Earning rent with your talent: modern-day inequality rests on the power to define, transfer and institutionalize talent

In this article, I develop the point that whereas talent is the basis for desert, talent itself is not meritocratically deserved. It is produced by three processes, none of which are meritocratic: (1) talent is unequally distributed by the rigged lottery of birth, (2) talent is defined in ways that favor some traits over others, and (3) the market for talent is manipulated to maximally extract advantages by those who have more of it. To see how, we require a sociological perspective on economic rent. I argue that talent is a major means through which people seek rent in modern-day capitalism. Talent today is what inherited land was to feudal societies; an unchallenged source of symbolic and economic rewards. Whereas God sanctified the aristocracy’s wealth, contemporary privilege is legitimated by meritocracy. Drawing on the work of Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jerome Karabel, I show how rent-seeking in modern societies has come to rely principally on rent-definition and creation. Inequality is produced by the ways in which talent is defined, institutionalized, and sustained by the moral deservingness we attribute to the accomplishments of talents. Consequently, today’s inequalities are as striking as ever, yet harder to challenge than ever before

Merit and ressentiment: how to tackle the tyranny of merit

My contribution to this special issue engages with Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Meritocracy and its significance to the academic conversation about meritocracy and its discontents. Specifically, I highlight Sandel’s diagnosis of the rise of populism and his proposed remedy for the ‘tyranny of merit’. First, building on Menno ter Braak’s writings on the rise of fascism, I explore the sources of ressentiment in contemporary societies as stemming not from disillusionment with meritocracy but from the broken promise of liberalism and democracy more generally. Second, I consider Sandel’s proposals to reform elite university admissions and to ‘recognize work’, explore their wider applicability, and reflect on their limitations to meaningfully change how success and failure is socially experienced and morally understood.Published versio

The Great British sorting machine: adolescents’ future in the balance of family, school and the neighborhood

Research calls attention to the divergent school and labor market trajectories of Europe’s youth while, across the Atlantic, researchers describe the long-lasting consequences of poverty on adolescent development. In this paper we incorporate both processes to shed a new light on a classic concern in the sociology of stratification: how are adolescents’ aspirations, expectations, and school performance shaped by the combined socioeconomic contexts of family, school and neighborhood life? Theoretically, social contexts provide children with cultural resources that may foster their ambitions and bolster their academic performance. Reference group theory instead highlights how seemingly positive settings can depress educational performance as well as aspirations and expectations. We empirically test these competing claims, drawing on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) which describes the school and neighborhood trajectories of 7,934 British children followed from birth to adolescence. We find that, generally, childhood school and neighborhood deprivation is negatively associated with adolescents’ school performance, aspirations and expectations for their future, in line with the cultural resource perspective. However, there are important exceptions to this pattern which point to reference group processes for (1) children of highly-educated parents, whose academic performance especially suffers from growing up in a poor neighborhood, and (2) for children from low-educated parents, whose academic aspirations and expectations are unexpectedly high when they either went to an affluent school or lived in an affluent neighborhood—but not both. We conclude by discussing implications for theory, policy and future research

Neoliberalism and symbolic boundaries in Europe

Studies suggest that the rise of neoliberalism accompanies a foregrounding of individual responsibility and a weakening of community. The authors provide a theoretical agenda for studying the interactions between the global diffusion of neoliberal policies and ideologies, on the one side, and cultural repertoires and boundary configurations, on the other, in the context of local, national, and regional variation. Exploiting variation in the rate of adoption of neoliberal policies across European societies, the authors show how levels of neoliberal penetration covary with the way citizens draw symbolic boundaries along the lines of ethnoreligious otherness and moral deservingness.Published versio

Deliberating inequality: a blueprint for studying the social formation of beliefs about economic inequality

In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design—a blueprint—to study how people’s understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019

Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels intra-partisan polarization about inequality

Population-based survey research demonstrates that growing economic divides in Western countries have not gone together with increased popular concern about inequality. Extant explanations focus on ‘misperception’: people generally underestimate the extent of inequality and overestimate society's meritocratic nature. However, scholarly attempts to correct people's misperceptions have produced mixed results. We ask whether COVID-19, by upending everyday life, has made people responsive to information about inequality, even if that entails crossing ideological divides. We field an original survey experiment in the United States, a least-likely case of belief change, given high levels of inequality and partisan polarization. Our informational treatment increases (1) concerns over economic inequality, (2) support for redistribution, and (3) acknowledgement that COVID-19 has especially hurt the most vulnerable. Information provision renders non-significant the partisan gap between moderate Democrats and Republicans but increases that between moderate and strong Republicans. We discuss our findings' implications and suggestions for further research.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102692Published versio

Belief in meritocracy reexamined: scrutinizing the role of subjective social mobility

Despite decreasing intergenerational mobility, strengthening the ties between family background and children’s economic outcomes, Western citizens continue to believe in meritocracy. We study how meritocratic beliefs about success relate to individuals’ social mobility experiences: Is subjective upward mobility associated with meritocratic attributions of success and downward mobility with structuralist views? Whereas previous studies addressed the relevance of individuals’ current position or objective mobility, we leverage diagonal reference models to disentangle the role of subjective mobility, origin, and destination. Surveying a representative Dutch sample (n = 1,507), we find, echoing the Thomas theorem, that if people experience social mobility as real, it is real in its consequences: subjective upward mobility is associated with stronger meritocratic beliefs, and downward mobility is associated with stronger structuralist beliefs—but has no bearing on people’s meritocracy beliefs. This helps understand the muted political response to growing inequality: a small share of upwardly mobile individuals may suffice to uphold public faith in meritocracy.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0190272521106381

Detroit's wealth of ruins

Sociologist Jonathan Jan Benjamin Mijs explores Detroit, the symbol of destructive global forces, and finds agency in a wealth of ruins

The missing organizational dimension of prisoner reentry: an ethnography of the road to reentry at a nonprofit service provider

Prisoner reentry has received great interest in political sociology, criminology, and beyond. Research documents the struggles of individuals trying to find their way back into society. Less attention has been given to the organizational aspects of reentry. This is unfortunate given the rapid growth of nonprofit reentry organizations in the United States, which introduces a new set of questions about the context and challenges to prisoner reentry. Drawing on an ethnography of Safe, a nonprofit reentry organization in the Northeast, I describe the organization’s pivotal role in institutionalizing the pathway to prisoner reentry: a road to reentry, which takes former prisoners through a process that reconfigures their morality, identity, and social relationships. The road-to-reentry concept helps bring together scholars of the welfare state and criminology by highlighting how the challenges of prisoner reentry rely on how this process is organized. The way in which prison reentry is organized, in turn, affects former prisoners’ agency and shapes the relationship between these men and women and their respective families and communities