scholarly journals What Meritocracy Means to its Winners: Admissions, Race, and Inequality at Elite Universities in the United States and Britain

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Natasha Warikoo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
University Admissions ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
Brown University ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

How do winners of processes of meritocracy make sense of those processes, especially in the face of forceful public critiques of their unequal outcomes? In this paper I analyze the meaning-making with respect to merit in university admissions of White, native-born undergraduates attending elite American and British universities. I find that United States students support the “calibration” of evaluations of merit, and emphasize evaluations of applicants’ contributions to the “collective merit” of their university cohorts. British students espouse a universalist, individualist understanding of merit. While conceptions of merit differed across national contexts, students in both reproduced the notions of merit espoused by their universities. I conclude that in spite of a long history of student protest on college campuses, rather than engagement with symbolic politics on liberal-identified campuses, self-interest in status legitimation dominates student perspectives, ultimately reproducing understandings of merit that will reproduce inequality. The paper draws upon 98 one-on-one in-depth interviews with White, native-born undergraduates attending Harvard University, Brown University, and University of Oxford.

Deliberation and University Governance

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-150
Author(s):  
Richard M. Locke
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Governance ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Full Participation ◽  
Brown University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Collective Deliberation ◽  
Participation In Higher Education

In the United States, historical oppression and discrimination have barred certain groups based on their gender, race, religion, sexuality, and socioeconomic class from full participation in higher education. While there has been a long history of protest and pressure to diversify, progress has been mixed. After a recent wave of protests at Brown University, Richard M. Locke faced the task of developing a realistic and coherent university plan for addressing concerns and demands. Implementing insights from Joshua Cohen’s work on deliberation, Locke led a process that resulted in one of the most ambitious university diversity and inclusion action plans in the country. In this chapter, Locke describes the process undertaken and seeks to generalize from the experience at Brown to argue that collective deliberation can be an effective model for how universities can address an array of complex issues faced today.

Belonging

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
Mary Gilmartin ◽  
Patricia Burke Wood ◽  
Cian O’Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the issue of belonging. It first focuses on citizenship, which is often described as formal belonging. While citizenship is regularly framed as ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’, it is argued that it is never fully stable or secure. This is shown in practice through the example of the United Kingdom and Ireland, specifically, how the Brexit vote has had knock-on consequences for how citizenship and belonging is being re-imagined in both places. This is contrasted with the practice of citizenship in the United States, where, despite effusive expressions of unity, articulations of belonging have a deep history of division and exclusion. It considers both the barriers to formal belonging experienced by undocumented residents of the United States and the ways in which citizens themselves struggle to achieve inclusion and equality in the face of increasingly explicit intolerance.

Identity and Institutions: The Social Construction of Trade Unions in Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Herrigel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Functional Adaptation ◽  
Character Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Face

The aim of this research note is to begin to develop the idea that trade unions are historically constructed as much through considerations of social identity as they are through calculations of economic self-interest, market power, or functional adaptation in the face of changes in the division of labor. By social identity, I mean the desire for group distinction, dignity, and place within historically specific discourses (or frames of understanding) about the character, structure, and boundaries of the polity and the economy. Institutions such as trade unions, in other words, are constituted through and by particular understandings of the structure of the social and political worlds of which they are part. In making this argument, it should be immediately said that I in no way intend to claim that trade unions are only to be understood through the lens of identity or that they do not engage in strategic calculation either in labor markets or in the broader political economy. The point is that action along the latter lines presupposes some kind of commitment on, and even resolution of, issues concerning the former. The discussion below focuses on the emergence of trade union movements in the United States and Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It Attempts first to develope the two cases as constituting a paradox and then, second, explains the paradox with an argument about identity.

Introduction to the Colorado River Negotiations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Verdini Trejo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Colorado River ◽  
The United States ◽  
River Delta ◽  
Environmental Resources ◽  
Key Players ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

Introduces the Colorado River case, presenting an overview of the chapters to follow, as well as providing context for analysis of the binational negotiations with a summary of the 2012 landmark Minute 319 agreement between the United States and Mexico. Outlines the key players, the decades-long history of protracted disputes over the waters of the river basin and the environmental resources of the Colorado River Delta, the increasing challenges in the face of extraordinary drought and climate change, and the mutual gains approach that underpinned the negotiations.

scholarly journals “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilly Irani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Business Schools ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This paper examines the emergence of “design thinking” as a form of technical expertise. It demonstrates that “design thinking” articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to maintain whiteness at the apex of global hierarchies of labor.“Design thinking” is a form of expertise that poses design not as form giving, but as a form of empathic reason by which executives can plan products, services, and accumulation. Silicon Valley, business schools, and reformers promote it as a form of caring technical expertise by which some guide futures for others. The paper will examine the history of the concept of “design thinking” – a category forged by Silicon Valley designers in the face of mounting competitive pressures on design professions in the United States in the mid-2000s. By drawing on artifacts, documents, public debates about the design profession from this period, I will demonstrate how champions of “design thinking” responded to expanded availability of design labor globally by figuring Asians and machines as the creative subject's Other.

From inclusionary to exclusionary populism in the transformation of US community development

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Randy Stoecker ◽  
Benny Witkovsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Community Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Community Power ◽  
Community Model ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Milieu

This chapter addresses the transformation of community development in the United States. The post-World War II history of community development in the United States can be defined by a transition from a power-based model emphasising participatory and redistributive community power building, to a neoliberal model emphasising physical rehabilitation and business development. Neoliberal community development, however much it was consciously planned and engineered by economic and political elites, required a specific political milieu to take root and grow. In particular, it required a voting base that would support candidates promoting far-right, anti-democratic, anti-worker, and baldly racist policies. This political base — rural, white, and male — ends up voting to dismantle the community structures designed to empower them in the hope of some benefit from powerful leaders. This is the exact opposite of the community model that organises people to define and pursue their collective self-interest towards an expanded democracy. How can we understand such behaviour? We can start by thinking about it as a result of the Janus-faced nature of populism that allows it to be either (or both) inclusionary and exclusionary.

scholarly journals “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilly Irani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Business Schools ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This paper examines the emergence of “design thinking” as a form of technical expertise. It demonstrates that “design thinking” articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to maintain whiteness at the apex of global hierarchies of labor.“Design thinking” is a form of expertise that poses design not as form giving, but as a form of empathic reason by which executives can plan products, services, and accumulation. Silicon Valley, business schools, and reformers promote it as a form of caring technical expertise by which some guide futures for others. The paper will examine the history of the concept of “design thinking” – a category forged by Silicon Valley designers in the face of mounting competitive pressures on design professions in the United States in the mid-2000s. By drawing on artifacts, documents, public debates about the design profession from this period, I will demonstrate how champions of “design thinking” responded to expanded availability of design labor globally by figuring Asians and machines as the creative subject's Other.

Obama’s Africa Policy: The Limits of Symbolic Power

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
The U.S

Abstract:The election of Barack Obama as the first African-descended president of the United States in 2008 was greeted with euphoria in the U.S. and around the world, including Africa. Little, however, changed in the substance of U.S.–Africa relations. This underscores the limits of the symbolic politics of race and presidential personalities in the face of the structural imperatives of U.S. power and foreign policy in which African interests remain marginal and subordinate to U.S. interests. The article explores the structural contexts of foreign policy-making in the United States and what might be expected from the second Obama administration.

Cuban Complaint of Aggression

1960 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-578 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Security Council ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cuban Government ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cuban Sugar ◽  
The Government ◽  
Self Protection

From its 874th through its 876th meetings the Security Council considered the complaint of the government of Cuba that that country had been subjected by the government of the United States to “repeated threats, harassments, intrigues, reprisals and aggressive acts.” The discussion was opened by Mr. Raúl Roa, Cuban Minister for Foreign Affairs, who began by asserting that Cuba had been under no juridical obligation to bring its complaint to the Organization of American States (OAS) before submitting it to the Council. He then traced the history of United States hostility to the revolutionary government of Cuba, hostility based, in his opinion, on opposition to the Agrarian Reform instituted by that government and culminating in the recent drastic curtailment of the Cuban sugar quota. In his reply to Mr. Roa, Mr. Lodge (United States) assured the Cuban government that the United States had no aggressive purposes against Cuba, and deplored the removal of the controversy between the two nations from its rightful forum in OAS to the Security Council. He also indicated, after a summary of Cuban-United States relations during the preceding year and a half from the United States point of view, that the reduction of the Cuban sugar quota had been no act of economic aggression, but rather a justifiable measure of self-protection on the part of the United States to ensure its needed supply of sugar in the face of acts by the Cuban government which made this supply extremely insecure. In conclusion, Mr. Lodge stated his belief that someday, somehow, Cuba and the United States would again be friends.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Adam Goodman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Private Firms ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter explores the history of expulsion and exposes the various ways immigration authorities have forced, coerced, and scared people into leaving the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. It reveals how public officials have assembled a well-oiled deportation machine, propelled by bureaucratic self-interest as well as the concerns of local communities and private firms. The chapter focuses on the deportation machine's three expulsion mechanisms: formal deportation, voluntary departure, and self-deportation. It analyzes how authorities have used the expulsion mechanisms to exert tremendous control over people's lives by determining who can enter the country and regulating who the state allows to remain. It also talks about how undocumented immigrants and their allies have endured, adapted, and resisted to demand their constitutional rights and challenge what they have considered to be unjust laws and inhumane treatment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document