Against Meritocracy: culture, power and myths of mobility

Allen, Ansgar

doi:10.1080/00071005.2017.1404252

Cited by 22 publications

(39 citation statements)

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“…Placing the emphasis on the individual to 'internalise both the responsibility for the problem and the programme required to resolve it' in order to 'work on herself to overcome her problems' rather than look to any social and cultural influences upon the problem (Gill and Orgad, 2016: 334) is a key feature of the neoliberal workplace. The idea that everyone has an equal chance of 'making it' to the top of the ladder is a meritocratic myth (Littler, 2017). I argue that the need for confidence and resilience was key to the recruitment process at Southbank Centre but that the adept demonstration of these personal attributes is not something which is equally available to all.…”

Section: 'Happy Smiley Open Body Language': the Evolution Of Recent R...mentioning

confidence: 95%

Loving cultural work at Southbank Centre: Evolutions of emotional, embodied, collaborative labour

Williams

2023

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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This article scrutinises a recent moment of cultural work at Southbank Centre, drawing on empirical research including 32 interviews carried out over a 4-year period. It supports the view that it is important to extend our historical understanding of cultural work and argues that cultural labour and affective economy debates need to be situated in longer institutional contexts. Focusing on what it describes as ‘emotional, embodied, collaborative labour’, it analyses these tropes in relation to both specific histories of Southbank Centre and to broader theories of cultural work and emotional labour. It also argues that by unpacking the changing forms of emotional labour required by cultural workers at Southbank Centre, we can develop our understanding of how and why cultural work evolves within specific contexts. During the period I researched Southbank Centre, the need for individualised, ‘appropriate’ emotional labour, and the ability to facilitate enjoyable visitor experiences was made key for cultural workers, and yet the adept demonstration of these personal attributes is not something which is equally available to all. Through analysis of both academic theory and findings from my research, the article therefore unpacks how collaborative working practices coexist with emotional labour, embodied work and the production of an affective visitor experience as well as being shaped by their cultural–political contexts.

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Section: 'Happy Smiley Open Body Language': the Evolution Of Recent R...mentioning

confidence: 95%

Loving cultural work at Southbank Centre: Evolutions of emotional, embodied, collaborative labour

Williams

2023

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Counter to contemporary narratives of the undeserving versus the deserving (Katz, 1989;Littler, 2017;Sandel, 2020), dependence is not something that you are and I am not, but a continuum on which we all exist. As nurse-citizen-students, we have both found ourselves here;…”

Section: Dialogue-on-dialoguementioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a new (or rearticulated) philosophy of mental health nursing: A dialogue‐on‐dialogue

Collier‐Sewell

Melino

2023

Nursing Philosophy

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The following dialogue takes up recent calls within nursing scholarship to critically imagine alternative nursing futures through the relational process of call and response. Towards this end, the dialogue builds on letters which we, the authors, exchanged as part of the 25th International Nursing Philosophy Conference in 2022. In these letters, we asked of ourselves and each other: If we were to think about a new philosophy of mental health nursing, what are some of the critical questions that we would need to ask? What warrants exploration? In thinking through these questions, our letters facilitated a collaborative enquiry in which philosophy and theory were generative tools for thinking beyond what is and towards what is yet to come. In this paper, we expand the dialogue within these letters—in a ‘dialogue‐on‐dialogue’—and take up one thread of our discussion to argue that a new philosophy of mental health nursing must rethink the relationships between ‘practitioner’/‘self’ and ‘self’/‘other’ if it is to create a radically different future. Further, we posit solidarity and public love as possible alternatives to foregrounding the ‘work’ of mental health nursing. The possibilities we present here should be received as partial, contingent and unfinished. Indeed, our purpose in this paper is to provoke discussion and, in so doing, to model what we believe is a necessary shift towards criticality in our communities of nursing scholarship.

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“…This process can only be achieved by enhancing "positive" feelings and dispositions (optimism, confidence, individual resilience, and risk-taking) and inhibiting those construed as "negative" (fear, insecurity, sadness, vulnerability, dependence, and anger) (Gill and Orgad, 2017;Orgad and Gill, 2021;Scharff, 2016b). The never-ending nature of the imperative to self-improve and selfcommodify condemns subjectivity to a perpetual process of "becoming" or "emerging" (Bröckling, 2016;Scharff, 2016b) as it strives to "go beyond" itself (Han, 2015;Littler, 2017). Affective governmentality (Penz and Sauer, 2020), as such, plays a fundamental role in neoliberal subjectivation.…”

Section: Self-intervention and The Interpellation Of The Entrepreneur...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The limits of “no limits”: Young women's entrepreneurial performance and the gendered conquest of the self

Leache

Carretero‐García

Pascual

2023

Ethos

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Numerous programs have been set up to support women entrepreneurs on the basis that inequality results from incompatibilities between gendered emotional culture and the affective governmentality of the entrepreneurial paradigm. In the context of Spanish entrepreneurial training programs, this article identifies technologies of the self in young women's narratives of successful entrepreneurship. Using a crossed‐narrative approach, as part of three case studies, we conducted 14 interviews with program participants and 6 with program trainers. The analysis shows that, to overcome their supposed deficiencies, the participants understood that female entrepreneurialism required unlimited efforts to self‐modulate their emotional dispositions. The analysis identified three broad cultural narratives that frame entrepreneurialism as an epic quest, a vocation or calling, and a ludic pursuit of pleasure. Each of these provides an interpretative frame within which the limitless efforts demanded of feminized entrepreneurialism were resemanticized into three moral values that characterized the story protagonists (heroism, sacrifice, passion). The article further explores the vulnerability of young women to the depoliticization of entrepreneurialism by analyzing emotional suffering and lack of well‐being, distancing, ambivalences, and microresistances to the hegemonic paradigm.

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Against Meritocracy: culture, power and myths of mobility

Cited by 22 publications

References 1 publication

Loving cultural work at Southbank Centre: Evolutions of emotional, embodied, collaborative labour

Loving cultural work at Southbank Centre: Evolutions of emotional, embodied, collaborative labour

Towards a new (or rearticulated) philosophy of mental health nursing: A dialogue‐on‐dialogue

The limits of “no limits”: Young women's entrepreneurial performance and the gendered conquest of the self

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