University of Melbourne Events Calendar

Hosted by the Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne

Meritocracy is often celebrated as a fair system for allocating social rewards, promising that education, employment, and prestige are distributed according to individual ability rather than inherited privilege. Yet across societies, evidence shows that meritocratic systems routinely reproduce and legitimise inequality. In this talk, Dr Lauren Rivera argues that such outcomes are not flaws of meritocracy but constitutive features of how it operates.

Drawing from existing research in sociology, psychology, and management, current events, and her own empirical work, Dr Rivera identifies three mechanisms through which elites sustain their dominance in ostensibly merit-based systems: consecration, or the power to define and evaluate merit; adaptation, or the unequal capacity to cultivate valued traits; and co-optation, or the strategic use of meritocratic ideals to resist challenges to privilege.

Together, these processes demonstrate how meritocracy launders advantage in the language of deservingness, naturalising hierarchies and, at times, dehumanising marginalised groups.

Dr Rivera concludes by suggesting that genuine fairness requires not simply alternative distributive mechanisms but structural transformations that reduce the extreme stakes of stratification itself.

The event is free and light refreshments will be provided.
However, registration is essential. Please register via the Eventbrite link on the left.

This annual symposium was developed jointly by the University of Melbourne and Monash University to recognise and highlight the outstanding contribution to industrial relations by the late Emeritus Professor Joe Isaac. Professor Isaac was one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars and practitioners in the broad field of industrial relations.