Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School and The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
本文评论了两本关于社会经济不平等的专著，分别从政治哲学和社会学角度探讨精英如何利用优绩制巩固特权，以及精英教育如何掩盖先天优势。
Socioeconomic inequalities are attracting increasing attention from business and management scholars (Amis, Mair, & Munir, 2020; Bapuji, Ertug, & Shaw, 2020). Given the focus of the present Special Issue on how management education and learning might contribute to exacerbating or attenuating these, it seems opportune to consider two recent landmark monographs which both address socioeconomic inequalities in different ways. In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, political philosopher Michael J. Sandel ([2020]2021), Professor of Government Theory at Harvard, shows how the meaning of merit has evolved in recent decades. Ruling elites, Sandel suggests, have profited from globalization while disempowering ordinary citizens by robbing them of the dignity of work. Relatedly, in Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, sociologist Shamus Khan ([2011]2021), Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton, asserts that, even as principles of openness and access are embraced in terms of race and gender, this has not created a more equitable society. On the contrary, attendance at an elite school obscures the advantages that the privileged are born into.