Against Meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility

This is a marvellously rich and timely book. It is meticulously researched and wide ranging in focus. Jo Littler pins down with precision the key role played by the idea of meritocracy in the political and cultural neoliberal strategy.

- Professor Angela McRobbie, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Against Meritocracy is a tour de force of political analysis. But it's also a landmark political book, charting pathways beyond the leading social beliefs of our time.

- Professor Andrew Ross, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, USA

In Against Meritocracy, Jo Littler elegantly and persuasively weaves together histories and discourses of the concept meritocracy, and theorizes about the longevity of this concept even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this concept does not work in culture, in politics, in our everyday lives. Here she offers an important new angle on the familiar assumptions about meritocracy, and importantly demonstrates how these assumptions are put into practice in ways that benefit the privileged. This brilliant book is so important; Littler's refusal to make totalizing statements about what, and how, meritocracy means, is a major, and necessary, contribution.

- Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser, Communication, USC Annenberg, USA

Meritocracy, as legitimating creed for capitalism-as-culture, has been widely studied, but less than adequately theorized. In a commanding new study, Jo Littler subjects the myth of upward mobility to searching critical analysis, probing its historical resilience, its pervasive presence in popular discourse, and its insidious effects as an ideology that continues, amidst plutocratic rule and widening structural inequality, to promote faith in the elusive ladder of opportunity .

- Professor Jean Comaroff, African and African American Studies, Harvard University, USA

Against Meritocracy has an important role to play in informing the growing movement working to sweep away the Tory government.

- IAN SINCLAIR, Peace News

Littler's compelling argument of the damage, both ideological and material, caused by the workings of meritocracy needs to be heeded. [...] Against Meritocracy is an important and timely book that reminds us it is time to abandon meritocracy as elitist, inequitable, and well past its sell-by-date.

- Diane Reay, University of Cambridge

Littler offers a systematic and brilliant analysis of the kind of cultural work that the incorporation of meritocratic ideals has carried out in the Anglo-American world, particularly since the 1980s

- Dr Catherine Rottenberg