What Do Managers Talk about When They Talk about Merit?

• In Event: 048 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Paper Session. Organizations and Social Inequality

Abstract

Scholars are increasingly focusing their attention on the role merit and merit-based practices play in the distribution of rewards among employees inside organizations. While a few recent studies have found variation in the ways managers make merit-based employment decisions, it is less clear why this is the case. Our article starts addressing this question by uncovering the main semiotic codes that organize how managers talk about the widely popular concept of merit, and about who gets ahead in the workplace. Using in-depth interview data from a sample of individuals with managerial experience, our analysis identifies three main semiotic dimensions—objectivity/subjectivity, individual/group, and achievement/ascription—along which managers make sense of merit and how merit should be rewarded in the workplace. We also investigate how managers’ understandings of merit along these three dimensions are related to their perceptions of employment-related outcomes. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this multiplicity in meanings of merit for the future study of workplace inequality.

Authors

• Emilio J. Castilla, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Aruna Ranganathan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology