Stratification by Design: Meritocracy and the Reproduction of Inequality

This annual symposium was developed jointly by the University of Melbourne and Monash University to recognise and highlight the outstanding contribution to industrial relations by the late Emeritus Professor Joe Isaac. Professor Isaac was one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars and practitioners in the broad field of industrial relations.

Stratification by Design: Meritocracy and the Reproduction of Inequality

Meritocracy is often celebrated as a fair system for allocating social rewards, promising that education, employment, and prestige are distributed according to individual ability rather than inherited privilege. Yet across societies, evidence shows that meritocratic systems routinely reproduce and legitimize inequality. In this talk, I argue that such outcomes are not flaws of meritocracy but constitutive features of how it operates. Drawing from existing research in sociology, psychology, and management, current events, and my own empirical work, I identify three mechanisms through which elites sustain their dominance in ostensibly merit-based systems: consecration, or the power to define and evaluate merit; adaptation, or the unequal capacity to cultivate valued traits; and co-optation, or the strategic use of meritocratic ideals to resist challenges to privilege. Together, these processes demonstrate how meritocracy launders advantage in the language of deservingness, naturalizing hierarchies and, at times, dehumanizing marginalized groups. I conclude by suggesting that genuine fairness requires not simply alternative distributive mechanisms but structural transformations that reduce the extreme stakes of stratification itself.

About the speaker: Lauren Rivera is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She is a leading scholar of workplace personnel practices. Her award-winning research investigates how organizational definitions and evaluations of merit shape social inequality. Her work has been published in top academic journals, including the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology, and she has also written for broader audiences in outlets such as The New York Times, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. Dr. Rivera is the author of the best-selling book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, which provides a systematic analysis of on-campus recruitment and hiring in elite professional service firms. At Kellogg, she teaches MBA and executive-level courses on leadership. She received her B.A. in Sociology and Psychology from Yale University and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University. Prior to her academic career, she was a management consultant with Monitor Group in London.

The public lecture will be delivered in-person. Join us for light refreshments from 5.30pm to 6.30pm. The public lecture will commence at 6.30pm.

For additional information please email cmVjZXB0aW9uLW1nbXQtbWt0ZyB8IHVuaW1lbGIgISBlZHUgISBhdQ==

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