Essays Meritocracy and Brazilian Society down with Meritocracy

“Down with meritocracy” is a frequent sentence in posters displaying demands from different professional categories on strike and other union demands in Brazil. So, it is far from being new. What is interesting, in the present moment, is that this demand – “down with meritocracy” – is reproduced simultaneously with a Brazilian party-political, administrative and institutional discourse change, which wants to promote exactly what this demand wants to extinguish. The current and frequent references to meritocracy in government authorities, politicians and entrepreneurs speeches, invoking the need to “implant meritocracy” (commonly adopted expression.), in different spheres of Brazilian society, illustrate this change. This speech transformation is followed by countless organizations, public or private, medium and large-sized, whose high administrations have assigned, since the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, their Human Resource (HR) and/or Organizational Development (OD) areas, the job of “implanting meritocracy” in work environments. This is ironic, because the majority of these organizations already have performance assessment systems, one of the most used tools that measure and acknowledges merit, with promotions, wage increases and bonus as compensations. If we consider ‘assess’ as ascribe value, merit, to the results obtained, what does the expression “implant meritocracy” actually mean? What factors are at the root of this political, administrative and entrepreneurial speech change and the pressure for institutional ‘implementation of meritocracy”? In this opportunity, I intend to explore what is behind this demand for meritocracy in Brazilian organizations, both private and public, in direct or indirect administrations, and the speeches structured around its implementation. The qualitative material used in this analysis comes from my experience as meritocracy theme researcher for over a decade. During this whole period, I have had frequent contacts with HR and OD professionals, carried out focal groups with different hierarchical levels employees (including directorship and high management) and individual interviews, have examined institutional material and analyzed administrative policies relative to performance assessment. RAE-Revista de Administração de Empresas | FGV-EAESP