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Accepted Contribution:
Merit, meritocracy and human capital development
Amitabha Sarkar
(Tampere University)
Indrani Talukdar
Contribution short abstract:
The paper counts on our lived experiences to illustrate the way we developed ideas about merit as a social good, its reduction to meritocracy, and critically assess the role of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in countering the measures of meritocracy in relation to human capital development.
Contribution long abstract:
From ancient times, merit is a system of reward for making valued contributions to promote goodness or comply with rightness in the society – a distinct character of social good. The modern institutes appropriated merit as a constitutive fix to set as benchmarks for excellence and achievement. This posits merit into the static category of absoluteness, which is often akin to personification (but not action), standarisation (in opposition to diversification), and quantification (instead of qualification). This is the structure of meritocracy, which is indifferent to the idea of social good. Instead, it nurtures the status of individual greatness. While the opposition to this very interpretation of merit (i.e. meritocracy) may be illuminating in the political and ethical spheres, such as the decolonisation movement, the instrumental character (in comparison to constitutive form) of merit that depends on the association of success with collective and social values should be given primacy over others. The practice of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in higher academia is a popular mechanism across the world to promote justice in delivering human capital development. While the DEI at the individual-level (i.e. in student-teacher/mentor relationship) is often subjective and determined by multiple factors, but in the collective sphere it is imperative to know how the DEI strategies can produce 'equal outcome' and not just create 'equal opportunities'. The paper critically assesses how the DEI as a matrix has the capacity to ‘unchain’ merit for collective wellbeing by nurturing the values of distribution, rights, and epistemic plurality.