Multiple Meritocracies: A Text-Based Analysis of Personal Narratives Revealing Distinct Frames of Success

What concepts do people use to construct narratives about how to get ahead in contemporary society? To what extent do these narratives reflect distinctive constellations of beliefs? What are these constellations and is their usage contingent on social position? With these questions in mind, we used the qualitative data associated with the American Voices Project to systematically explore and map constellations of beliefs. Adopting a natural language analysis, we identify linguistic patterns that signal the relative importance of different get-ahead outlooks as cultural frames. These outlooks include not only traditional meritocratic factors, but also a range of nonmeritocratic influences, including nonrational factors such as luck and religion. Our analysis identifies three distinctive versions of meritocracy—frustrated, complex, and detached—in how people describe their life trajectories. Our findings suggest that the idea of meritocracy hides meaningful variations and nuances in the ways people construct visions of what meritocracy means and how it is constituted.