Abstract
Lauren Rivera’s important book goes deep into the meritocratic heart of American corporate culture to present a powerful, arresting and worrying picture about elite recruitment into top professional service firms in corporate law, investment banking and consulting. The book is thus part of a recent revival of sociological interest in elite formation, where it takes its place alongside Shamus Khan’s Privilege and follows in the wash generated by Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz and the growing concern about the mushrooming fortunes of the super-rich. It looks in detail at how recruitment chains to elite jobs take place, starting with how firms target students in elite universities, job fairs, reviewing applications, shortlisting, interviews and selection. This careful unravelling of the recruitment process shows how difficult it is for talented people from less advantaged backgrounds to succeed in this hothouse world. The book’s findings are unremittingly bleak, and indicate how clear processes of elite closure are now operating at the entry level to privileged jobs – notwithstanding interventions around equality and diversity from human resources (HR) departments.
The basic picture is in many respects remarkably straightforward and almost too easy to dissect. Recruiting decisions are largely passed down to practising partners and senior professionals, who, confronted with a great variety of candidates to choose from and the need to fit recruitment into their busy diaries, overwhelmingly select interviewees on the basis of a few stereotyped characteristics, especially their profiles at a few elite universities. At the interview stage, selection is based powerfully on the ‘fit’ that they detect with those they interview, thus facilitating pervasive pressures towards ‘homophily’, in which recruitment is geared towards ‘people like us’.
Yet, although the basic findings seem remarkably simple, there are some crucial implications that need to be underscored. Firstly, Rivera’s book is a powerful critique of those who see recruitment as based around any kind of ‘rationalised’ criteria, such as those that are generally supported by HR units and in formal recruitment training. Rivera shows that HR is in fact rather powerless and marginal in terms of influencing the recruitment process. Above all what counts in selection is passion, excitement and ‘love’, rather than any detached point-scoring or attribute matching. The world of elite recruitment is an erogenous zone of mate selection, in which recruiting staff are fundamentally concerned with whether they will enjoy working with, socialising with and being friendly with potential colleagues. This politics of pleasure and power is unravelled with clinical detail – the tone of Rivera’s book is always detached, and all the more powerful for this. Those interviewed are differentiated into ‘rock stars’, ‘rejects’ and a large intermediate category where it depends on ‘champions’ to decide which of those in the middle pile actually get offers.
Rivera reveals in a fascinating way how issues of diversity play out with respect to this homophilic culture. Forty years ago, Rosabeth Moss Kanter famously showed how men recruited other men, and how this generated male dominated corporations that excluded women. Yet this culture appears to have changed fundamentally as it is now women who tend to be seen as a better ‘fit’ than men. Their social skills appear to make them by default the usual candidates to be appointed, whereas special cases have to be made for men who might otherwise be too awkward, too forward, too geeky. This apparent change in the gender cultures of hiring must constitute a remarkable shift in organisational cultures. Rivera shows, however, that ethnic minorities fare much less well in this hiring culture. Even though a special effort is made by HR to note ‘diversity candidates’, it is much less easy for ethnic outsiders to have the kind of ‘ease’ and graces (as perceived by those hiring them) to fit, and this is compounded by the lack of information on the ethnic profiles of those applying. In this respect, the politics of diversity with respect to gender on the one hand, and race/ethnicity on the other, play out very differently.
Rivera draws critically on the sociology of Bourdieu, and his emphasis on the way that social and cultural capital are implicated in the production of elite networks. Yet there is an important twist in her arguments which offers intriguing parallels for recent Bourdieusian scholarship. She shows that traditional ‘highbrow’ cultural capital is largely irrelevant for the selection of elite professionals: going to the right opera houses, knowing Shakespeare or being able to hold your own about the latest art house movie counts for nothing. Rather it is the traits of being ‘engaged’ (for instance in clubs and sports), physically fit and personable which count. These are precisely the kind of characteristics which have been referred to as ‘emerging cultural capital’ in recent scholarship, and which suggest that amongst younger elites the older canon has been replaced by a much more corporeal and physical display of cultural capital. It is this bodily persona that seems essential now for elite recruitment – brilliant geeks have little chance of getting an offer, it would appear, but beautiful, confident and socially skilled graduates from the right universities could well do so.
Rivera also emphasises that fundamental to this system of elite recruitment is the possibility for there to be the occasional recruitment that does not conform to the norms. Although these professional firms strongly focus on recruiting from a few elite universities, they occasionally stray more widely. It is possible for a few people without the appropriate ‘ease’ to get offers, and in this way, the meritocratic legitimation has a certain purchase by being able to point to occasional success stories from below, however unusual this might be.
Rivera’s writing style is always clear and direct. Her dispassionate tone sometimes keeps the reader at more distance than they might like. But her very clear and rigorous qualitative methods demonstrate all too clearly the power of these perspectives for illuminating how processes actually work, in a way that a more conventional survey-based study might be less able to reveal. At times it would have been good to have heard more of Rivera’s own reflexive voice, and how she was treated as a young well educated and attractive woman (i.e. precisely the kind of person who might be seen as a desirable employee in the firms she is analysing) in doing this research. She does make it clear that she is upwardly mobile, and from a relatively disadvantaged background, and one suspects that this is an important plank on which her study is based. She might also have pushed further her conceptual arguments about class, elites and skill formation which might follow from her findings. But in any event, Rivera’s book performs a signal service and will be a crucial reference point.