The Making of Meritocratic Status Orders

This article surveys a growing body of work examining the concrete consequences of implementing meritocracy in social life. To date, this work remains compartmentalized into the separate subfields of cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational science, and the sociology of education and stratification. We bring these literatures together by arguing that they describe the consequences of constructing merit-based status orders, or merit orders. Merit orders are status hierarchies—sets of relations of value superiority, equality, or inferiority people perceive among others—based on assessments of others’ merit, achievement, or performance. We explore the nature of merit orders, argue that they exist as cultural objects and cultural schemas, and explain how they can be studied for their shape and for their sharedness. Most importantly, we show that a focus on merit orders enriches our understanding of how meritocracy enters social stratification processes. Meritocracy, this approach highlights, shapes stratification not only by sorting individuals into unequal social positions, but also by creating merit orders that have stratifying effects of their own. In particular, the making of merit orders has a tendency to moralize inequality by framing disparities in social advantage as differences in individual merit, it teaches observers to perceive quality differences among social actors in hierarchical terms that undermine egalitarian beliefs, and it can directly exacerbate inequality in merit-based rewards when the architecture of merit orders is more hierarchy-like.