The first cut on this record has been cross-format focused for Airplay success.

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the Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and today I'm joined by Joe Littler to discuss meritocracy and the neoliberal era. You can listen to the podcast

on SoundCloud, iTunes and ACAST, and you can also follow on Facebook and Twitter at Poll Theory

Other. And if you've been enjoying the show, please do consider rating or reviewing it on iTunes.

Joe Littler is a reader in the Centre for Culture and Creative Industries and Director of Research

in the Department of Sociology at City University London.

She is the author of Radical Consumption, Shopping for Change in Contemporary Culture, and More Recently, Against Meritocracy, Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility, published by Rutledge,

which form the basis for our discussion today.

So, Jo, you begin your book with a discussion of the history of the idea of meritocracy,

and you point out that before it's more modern usage, it can be identified in the discourse

of the re-established French Republic after the crushing of the Paris commune in 1871,

which, as you describe, after the defeat of the communards, the

new regime declared that careers would be open to talents, which is certainly reminiscent

of more modern usage of the term. Could you say something on the history of the notion of meritocracy?

And where do you think lies the point at which the idea is deployed in its more modern sense?

Yes, so in the book I talk about the emergence of meritocracy both as a word and as an older concept.

So it becomes coined as a word in the 1950s. It's stereotypically ascribed to Michael Young, with his book,

The Rise of the Meritocracy, popularised the term. But there is an earlier usage by an industrial

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