Journal Article

Agentic selves, agentic stories: cultural foundations of beliefs about meritocracy

Ho, Jacqueline

2024

Overview

Work on stratification beliefs expects disadvantaged individuals to believe less strongly in meritocracy because they are more likely to observe structural barriers to opportunity, and because meritocratic ideology runs counter to their self-interest. If they embrace meritocracy, they are understood as victims of a system-justifying ideology. By conceptualising belief formation as a cultural process, I argue that meritocracy belief among the disadvantaged may simply be pragmatic, rather than irrational. I use a narrative identity lens to analyse interviews with forty-one Singaporean youth, arguing that in the absence of other forms of capital, socioeconomically disadvantaged youth draw on narratives of meritocracy and family responsibility to construct agentic selves, telling stories in which they achieve success by relying on the chief resource available to them—themselves. These stories implicitly carry individualistic analyses of inequality, and serve as durable lenses through which disadvantaged youth interpret the successes and failures of those around them. Overall, a narrative lens pushes us to ask what cultural tools are available and useful to individuals in particular settings, and cautions against exporting assumptions about members of a social category beyond the context in which they were developed.

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Subject: Disadvantaged / Inequality / Meritocracy / Narratives / Occupational achievement / Self interest / Youth