resource manager Jennie told me in 2019: “Selection is incredibly rigorous nowadays, all candidates are screened on academics, they do tests, we have interviews based on standardized questions. It has to be meritocratic … the things we ask them to do, they wouldn’t get past if they weren’t really good.” In this and the following chapters I will explain why Jacob and Jennie (and many of their colleagues and peers) are mistaken to believe that recruiting from ‘elite’ universities and the use of scientific selection techniques necessarily lead to meritocratic outcomes. As
and the earlier 1990s the City urgently needed more ‘bodies’ who could be matched with an expanding number of jobs and it was forced to open up. Once recession hit, City firms continued to attract very high numbers of applicants but were offering fewer jobs and as corporate lawyer Angela, who I quoted above, said, “They went straight back to type”. This can be explained because despite the introduction of scientific selection techniques, hiring managers and human resources teams were no better at knowing how to predict performance or identify talent. Given
Why does the City of London, despite an apparent commitment to recruitment and progression based on objective merit within its hiring practices, continue to reproduce the status quo?
Written by a leading expert on diversity and elite professions, this book examines issues of equality in the City, what its practitioners say in public, and what they think behind closed doors.
Drawing on research, interviews, practitioner literature and internal reports, it argues that hiring practices in the City are highly discriminating in favour of a narrow pool of affluent applicants, and future progress may only be achieved by the state taking a greater role in organisational life. It calls for a policy shift at both the organisational and governmental level to the implications of widening inequality in the UK.
and remedial education tracks, as well as the overall streaming system centred on the concept of children’s innate abilities and giftedness. There was also the necessary political will to counter problems and introduce what was considered an improved and scientific selection technology. Nevertheless, many teachers remained sceptical about education psychology and IQ testing. This was mostly because educational psychologists were seen as representatives of the progressive education movement, which advocated for a free upbringing and freedom for the child and were
. This helps reinforce the central message of this book, which is that judgements of ‘merit’ operationalized in the City rest as much on an individual’s social and cultural position as their innate ability or exceptional talent, in ways that can rarely be considered entirely ‘fair’. Confidence, polish and ‘fit’ In Chapter 3 , I discussed how City firms had introduced scientific selection techniques during the 1990s which were presented as neutral but which accommodated individual preferences and corporate culture to also prioritize also ‘fit’. Checking for
Increasingly it is not just the state that determines the content, delivery and governance of education. The influence of external actors has been growing, but the boundaries between internal and external have become blurred and their partnerships have become more complex.
This book considers how schooling systems are being influenced by the rise of external actors, including private companies, NGOs, parent organisations, philanthropies and international assessment frameworks.
It explores how the public, private and third sectors are becoming increasingly intertwined. Introducing new theoretical frameworks, it examines diverse sites – including Cambodia, Israel, Poland, Chile, Australia, Brazil and the US – to study the role of policies, institutions and contextual factors shaping the changing relationships between those seeking to influence schooling.
