Search results

The aim of this paper is to explore how an elite group of senior women in banking represent and describe their understanding and experience of the role of meritocracy, within the context of their own career.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 33 senior female directors from six global investment banks. Template analysis was used in the qualitative analysis of the coding.

The paper found that the women's adherence to the notion of meritocracy diminished over time, as merit appeared to be less defined by human capital (ability and experience) and more by social capital (seen as political behaviour). The paper also reveals how the concept is construed on two levels: first, on a symbolic level, demonstrating how the organization defines and rewards success; second, on a personal level, how it affects the individual's cognitions, emotions and self‐belief.

This paper contributes to the small literature on the concept of meritocracy in the management field, with an emphasis on the experiences of successful female directors in global investment banks.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a picture on the impact of the meritocracy and personality traits on the recruitment process in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the State of Qatar.

The study used ADANCO software for carrying a structural equation modelling analysis and for descriptive statistics.

The findings showed that meritocracy and personality traits had an impact on recruitment process. In addition, meritocracy showed to be more important than personality traits in the recruitment process.

This research is conducted only in one country, i.e. the State of Qatar, and findings cannot be generalised for other countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council and abroad. Extending this research in other countries and comparing the findings will help create a better portray on the role of meritocracy and personality traits on the recruitment process.

This paper will help the Qatari and other SMEs owners to use a more comprehensive approach during the recruitment of their employees, considering that the process of recruitment plays an important role within the overall human resource management. Recruiting the right people has become an extremely daunting mission for SMEs, given that competition for talent is increasingly becoming a very tough and uncompromising issue.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the only paper that has researched the role of meritocracy and personality traits on the recruitment process in the SMEs in the State of Qatar and abroad. Separate studies were conducted that treat the impact of meritocracy and personality on recruiting the right person(s) for the company, but none treated these aspects together in one single paper.

This paper aims to examine how the work of Ruth Simpson and the subsequent collaborations have contributed to understanding of the gendered constructions of meritocracy, as they apply in organizations.

This paper is a personal analysis of the work of Ruth Simpson and her colleagues and the way in which her work has resonated with me and influenced our joint collaborations. The key questions our work has addressed, both when we work together and with others, include how merit is constructed. Is it gendered? How does it influence organizational outcomes? How is merit recognized? Is merit “performed”? Key theoretical constructs and frameworks are used to address these issues; including, gendered organizational structures and regimes (Acker, 1990; Ely and Meyerson, 2000; Gherardi and Poggio, 2001), the gendered nature of meritocracy (Thornton, 2007; Sommerlad, 2012, Brink van den and Benschop, 2012) and the performance and “stickiness” of meritocracy (Ashcraft, 2013, Bergman and Chalkley, 2007).

The paper reveals alternative ways of interrogating the discourse of meritocracy. Usually taken for granted, as an objective and fair mechanism for the allocation of scarce resources, the concept is examined and found to be much more contingent, unstable and subjective than had previously been considered. The gender-based implications of these findings are assessed.

The implications of the work are to broaden the field and develop frameworks within which we can understand more clearly the way in which merit is understood. Through the work we have done, we have highlighted that merit far from being an objective measure of ability is deeply rooted in contextual and we argue, gendered understandings of contribution, worth and desert.

The practical implications are that firms can no longer rely on discourses of meritocracy to evidence their commitment to equality and fairness. They will need to go further to show a direct link between fairness in the design of processes as well as fairness in the outcomes of these processes. Until these objectives are more clearly articulated, we should continue to shine a light on embedded inequalities.

The social implications are that a call for wider societal understanding of meritocracy should be made. Rather than simply accepting discourses of merit, key constituent groups who have not benefitted from the prevailing orthodoxy should seek to examine the concept and draw their own conclusions. In this manner, the author develops societal mechanisms that do not just purport to ensure equality of outcome for all; they achieve it.

This paper offers an examination of the development of ideas, how we can learn from the work of influential scholars within the field and, in turn, through collaboration, advance understanding.

The aim of this paper is to examine health care organizations' power structures from the first‐line management perspective. What liable power structures derive from the theoretical bases of bureaucratic, professional and result based organizations, and what power type do health care organizations represent, according to the empirical data? The paper seeks to perform an analysis using Mintzberg's power configurations of instrument, closed system, meritocracy and political arena.

The empirical study was executed at the end of 2005 through a survey in ten Finnish hospital districts in both specialized and primary care. Respondents were all first‐line managers in the area and a sample of staff members from internal disease, surgical and psychiatric units, as well as out‐patient and primary care units. The number of respondents was 1,197 and the response percentage was 38. The data were analyzed statistically.

As a result, it can be seen that a certain kind of organization structure supports the generation of a certain power type. A bureaucratic organization generates an instrument or closed system organization, a professional organization generates meritocracy and also political arena, and a result‐based organization has a connection to political arena and meritocracy. First line managers regarded health care organizations as instruments when staff regarded them mainly as meritocracies having features of political arena. Managers felt their position to be limited by rules, whereas staff members regarded their position as having lots of space and influence potential.

If the organizations seek innovative and active managers at the unit level, they should change the organizational structure and redistribute the work so that there could be more space for meaningful management.

This research adds to the literature and gives helpful suggestions that will be of interest to those in the position of first‐line management in health care.

This editorial aims to introduce the special issue on meritocracy, difference and choice.

The first part is a commentary on key issues in the study of the notions of meritocracy, difference and choice. The second part presents the six papers in the special issue.

Five of the six papers in this special issue explore the work experiences of women managers/directors in senior positions within a variety of organizations. All of these papers demonstrate that despite their economic empowerment, these women are still strongly connected to the domestic realm through their continued entanglement in the traditional roles of mother and homemaker. This has led them to interpret their work situation either through a consideration of what they understand by the notion of merit or a presentation of their situation through the lens of choice. A further paper which explores the experiences of sex workers exposes the gendered nature of agency, highlighting the limitations on “choice” that different types of workers experience.

The authors comment on how contemporary notions of merit and choice individualise women's experience within organisations, ignoring the structural and systemic elements inherent to women's continued disadvantage. This allows “blame” for women's absence in the upper echelons of organisations to lie with women themselves, explaining this in terms of their lack of skills or the traditional “choices” they make. The six papers which make up the special issue explore how women's “choices” are constrained, how the contemporary discourses of merit and choice conceal issues of structure and organizational process and how women struggle to make sense of their own and others' experiences.

The issues discussed in the papers have important implications for understanding women's experience of work and organizations. They highlight the need to introduce a structural and systemic element to the understanding of how women experience work at senior (and other) levels of organizations, why they take the decision to leave a senior position and why women appear to “choose” not to seek senior positions.

Gender and Management: An International Journal invited this special issue on meritocracy, difference and choice to draw attention to the ways in which women draw on these discourses as a means of understanding their organizational situations and how use of these discourses acts to conceal the structural and systemic element connected to their work experiences.

In my consulting practice, I spend a great deal of time talking with senior level executives about their organization’s human resource practices. One theme I hear consistently is that their organizations are “true” meritocracies where the “gifted” rise to the top as a result of a fair process. The irony is that women and professionals of color in those same companies often tell me that the environment is far from fair to them.

A dark side of global mobility is that many immigrants have negative work outcomes. Studies have analyzed the antecedents to poor work outcomes from the immigrants’ point of view or from that of host country nationals. The purpose of this paper is to propose a relational model, which applies terror management theory to address how the economic mobility beliefs of immigrants and host country nationals interact and how these different combinations of beliefs affect the self-esteem of immigrants.

This theoretical model considers the impact of the social interactions between immigrants and host country nationals when immigrants’ mortality is salient.

In hostile environments that make immigrants’ mortality salient, lack of confirmation of immigrants’ beliefs about economic mobility from host country nationals can lead to a decrease in immigrants’ self-esteem and therefore to negative work outcomes.

As the number of immigrants grows, so do concerns about their ability to contribute to the economy. Lack of confirmation of their beliefs in a context in which their mortality is salient, is likely to lead to lower self-esteem and perhaps other negative outcomes.

This paper is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to use terror management theory to advance our understanding of the outcome of a lack of confirmation from host country nationals of immigrants’ beliefs on economic mobility under conditions of mortality salience.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how women in senior management draw on discourses of merit and special contribution in making sense of the contradictions and tensions they experience in their working lives. It has a particular focus on how women explain possible experiences of disadvantage and the extent to which they see such experiences as gendered.

The research is based on an Australian study of women leaders in the private and tertiary sectors. Data are drawn from in‐depth interviews with 14 women.

Findings suggest that women draw on discourses of meritocracy and of “special contribution” in discussing their experiences at work. Inconsistencies between these competing discourses are mediated through notions of choice.

The research has implications for the understanding of how women at senior levels make sense of their experiences in organizations. A wider sample may give further corroboration to these results.

The paper highlights the significance of the discourse of choice in aligning discourses of “special contribution” with the reality of their lives whilst keeping intact the concepts of equality and meritocracy to which they strongly adhere.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, who governed the country from 1959 to 1990, passed away on 23 March 2015 at the age of 91. The purpose of this paper is to assess his legacy of good governance in Singapore.

The changes in Singapore’s policy context during 1959-2014 are described first before analyzing Lee’s legacy of good governance in Singapore by examining his books and major speeches.

Lee Kuan Yew’s commitment to meritocracy, empowerment of the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau to curb corruption effectively, reliance on competitive salaries to attract the “best and brightest” citizens to join the civil service, and maintenance of the rule of law, constitute his legacy of good governance in Singapore.

This paper will be useful to policy-makers, scholars and readers who are interested in learning about Lee Kuan Yew’s contribution to good governance in Singapore.

Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.

In “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.

This study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.

The authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.