Benefits & Origin of Meritocracy Essay Questions answered based on viewing: 1. What is a meritocracy today and how was it similar to ideas that justified

Benefits & Origin of Meritocracy Essay Questions answered based on viewing:

1. What is a meritocracy today and how was it similar to ideas that justified early industrial capitalism?

2. Where did the term “meritocracy” come from?

3a. There are different kinds of control, including ideological. How is a belief in a meritocracy as either reality or ideal useful or necessary for social control over most workers? 3b. More necessary in recent decades within Talentism/ Cognitive Capitalism and rise of modern management within corporations?

Meritocracy by Alain De Botton (5 minutes)/

Against Meritocracy by Jo Littler (78 minutes)/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELdEelvGli8 Creativity as Ideology
in 2008 issue of Renewal : a Journal of Labour Politics
‘Creativity’ has gone viral. It is everywhere. Creative industries. Creative classes. Creative
Britain. We have a creative minister now. Cities have creative policies. From Melbourne to
Stoke-on-Trent, they pump out fat brochures with shots of canal-side cafés, nightclubs and
craft-markets. There are eye-catching factoids – Hong Kong has most auctions in the world,
New York houses most American actors (and they are all serving your coffee), Brighton the
most Macs per head of population.
Urban regeneration, economic policy, and teaching (schools must provide five hours of high
culture a week) are all policy sectors that have been re-worked to emphasise the importance
of creativity, as well, of course, as arts policy.
Universities, like East London, Bradford, Greenwich and City offer creative sector courses often with design or media components. Andy Pratt at LSE and Justin O’Connor at
Manchester have been running a seminar on creative industries for several years now.
But as ubiquitous as the idea of creativity is in policy-making and education, there is too little
theoretical reflection on what creativity is. The ground on which our policy is being made is
scarcely understood. Most writing on creativity is shameless boosterism (see Elliott and
Atkinson, 2007).
Creativity as hype
Our understanding of the creativity process is for the most part based on flabby business
writing: bad books on the Tom Peters or Charles Handy model ‘break down’ the process of
creativity into bullet points and byte-size chunks. The extensive and rich philosophy of
aesthetics, which did deal with creativity, albeit in a rather snooty way, has been
deconstructed by polytechnic yahoos and dumped in favour of… what? Another powerpoint
presentation by Charles Landry’s Comedia consultancy.
There are now tens of thousands of creative policy documents drafted all over the world, and
they are all, pretty much the same (Heartfield, 2007c). They are heaped up with numbers
plucked willy-nilly from employment, export and output statistics to ‘prove’ that the creative
sector is vital to their region, and indeed that their region is vital to the creative sector. These
numbers are exaggerated to a degree that would lead to criminal investigation if they were set
out in the financial sector – and since the policy documents that they decorate are evidence
(too often falsified) in support of claims on public money, they really ought to be subject to
similar scrutiny.
But worse than the quantitative exaggeration of the numbers involved, is the lack of any
critical investigation of the social dynamic at work in the enhanced importance of the creative
sector. Even the question of whether there really is a creative sector is never asked. The very
first thing that ought to have been queried is: What does it mean to lump together fine art
auctions, advertising, Information Technology services, the music industry and gallery
attendances all under the category of the ‘creative sector’? In each of these, quite different
processes are at work, processes that it would be very interesting to understand. But instead
these lose their specificity under a general campaign to persuade policy makers that the
creative sector is vital to British industry. It would be hard to think of a more hostile approach
to actual creativity than the Stakhanovite larding on of numbers in the policy documents.
In the eternal present of the boosters there is no sense that the importance of the creative
industries is an idea with a history. John Hesmondhalgh, Andy Feist and Jane O’Connor were
among the first to raid the census and export figures to illustrate the importance of the
creative industries. They did so at a time when arts’ funding was being cut back. It was a
defensive argument that seemed to justify a certain amount of exaggeration at the time, but
has not really changed even though funding almost doubled between 1998 and 2005
(Heartfield, 2007a).
Students on creative industries courses might be surprised to learn that Britain’s artists and
designers managed without a government department of culture until 1997 (1992 if you count
its predecessor, the Department of National Heritage). The question of why the promotion of
culture became a national priority in the 1990s, or what had changed to make us believe that
we needed to promote creativity, is never asked.
There are, of course, some real changes, some positive, and some less so, that put creativity
and the creative industries on the public policy agenda. There is indeed a longterm trend
towards greater acculturation. Near universal literacy was an achievement of the twentieth
century, and an important one in the growth of print media. As a share of household
spending, entertainment has grown from a tenth to quarter in the last fifty years (a trend
helped by the long-term falling price of essential goods).
There is also a more recent trend in leisure time. During the recessions of the 1980s working
hours rose as did unemployment, leading to the division between the cash-rich, time poor and
the enforced leisure and impoverishment of mass unemployment (Heartfield, 2000). Since
1988 working hours have fallen back and employment grown, creating more customers for
mass leisure goods.
Spurred on by this growth in leisure spending, satellite and cable television has expanded
(with the reduced cost of film and broadcasting) and broadband downloading has spurred
digital media. The much-vaunted multiplication of platforms helped disaggregate the 17
million-strong mass audience that once tuned into ‘Coronation Street’ on a Wednesday
evening.
At the other end of the mass civilisation/minority culture spectrum, luxury spending has also
expanded, though for different reasons. As businesses plough much less of their operating
profits back into expansion (gross fixed capital formation, net of private dwellings stands at
around 13 per cent in the UK, much lower than in the US, Germany or the developing world),
they generate vast cash surpluses which trickle down into the hands of a new breed of high
net worth individuals. Since the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance bought Vincent Van
Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ for nearly $40m in 1987, the fine art market has been booming, boosted
by collectors like Charles Saatchi in London and Larry Gagosian in New York, creating stars
like Damien Hirst and Keith Haring (Heartfield, 2007b). Good for ‘Young British Artists’ but not necessarily good for the economy, which might thrive more if less value was locked
up in art collections and directed instead towards productive investment.
Britain’s design and advertising businesses on the other hand, thrived in the late nineties
because of the greater demand the IT boom put on their services (all those IPOs needed
stationery and ad campaigns), only to suffer when the bubble burst.
Creativity and culture
Urban regeneration, too, seemed to usher in a new age of the creative city, as the ‘Hoxton
effect’ saw the empty shells of warehouses filled up with art galleries, while Glasgow’s
European City of Culture status in 1990 overturned the received wisdom that Edinburgh was
civilised, Glasgow industrial. It has to be said, though, that the recovery of Britain’s inner
cities was part of a general economic recovery, of which the new Café Society was more
symptom than cause. Pointedly, the attempts to reproduce the Hoxton-effect were less
spontaneous, fuelled by public not private investment (Heartfield, 2006a).
On top of these economic shifts were more cultural changes. Markedly, the barriers between
high culture and the avant garde were breaking down. The big movement of avant gardism is
over’ said Lyotard (1985, 6); whereas to Peter York ‘modernism was coming home’ from lkea.
The Academy had given up its chokehold on culture, let the infidels into the citadel, merged
the Edinburgh Festival with the Fringe, and now we middle class families were to be found
venerating R. Mutt’s Urinal at the Tate Modern on a Sunday afternoon.
And there was indeed a critical mass of artistic innovation, some good pop music, the uplift
of the end of Thatcherism all of which seemed to add up to what the guitar-playing Prime
Minister was happy to call ‘Creative Britain’ (Smith, 1998). In fact Chris Smith’s arts policy
was rather too successful, becoming the model for Peter Mandelson and Charles Leadbeater’s
‘knowledge economy’, in which we were all to make a ‘living out of thin air’ (Leadbeater,
2000).
Around that time I turned a penny, now and then, scoffing at the pretensions of the ‘Creative
Britain’ policy. It was not so hard, since the exaggerated prospectuses were so obvious, and
for every hundred articles boosting the creatives, editors could be relied on to commission a
contrarian piece. It is a bit of a crowded market now, especially since Larry Elliott and Dan
Atkinson, as well as Paul Thompson have attacked the wilder shores of Leadbeater’s
‘knowledge economy’. The policy makers themselves have rowed back a bit from ‘Creative
Britain’ schtick, and the tendency to ‘puffery’ is widely acknowledged. Even Charles
Leadbeater admitted that ‘we can’t all live on thin air’ (Heartfield, 2005, 9).
Now that a little critical distance has opened up, we can ask the big question, the one that
looms behind all the others: why did ‘creativity’ recommend itself as the paradigmatic goal of
policy, business activity and social collaboration in the 1990s? We have to understand the
appeal to creativity as ideology, why did it resonate so much with policy makers,
entrepreneurs, and punters?
We do already know, in the first instance at least, why Charles Leadbeater’s knowledge
economy policy was adopted by the Department of Trade and Industry in 1998 because there
was not anything else on offer: ‘Apart from the knowledge-driven economy theme’, said
Geoff Norn’s of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, ‘the proposals did not contain a big idea’
(DTI Memorandum, 1.10.1998).
More important, though, than the policy vacuum at the top, though, was the resonance that
the appeal to creativity had as it trickled down from the Cabinet Office, through the DCMS
and DTI, the funding bodies and the think-tanks, the local authorities and the brand
strategists, the businesses and galleries. Clearly, if it were just an edict from on high it would
have quickly melted away.
Creativity and self-expression
Of course the appeal to creativity was heard. Creative is what everyone would want to be.
The ideal of creativity was control over one’s working life; the satisfaction that comes from
knowing that your work is an expression of your own self. This is a powerful and compelling
appeal. Why? Because it is precisely what is missing from most people’s working lives. Or,
more precisely, creativity is tantalisingly present, but at the same time blocked off for most of
us.
Richard Sennett’s new book on craftsmanship makes this point forcefully (Sennett, 2008).
The craftsman’s self-absorbing satisfaction is pointedly contrasted to the timewatching
McJobber. Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi’s investigation of personal satisfaction, Flow, puts this
paradox before us: most people record most satisfying experience at work, but at the same
time most of us, when asked would rather be anywhere but at work (2002,159). It is only at
work that we are participating in truly productive activity, and yet that activity, being work
for someone else, is never our own.
Creative work, for most people, remains an ambition that cannot be reconciled with earning a
living. They practice in a band at the weekends, or are working on a film script in their spare
time, or dream of becoming an actor while serving coffee. These dreams are idle, mostly. The
scripts are not often finished, the bands split up, and the auditions are not pursued. Keeping
up the rent or mortgage payments does not leave so much energy for creativity. The ambition
remains important, though, because otherwise we are just drones. B. J. Fogg at the Stanford
University Persuasive Technology Laboratory explains that the success of Facebook (like the
blogging explosion before it) has less to do with social communication than it does with the
need for self-expression.
Here, it helps to step outside of our own era, and ask how these questions were addressed in
another time. The question of satisfaction at work was pressing in the 1960s, but few would
have used the word ‘creative’ (which was a euphemism for homosexual, amongst other
things). It was the ambition to be counted amongst the skilled that the assembly line craved,
and the tool-shop defended. To be skilled was to take a greater pride in, and have more
control over your work. When employees rallied to take over the failing Meridien Works in
the 1970s they thought they could do a better job of making motorbikes than their managers,
who neither rode them nor knew how to put them together. Those serfs did not rehearse
bands in their bedrooms, but had hobbies – which is to say work they did for themselves – like
carpentry or gardening.
Further up the 1960s food chain, enquiring minds struggled with the big question of the day:
alienation. Spurred on by the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment, everyone from the Student Revolutionaries and union activists to the worker
priests to the industrial novelists (Sillitoe and Ottieri) were reflecting on the industrial
Moloch devouring our creativity.
Cornelius Castoriadis argued that this was the great paradox of the industrial system:
even on the assembly line, production is based on man as an active, conscious being.
The transformation of the worker into a mere cog – which capitalism constantly
attempts but never succeeds in achieving – comes into direct conflict with the
development of production.
What he saw was that capitalist industry was torn – engaging the creativity of its workers, and
at the same time crushing it
The simultaneous attempt on the one hand to reduce work into a mere execution of
strictly defined tasks (or rather gestures), on the other hand constantly to appeal to and
rely upon the conscious and willing participation of the worker, on his capacity to
understand and do much more than he is supposed to. (Castoriadis, 1969, 8)
The word ‘alienation’ was repeated so often in the pages of Encounter, that they joked there
was a special key on the typewriter for it, to save time. Modern architecture, education,
workers control, national service were among the many solutions offered up to the perceived
problem of alienation.
The defence of skills, and the struggle against alienation were the way that our parents’ and
grandparents’ generation dealt with the questions that we address through the pursuit of
creativity. Unlike the ambition to be creative, the defence of skills, and the struggle against
alienation was conducted on a quite different plane: that of collective solidarity and politics,
as opposed to personal career progression.
Our yearning for creativity is how we experience the problem of alienation in a highly
individualised society. It speaks to our sense of loss of the object in the work process, and the
desire to recover it, but through the medium of individual struggle. As such the ideology of
creativity has a powerful resonance. But it also disguises the social challenge of engaging
creativity as a task in the personal life plan.
Connecting with the real creative impulse that all people feel, the elevation of a distinct realm
of a ‘creative sector’, the ideology of creativity is divisive (just as in its day, the division
between skilled and unskilled set working people at each other’s throats). Even at the most
expanded definition, the creative industries can only be made to account for one twentieth of
the workforce. What does that say about the other 95 per cent? That they are uncreative – and
that is a failing of their own. In principle, of course, all work is creative; but as long as it is
organised as private enterprise, then it will continue to be creativity at the behest of someone
else, which quickly turns to routine drudgery.
Despite the ambitions to free creativity engaged in the promotion of the creative industries,
there, too work is alienated. A friend working developing ideas for an independent television
company was called into the head office and accused of ‘stealing’ ideas, because she
(innocently) emailed herself from work to home. In the 1990s TV executives were quick to
dismiss allegations that they were ‘dumbing down’ as ‘elitism’. But 70 per cent of television
newcomers polled by the British Film Institute had said that programmes had got worse,
commenting that they were ‘anodyne’, ‘formulaic’, ‘insipid’, ‘depressingly unambitious’, ‘going
for the lowest common denominator’ and ‘dumbed down’ (British Film Institute, 1999, 41,
43). Copywriters and researchers, producers and designers all have the experience of being
called on to work long hours, often without pay, out of an appeal to their vanity as ‘creative
workers’. Facebook’s content-generating users rarely notice the terms of service that give up
the intellectual property rights to their work.
Seen through the distorting lens of ‘creativity’, the distribution of power and wealth can be
disguised. In the 1990s the case for top people’s pay was called into question. Obscene City
bonuses looked to many like rewards for greed. The argument that these were the market
price for high-fliers seemed unconvincing. Rewards for creative input were an altogether
more believable case. Bill Clinton’s labour secretary, Robert Reich argued that the future
belonged to ‘symbolic analysts’ who could steer a course through the new world of
communications (Reich, 1991,171). Examples of these varied from the singer Madonna to
Wall Street lawyers. Of course, a definition of creativity that encompassed pop stars and
corporate suits was pretty complimentary to the suits, and a more attractive, meritocratic
argument for their remuneration.
In 2004 the Design Council named Hilary Cottam ‘designer of the year’ for her role in the
refurbishment of my old school, Kingsdale Comprehensive. Eyebrows were raised because
Cottam had not in any conventional sense designed anything – the work was done by
architects de Rijke Marsh and Morgan. Cottam’s claim to the title designer was that she had
brokered the deal between the school, government and architects. There was no shame in
that, but it was curious nonetheless that Cottam would want to be seen as a designer, rather
than as a local authority official, or social entrepreneur. To be thought of as ‘designing’ the
relationship between the actors was a more attractive role than the conventional one of
alderman laying the foundation stone in a chain. seeking recognition for creative input put
Cottam alongside the architects (whose drawings were exhibited, uncredited, by the Design
Council to illustrate the award).
Corporations increasingly re-conceive their claim to profits in the name of ‘brand added
value’, the intangible surplus of the image (Heartfield, 2006b). Elsewhere, intellectual
property lawyers are scouring China’s booming cities in the hope that they can lay claim to
part of that value stream in the name of ‘creativity’.
The ideology of creativity works because it appeals to a real ambition to do fulfilling and
original work, when most of us are executing other people’s timetables and plans. It is not
that there is no creativity – far from it, there has indeed been a flowering of creativity. Its
scale though, is constantly exaggerated by elites who find the Creative Britain self-image
altogether more attractive than, say, arms-exporting Britain, or cheap-labour Britain. When
personal creativity is lauded as a policy goal, in defiance of the fact that most people’s true
creativ…
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