

But let’s return to the development of “equality of opportunity” in the UK – at least as I was slowly beginning to understand it. In 1977 I was given the opportunity to publish this long article Community Development – its administrative and political challenge in a national  professional journal in which I explored the notion of representative democracy 

There is, I think, a relatively simple way in which to test the claims of those who argue that there is little scope for improve­ment in the operation of our democratic process and that any deficiencies art attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves looking at how new policies emerge and asking such questions as –

• how does government hear and act upon the signals from below?

·       how do "problems" get on the political "agenda"?

·       does the political and administrative process influence the type of problem picked up by government or the form in which it is presented?'

 

The assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially are, is that the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and that the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society. This is what needs to be examined critically - the concept of grievance and the process by which government responds to grievances. "Problems" emerge because individuals or groups feel dissatisfied and articulate and organise that dissatisfaction in an influential way which makes it difficult for government to resist.

"Grievance" or "dissatisfaction" is not. however, a simple concept - it arises when a judgement is made that events fall short of what one has reason to expect. Grievance is a function of expectations and performance - both of which are relative and vary from individual to individual - or. more significantly, from group to group. 

I then looked at how grievances were expressed and organised and suggested that this posed the following questions -

 

1 Do all groups in our society have the same expectations about government or (say) the social services?

2 Do all groups share roughly the same level of critical perception of their own achievement?

3 Is the capacity to articulate grievances equally distributed in society?

4 Is the capacity to organise that articula­tion equally distributed?

5 Is the process by which the political system picks up signals a neutral one?

6 is the process by which civil servants define problems and collect information a random one?

7 Does the way our decisions are taken and implemented affect the chance of their subsequent success?

 

Community development grew in the 1960s as, increasingly, negative answers were given to these sorts of questions" and - perhaps more significantly - confidence grew that the situation could be changed.