The Meritocratic Mindset: How Efforts at Promoting Workplace Equality Fall Apart

• In Event: Inequality and Equality

Abstract

A growing number of organizations seek to mitigate workplace inequality by adopting explicitly equitable practices, including flattened hierarchies, collective decision-making, and inclusive hiring criteria. While sociological research has extensively documented how organizations reproduce inequality, less attention has been paid to how efforts to promote workplace equality unfold in practice and with what unintended consequences. Drawing on one year of ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews conducted at a homelessness-services nonprofit that explicitly sought to prevent workplace inequality, this study examines how informal hierarchies emerge even in the absence of formal rank and differential pay.

Midwest Harm Reduction implemented a sociocratic governance structure, equal pay across workers, non-hierarchical job classifications, and hiring practices designed to prioritize lived experience over formal credentials. These measures were largely successful at preventing inequalities rooted in job title, tenure, and ascribed characteristics such as gender, race, and class. Yet despite these efforts, a new hierarchy emerged based on workers’ perceived merit and competence. In practice, lived experience of homelessness became a dominant criterion through which competence, legitimacy, and authority were evaluated.

I show that workers with lived experience were routinely deferred to in decision-making, granted greater autonomy in task allocation, and disproportionately selected for opportunities representing the organization externally. These dynamics were widely understood as fair and appropriate, reflecting a deeply held meritocratic belief that those most proximate to homelessness were inherently more competent and deserving of influence. As a result, unequal distributions of power, recognition, and opportunity were rendered legitimate and largely invisible as inequality.

This study contributes to research on workplace inequality and status hierarchies by demonstrating that hierarchies are not eliminated through egalitarian organizational design but reconstituted through culturally specific valuation regimes. More broadly, it highlights how meritocratic ideologies can undermine equity-oriented reforms by legitimizing new forms of inequality—even within organizations explicitly committed to equality.

Author

• Chloe Jane Rosenstock, University of Wisconsin-Madison