Is class truly in the past, or do invisible workplace codes still govern who gets a place in elite workplaces?
In this Transforming Business episode, Martin Parker speaks with Lee Elliot Major and Anne-Marie Sim, authors of Cracking the Class Code, about how leading employers can dismantle these class barriers.
They discuss the hidden codes passed down through generations, why it matters for both people and businesses that talent is assessed beyond these codes, and how we can build a fairer system in which everyone has a genuine chance to lead a decent life.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Lee Elliot Major is Britain’s first Professor of Social Mobility, based at the University of Exeter. Anne-Marie Sim is co-founder and lead of the South-West Social Mobility Commission at the University of Exeter.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Cracking the Class Code by Lee Elliot Major and Anne-Marie Sim is available for £14.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:16 – Why do you care about social class at the present moment?
04:27 – Has social mobility stalled in some way?
10:49 – What do you mean by ‘class code’?
16:04 – Isn’t judgement in organisations inevitable?
20:01 – How do gender, ethnicity and social class intersect?
23:05 – What should firms be doing in order not to be discriminating on the basis of social class?
28:03 – How does tax come into this equation?
31:09 – Are these steps necessary in our current ‘meritocracy’?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Martin Parker: Hello. My name is Martin Parker, I’m professor at the University of Bristol Business School. It’s my enormous pleasure today to be having a conversation with Lee Elliot Major and Anne-Marie Sim about their book, ‘Cracking the Class Code: How the Opportunity Game is Rigged – And How Firms Can Help Fix It’, which is published by Policy Press in November. To tell you a little bit about Lee and Anne-Marie.
So Lee Elliot Major is Britain’s first professor of social mobility, based at the University of Exeter. He was previously chief executive of the Sutton Trust, prominent UK foundation working to improve social mobility through education. His award winning books include ‘Equity in Education’ and ‘Social Mobility and Its Enemies’. Anne-Marie Sim is co-founder and lead of the Southwest Social Mobility Commission at the University of Exeter.
She was previously a strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, where she worked with leading UK and global companies. She’s got a DPhil and a master’s in social anthropology, and a bachelor’s in economics and management from the University of Oxford. Welcome both.
Anne-Marie Sim: Thank you.
MP: A pleasure. Really pleased to have you. So let’s start off with the kind of a general question, just to kind of establish what it is we’re talking about today.
You’re interested in social class. Why social class now? Social class very often feels like a rather, a rather dated term. Lee, why do you care about social class at the present moment?
Lee Elliot Major: So we thought about this term a lot in writing the book. We actually thought about not using that term because it’s so loaded, right? And it’s so contested, particularly given that this book has aims to be global, right? We are trying to document what we call a crisis of opportunity, actually, we might get into that. And that’s something you’re witnessing in the UK.
But what is really interesting from what we found is that there seems to be similar patterns across the world. Now, as you know, Martin, we talk a lot about class in the UK, what we found in other countries, even though we would argue there are similar patterns, i.e. people’s lives are systematically held back, if you like, their options are held back by systemic barriers that we would argue is a class system.
They wouldn’t use that language of class. And in the UK we have lots of debates about theories about class. But we felt that we had to use that term because what we were finding was the product, if you like, of a class system. It’s important because it’s more than just talking about, for example, disadvantage. You know a lot of my work is in education.
You know, a lot of the narratives in the political debates are about how do we help children from disadvantaged backgrounds. That, of course, is hugely important. And we have poverty in this country. But one of the arguments of the book is that the we call it the class cleavage, the most important class cleavage, we believe, is between a detached elite and the rest.
Right. And we would argue people right across the system, both those from poorest backgrounds or lower class backgrounds, however you want to frame it, but also those in middle class, middle income backgrounds. Again we come back to definitions. All of those to some extent are struggling, we would argue. And so therefore you need, in my view, in our view, to think about class.
And it and it is by the way about cultural barriers as well as material barriers. It’s about intergenerational patterns, not just inequality in the present day. You know, it’s many of those things. And so in our view, we do need that word class. Now we’ll come back to this because interestingly, when we’re talking to big firms, we tend to when we’re talking to them about what you do about all this is we use the word opportunity a lot it’s quite interesting.
So I think we use class as a kind of diagnosis of the issues. But then we kind of turn to opportunity when we talk to firms about, okay, what can you do about this? But that’s it in a nutshell.
MP: That’s really helpful and really interesting that many people clearly have a sort of stigma around the word class. It becomes a kind of a difficult object to interpret in various ways. Anne-Marie, can we just talk a little bit about this idea of the crisis of opportunity. I mean, in the UK context, very often the postwar story that’s told is one of social mobility, with very often education being one of the routes to social mobility and so on.
The idea of a kind of crisis in that suggests that social mobility has stalled in some way. Is that correct?
AMS: In some senses we think, yes, we think that what’s happened across the world, really, and at different, I guess, times with different countries. There’s been this expansion of opportunity, this expansion of education, as you say, higher education, an expansion of professional roles, things like this. But then what we’re seeing kind of more lately is that those aren’t expanding as quickly.
And what we find is, I suppose, those expectations that people have around what opportunity is available hasn’t been materializing. At the same time, we have particular contemporary trends as well. Things like, AI impacting on those professional jobs too. And we see this, you know, accelerating this trend. And overall, what we think that means is that there’s heightened stakes involved in realizing opportunity or not.
And that’s heightening the class, if we want to use that term, divide that we were talking about, insofar as it becomes even more important to, I guess, pass on advantage from one generation to another in order to take advantage of those diminishing opportunities.
MP: So one of the implications of this then, as Lee was kind of prefiguring, is this idea that we now have a kind of an elite who are slightly detached from many of the everyday assumptions of people. Lee, could you just talk a little bit about how that what you referred to as a cleavage or detachment is occurring? How is it being manifest?
LEM: Yes. So we did think a lot about these terms that we use and we’re not, I know we probably won’t get into theory Martin, but when we’re using these terms we’re not trying to develop a new class theory by the way. We do allude to a lot of the different competing class theories, and we’re using in many ways, many different traditions.
You know, Marxist, Weberian, Bourdieusian. I told you I’d mentioned Bourdieu. So we’re not in any way challenging I guess those, but we are using them actually to try and describe the modern class cleavage divide. Right. And we use that term detached because one what has happened and it’s been reported in many other articles over the years, is wealth has become a huge aspect of that class division.
So, you know, I mean these we’ve had debates about these over the years. You might argue that previous generations, you know, what your mom and dad did, the occupations was a really important measure of class, probably could debate that, but certainly that was one of the ideas. And when we think about, you know, popular notions of class, we still tend to use, if I go down the pub, you know, people’ll say, ‘Lee, what do you mean by working class?’
You know, and of course, we’re talking about origins and destinations and all that. But when people think of that terminology, they’re thinking about occupational class generally. Right. But what we argue in the book is that actually modern class division and that cleavage, particularly between the detached elite and rest, is driven by this, what we call mobilizable wealth.
So it’s not just someone in formerly a middle class maybe bracket, what we call the disenchanted. All a bit depressing isn’t it, we have the detached, the disenchanted and the dispossessed. Right. So yeah, those people that are in that detached have what we call mobilizable wealth. So you’ve paid off your mortgage. You’re living in a house that’s accruing more wealth.
You might have assets as well. If you’re at the top of that spectrum. We estimate about 1 to 5%, by the way, depending on which country you look at is in that bracket. And the thing they have and Ann-Marie challenged me a bit on this because I’m a former PhD physicist. So I use this thing escape velocity.
They have got escape velocity, the sort of daily economic struggles that we have in daily lives. Right. For most people, they have got beyond that, basically. And they have the wealth, for example, to, I don’t know, give a deposit for a house for one of their children, to purchase a postgraduate degree, which these days you need to be above those that have got degrees right.
So there’s all these things that you can do through your wealth to stay ahead of the race basically, the opportunity race. So wealth has become a huge factor in it. The other strand, the book, and there is, you know, we are trying to cover a lot in this book. So we talk about wealth in many ways as the sort of almost, you know, the problem for many people now is, is a route to just a decent life.
So we do talk in the book about these big societal challenges that most countries are facing, but we also then look at and I’m sure we’ll get into this, the sort of what we call top tier firms. So these are global firms which we argue are incredibly influential on the opportunity system, if you like. But there we find and this is again, you know, very much influenced by people like Pierre Bourdieu.
We’re saying there it’s less the economic capital, the wealth, though does matter as well, but it’s also cultural capital. And it’s and maybe Ann-Marie can go into a bit of this. So the yeah we call it the cracking the class code because that’s, we’re trying to be really clever with this, trying to crack the system in a way, but also trying to address the cultural barriers that exist in those elite pipelines.
And they’re important because the people that flourish in those firms often become the people that shape all our lives, that determine how the rest of us are valued. So the book is quite ambitious in that sense, in that part of it is about the whole opportunity system, which is shaped by wealth, but it’s also trying to also challenge those elite pipelines, particularly those top tier firms.
So, sorry, I hope I’ve answered the question there, but that’s basically what we’ve been doing.
MP: No, that’s really helpful because that kind of summarizes the ambition of the book in a sense, doesn’t it? So you’re interested in looking at these top tier professional firms they’re, you know, global firms that have a new huge influence on global capitalism. So, so, Anne-Marie, the kind of the core part of the book, then, is this idea of the class code.
Yeah. So just, you know, reading your chapters, how you look, how you speak, how you play and how you act, can you unpack a little bit of that, perhaps with some examples, in terms of the way in which class is so very often manifested in these cultural ways?
AMS: Yeah, of course. So we talk about those four different sets of codes. And within them we split them up into 11 class codes. And I guess critically, what we’re saying is that firms often mistake these codes for capability. So they’re often mistaking familiarity and confidence and polish for talent really. And to unpack kind of what those look like, in terms of appearance we talk about three different codes there: dress codes, and we talk a bit about the trends that are happening, actually. So so in terms of dress codes, we talk about how globally there’s been a shift towards casual dress. And that differs by country of course. And in many ways this is sort of seen as a positive. You know, who doesn’t want to wear a t shirt to work instead of a suit.
But at the same time, insofar as the rules have become more vague around what’s acceptable to wear in the workplace, it also means that it’s become more difficult to navigate and certainly, kind of, I think that will resonate with maybe women who have always had perhaps more vague dress codes, which have been harder to navigate.
And, within appearance as well we also talk about the body itself. I think it’s something that isn’t thought about a lot in corporate workspaces, but actually there are so many assumptions around what bodies do and don’t fit within the workspace. Just to give one example, think there’s a lot of preference that’s given to athletic bodies, sometimes as a marker for internal motivation.
So it’s, the athletic body is seen as an external marker of things like drive and motivation and competitiveness and things which, you know, may well be valuable behaviors that firms might be looking for. But in that sense, they’re confusing attributes that are genuinely desirable and that they might be able to assess through things that are actually relatable to work and instead projecting kind of body image onto that.
And of course, as we know, the athletic body is very much linked to your socioeconomic background insofar as having the resources, the time, the access to sort of, you know, sports that leads to athleticism.
MP: I was just thinking to get on to how you speak, because obviously that’s quite relevant given that many of our listeners will be listening to this podcast and the assumption be that they would be in part judging us based on the ways in which we’re talking. Anne-Marie, just to kind of continue with that.
AMS: Absolutely I mean, we talk about appearance first because that’s the very first thing before anyone’s even uttered a word that people look at. And then secondly, of course, the moment you start speaking, and that would be before you’ve even completed your first sentence, you are being kind of assessed on just assumptions around, again, the type of person that might fit within organizations.
That might be because of your accent, that might also be because of the words that you’re using or your sort of authoritativeness in speaking. So we talk about those three different types of things. Accent. We talk about language because of course we’re talking about the global workplace and cultural fluency as well. And there being different sort of elements that are valued.
We talk about the humour test, for example, as something that I guess privileges those who come from often the country that the head office is based in, rather than a more peripheral country. And then, yeah, we talk about speaking up and speaking up is one that, you know, I think is just is fascinating knowing how to, when the appropriate moment is to speak up, when to offer a kind of interesting sort of insight and so on.
These are all kind of learned behaviors. And the key thing that comes through all of the class codes really, is that these are behaviors that are learned and practiced, often from a really early age. We talked about Bourdieu earlier, and of course, this is, you know, one of the key things that he talks about, it’s about growing up in environments where you might be practicing, you know, conversation and speaking up around the dinner table or in particular types of schools.
And what that means is that it provides certain kind of advantages in terms of the polish, I suppose, that firms are looking for. But we argue that, you know, if firms, I guess, are serious about diversifying their workforce. Then actually there are broader, I guess, attributes they should be looking for. And there are also kind of capabilities that they can look for and assess for in ways that don’t bring into play those class codes.
MP: That’s really helpful. And then that allows us to think about the kind of the general principles that are at stake here. And one of the responses, I guess, might be, well, don’t all organizations judge when they are recruiting people or evaluating them for promotion and so on? So, Lee, how would you respond to that sort of idea? That judgment is pretty much inevitable. It’s gonna happen on the basis of class or anything else.
LEM: Yeah. So we argue and it’s interesting. We’re already getting some interest from some quite big global firms around this, because we’re arguing this is about as much about, you know, fairness and moral case as much as a business case. Our argument is you’re basically losing talent if you’re not forensically or more forensically, I should say, thinking about what you… how you define talent.
It’s really as simple as that. And so when we did and we did lots of interviews with people, you know, quite senior people, but also employees in firms and in different parts of the world. It’s fascinating. You know, one of the things we find is that these are global trends. There are nuances, right, in China and India, as you’d expect, and America.
But there were some really common themes. And when we’ve done some talks already for firms with, you know, staff, it’s amazing how much this stuff resonates around the world. You know, this idea that the cultural factors impact on you and your progress, we’re particularly interested in progress, by the way. Not just recruitment. So things like, you know, when I ever asked people in a firm, you know, what is the factors that guide, that shaped progress?
They will often say it is visibility. You know, everyone kind of knows that it’s not just, you know, there’s a kind of working class stereotype. And I as someone who does come from that sort of background, get totally, you know, work hard, keep your head down and someone, you know, talent will out. What we would say is that is not the case.
You need the talent, but you also need to promote yourself and do it in a way that isn’t too crude. Right? Know when to do it, how to do it a lot of this is quite subtle. So we would really challenge, I think, the current selection promotion criteria, there’s some good things happening out there, right? There’s some attempts to think about-
We wouldn’t say, by the way, this is just about bias. We would say this is really about a clarity, a forensic sort of real think about how you define talent. And we’re doing some quite exciting work on the back of the book, again not to we can’t say who they are yet because we got to sign the contracts for it and everything, but some really interesting consultancy work around working with some quite big global players around a better definition of talent.
So lots of interest there. But I think that’s partly because it’s a business case as well. And by the way, we’re not AI experts like everyone. Everyone’s sort of speculating on what AI will mean. But one thing we are pretty sure is that these types of skills are probably going to become even more important in a world where perhaps that AI starts replacing some of those more technical things.
So we would argue it probably will become even more important. One last thing on this. It was really interesting. Some of the people that we spoke to said that nepotism is on the rise, you know, and it’s partly because we think that AI is helping people do more job applications, and then companies are using AI to go through all these applications, there’s a kind of arms race there.
And so if someone says to you, “Oh, my son, or did you know this person who’s really good?” Honestly, that is so incredibly valuable now, and if you do have some of what we call class codes, these skills, I think you’re going to do well. So it was really interesting, wasn’t it Anne-Marie, that we’ve seen the rise of nepotism.
We don’t have the data to prove that. But certainly anecdotally that was what was being suggested.
MP: Just flipping to Anne-Marie again. I mean, one of the other things that might be said and, you know, you’ve got some good stuff on this in the book, but it’s worth surfacing it. Is in terms of other ways in which people get judged in the, you know, the clearest one is clearly is gender. Something that’s been understood as an issue for many, many decades now in the in workplaces, but also ideas about ethnicity and race, which again, are very often articulated as a particular kind of problem.
Could you talk a little bit, Anne-Marie, about the way that gender, ethnicity and social class intersect in different ways?
AMS: Yeah, they intersect in lots of ways. I think, a sort of a really good way of thinking about it is that perhaps with gender and with ethnicity and race, you know, that there’s a really kind of obvious way of thinking about that in terms of just straightforward discrimination. Right? Because those are things that are, I suppose, immediately evident and quite straightforwardly, you know, people can just be discriminatory on that basis. Where I think kind of you can see both class and those other characteristics kind of working together is actually when it’s not so much about very clear discrimination, but it’s actually because people have in mind, almost very subtly, a kind of an ideal type.
So let’s say with accent, for example, you have a kind of an expectation of what someone might sound like in a professional environment. And then the moment, you know, someone opens their mouth and they don’t speak with that particular accent, just as you may have an expectation that someone is a man or that they’re white, for example, and the moment someone is not one of those things, you’re automatically somewhere away from the kind of ideal type.
And what that means is that your from the off on the back foot. And if you say kind of really useful competent things, then you can absolutely override sort of, you know, those factors. So it’s not to say that, you know, in some senses people are being kind of completely discriminatory and that’s just that. But because you are on the back foot, if you don’t have a chance to kind of prove yourself in a particular way, then I think that’s when you see these factors sort of coming into play.
And so I think for us, what a class lens does, is it kind of it sort of shows some of the ways in which I think actually expose bias, if for want of a better word, that involves other characteristics, too, plays out, even if it’s not in such a kind of an obvious way, as we might kind of surmise to start with.
And of course, the other piece to add on is just, you know, if more than one of these, I guess, characteristics, then that puts you at a double or triple disadvantage.
MP: Just so. And I guess this then speaks to the complexities of what many firms need to do, because it’s not as simple as thinking about one dimension of the kind of the candidates who present themselves to you. So, Lee, could you talk a little bit more now, and I’m thinking about the kind of the closing parts of your book where you invoke the idea of a new deal.
Yeah. Deliberately nodding towards Roosevelt. So a new deal for opportunity. What kinds of things are you suggesting some of these professional service firms., but presumably also most organizations you’d be arguing, should be doing in order not to be discriminating on the basis of social class?
LEM: Yeah. So that final chapter, we zoom back out to the societal challenges and we think all these things are needed, by the way. So I quite like this term opportunity system. I don’t know if others have used that yet, but the reason I like using that is that all these things are interconnected, right? And what I worry about with many of the political and policy debates is it tends to be quite siloed.
So, you know, I comment a lot on education policy that tends to be enacted without thinking about, you know, workplace labor policy, housing policy. And it’s hard. But what we kind of say in that last chapter is that you’ve got to think about the whole system if you’re really serious about improving these opportunities. So partly that’s about as we’ve been talked about, sort of fairer, if you like, pipelines, you know, to top tier firms because that is important.
Because those people then well, it’s important for a number of reasons. Those people go on to shape lives for all of us and how merit, talent is judged for all of us. But also it’s what’s one of the few routes to jobs that can afford a life in places like Bristol, London, Manchester, where have you. So they’re really important, those firms.
And so one thing we sort of talk about, the reason I talk about systems is we think that’s about firms as well as governments. You know, I’ve done a lot of work with governments over the years for various reasons, increasingly short term, hard to change things. We would argue that the global firms on that, on the other hand, have become more influential, more global.
And that’s why we really, seriously go into the business case for what we argue, because we think there is a business case. And if you can’t argue that in a way, you know, you’re going to struggle to convince those firms to come to all this. So, so one, it has to be, in our view, about a combination between firms and governments to solve some of these issues.
So the elite pipeline is really important. The other things we get into in that final chapter though is we argue that you need a big conversation, which firms, by the way, could contribute to we think, which is about what we call fairer rewards. So this is a bigger discussion around, you know, how do we create a society that rewards people that do incredible, valuable jobs in society?
Normal jobs, local jobs, right. That enables them to have a decent life, to buy a house, a flat, whatever it is that has broken down, we would argue. So there’s a broader piece there around fairer rewards as well as fairer pipelines. And then the final thing is we talk about fairer foundations and then you get into things like affordable housing, early years education, all the things, you know, there’s lots in the final chapter and we provide some really interesting examples around the world of where things have been tried.
But I guess one of the big picture points here is that you’ve got to think about the whole system. And in my view, Roosevelt, you know, in those this is what I’m an optimist. So if you look at, you know, the days of the Great Depression, you know, what Roosevelt managed to do was reform many things. If you look at those days and that wasn’t just education, free higher education for those returning, you know, coming back from the war and things, it was about affordable housing.
It was about finance. You know, you look at those amazingly ambitious reforms, they were very much about the whole system. And also at the same time, the big firms of those days were driven not just by profit, but by being social institutions. And one of the things we talk about in the book is really about how firms have become part of the problem, we would argue, in that kind of shareholder capitalism, which kind of evolved in the late 20th century.
And this is not, you know, we’re talking about rebalancing the system. We would argue. Not, and unless you do that, you know, the apocalyptic sort of a thing we would say is unless you do something about this, the whole system will come crashing down at some point, in our view.
MP: Which really does take us back to kind of theories of class, doesn’t it? It’s very difficult then, if you take the idea of the opportunity system not to see class as something which is necessarily entangled with an economic system, you know, let’s call it capitalism, for example, and many of the theories of class have gained their impetus from assuming that the social divisions exist partly because of the economic system that we exist within.
It’s a very interesting discussion of tax, I think, in the book as well, which of course, you know, takes us to the heart of many of the financial inequalities that exist within our societies. Anne-Marie, do you want to just talk a little bit about your tax proposal? It sounds like you’re standing on a manifesto, but maybe some advice you might give to our new prime minister.
AMS: I mean, I think the first thing that we talk about really with tax is that ultimately it’s what funds the fairer pipelines that we talk about. You know, if we are to create fairer systems, like systems to provide for health care and education, housing and so on, to try and make that sort of start in life fairer. Which is, which is critically important.
We haven’t talked so far so much about, you know, pre work stage, but in the book we do talk about, you know, the huge disparities in sort of family life and then indeed in the education system. If we want to make some of those things fairer, ultimately they need to be funded. Right. And so the very first thing we talk about is actually almost rebranding tax to make it really, really clear that what that is, is, I suppose, payment towards a system of fairness, really of creating the basis for fairness.
So I think that’s the very first thing I would say. It’s rebrand of tax. And then beyond that we do talk about wealth taxes. This goes back to the piece that Lee was talking about at the beginning with the detached and this sort of the growing importance, I guess, of wealth within that picture of class
So we do think that there is merit in a wealth tax to, I suppose, just rebalance that system where we just we think opportunity and the opportunity stakes have just become too heightened. And then finally we do talk about sort of other suggestions for taxes that might redress what we think is an issue of scale.
Across different sectors that sort of creates differences in reward. So to this point, I guess what I mean is that there are certain a few sectors where I think certain types of global scale as well as scale created through technology have created, you know, huge rewards off of a very, a relatively limited employee base. So, you know, you could think about, I guess, big tech as an example of this huge rewards there.
And we think that, you know, in terms of kind of globalization and technology that is only going to go in one direction, and that there is also merit in sort of thinking about tax as a means of redistributing, again, some of that, I guess, massive reward that comes from that scale and putting it into things where into areas where actually that scale kind of doesn’t create those rewards.
And, you know, we talked about sort of health and education and things like that, where actually, you know, they’re very sort of people intensive and don’t currently kind of offer the rewards that other sectors do.
MP: As ever, we end up talking about what it might mean to live in a fairer society. Or and this is kind of the final question, I’ll pitch this to you, Lee, a more meritocratic society. One of the specters that haunts your book is this idea of the meritocracy. Many people would argue we’ve achieved that. You know, we now live in a society where talent is rewarded.
Elon Musk deserves his trillions. You know, whatever it is. How do you respond to that sort of idea that really the aim of any society should be to achieve a meritocracy regardless of questions of talent, gender, ethnicity, whatever.
LEM: So we do dwell on this question. And you’re absolutely right. It sort of I don’t know if haunts is the right word, but it certainly is there in the whole book. And we talk about the myth of meritocracy, which I think we’d argue that there is a myth around this because it’s defined in such a narrow way, in ways that us three are winners in a sense, you know, very academic.
It’s a very sort of do well in some tests, be quite analytical, and we will reward you. Right. The challenge with the meritocracy is that you’re defining talent in very narrow ways. And we talk about this in the book. You know, part of the bigger debate we have is rewarding people for doing jobs that are, for example, valuable to others that are, you know, there’s something about generosity, not mentioning things, even things like, you know, creativity or having practical vocational types of expertise.
So, so really the problem with, the sort of, the people that say we have a meritocracy, it’s the devil’s in the details, it’s what merit you are rewarding, but Anne-Marie you can come back on this because we had honestly, we had such big conversations about this and Anne-Marie, your view I know and we do mention this, is that even if we did address some of the things that I worry about, which is how you define merit, your worry would still be that it would still lead to the inequalities that we are seeing.
Right, Anne-Marie?
AMS: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t think that, you know, I think one argument for meritocracy, of course, is that we don’t necessarily have any other better system. So a lot of the book is about how do we remove these hidden class codes and actually make things more meritocratic because they’re not maybe as meritocratic as they appear to be.
But yeah, to your wider point of, is meritocracy even the ideal that we should be aspiring to. Yeah, there are of course issues with meritocracy as an ideal for sure, because ultimately any system of merit is ultimately kind of arbitrary. And on what we’re choosing to reward in the end, even if you did live in a perfect meritocracy, is still, sort of still comes down to chance, basically, as to whether you happen to be born with those things that society really, really values.
So ultimately. Yeah. To I guess our wider point, we ultimately believe that there should be just fairer rewards for everyone. And I think that does go to the piece that Lee mentioned around, kind of widening our notion of merit because I think any sort of really pure meritocracy that has a really narrow definition of merit is not going to be a kind of, a sort of a fair society.
LEM: One other tension, Martin, I think in the book, and I know we’re going to run out of time with this, but is this idea of social mobility versus social justice as it’s sometimes framed, you know, so I think we believe this, why I would argue it’s a class system because what we want is both people like me, who come from different class backgrounds and gone into different academe and other things.
Right. You do want people from different backgrounds going into the elites to diversify those elites and detached for me also has a connotation around increasingly sort of detached political elites who don’t understand the daily challenges faced by many of the people they’re meant to serve. But at the same time, you do need to think about that broader social justice piece, which really speaks to that, you know, fairer rewards to people who don’t necessarily want to leave the community they’re in.
Right. And it’s I fear that in political debates, those two things are seen as you can’t have both, whereas we would argue that actually that you need both, you need both and that there is a tension in that. And, by the way, we have debates right now, you know, with the new Burnham government talking about having technical routes back in our schools.
Now, I’m in favor of that. But what you don’t want to do is have someone like me from a working class background that happens to be more academically orientated. Who then misses out on that route? Right? It’s a really delicate balancing act that. But that’s I think, another tension in the book.
MP: Thanks both. It’s been fantastic. A really interesting conversation about a very, very interesting book and one that really does speak to our present times, I think. So my name is Martin Parker. I’ve been talking to Lee Elliot Major and Anne-Marie Sim about their book, ‘Cracking the Class Code: How the Opportunity Game Is Rigged – And How Firms Can Help Fix It’.
Richard Kemp: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Transforming Society podcast. If you’d like to buy a copy of this book or any other book published by Bristol University Press or Policy Press, we have a 50% discount code valid until the 30th of September. Just go to bristoluniversitypress.co.uk, select your book and then enter POD03 at checkout. That’s POD03 at checkout.