Meritocracy from below: dreams, divisions, and the struggle for merit in a stigmatised neighbourhood
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ideal of a meritocratic society continues to exert significant normative power in political and public discourse, including in discussions about marginalised spaces and neighbourhoods. However, many urban scholars have been reluctant to critically engage with the normative assumptions underpinning the meritocratic ideal. Researchers working within neoclassical urban economics and positivist urban sociology, in particular, have often embraced and reproduced the notion of a more meritocratic society as a noble, if not inherently obvious and ordinary, ideal. This article argues for a critical understanding of meritocracy among urban researchers by exploring the consequences of how this ideal is internalised and reproduced in marginalised spaces. Through empirical research conducted in a stigmatised neighbourhood in Germany, I examine how meritocratic narratives contribute to sharp divisions among residents and hinder collective action. However, this does not mean that confronting the meritocratic ideal is impossible.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it