Self-centering Process, Meritocratic Conceptions and Political Identity in working class in Argentina in the 21st. Century

MULERAS EDNA

Melbourne

Congreso; XX ISA World Congress of Sociology. Resurgent Authoritarianism. Sociology of new entaglements of religions, politics and economies. Melbourne, Australia . June 25- July 1 2023.; 2023

International Sociological Association ISA

Self-centering process, meritocratic conceptions and political identity in working class in Argentina in the 21st century. The current diffusion of a meritocratic ideology is instrumental in the moral justification of the growing class inequality and adverse living conditions, experienced by large groups of working class in our societies in the twenty-first century. However, the empirical results of an exploratory research on different groups of workers carried out in Argentina in the last decade indicate that the effectiveness and incidence of meritocracy is linked to the occurrence of a broader and more complex process.Based on the results of our study, we propose to focus on the pre-existing epistemic and moral identity on which the meritocratic ideology necessarily operates. The meritocratic discourse impacts and is conceptually integrated by individuals only if it suits their available mental schemas to understand and judge the social processes. What they cannot fit into those schemas is deleted (forgotten?) or remains unobserved. Meritocracy only contributes to reinforcing certain types of pre-existing representative identities, characterized by a process of epistemic and moral self-centering. Such identities characterized by the prevalence of a retributive conception of justice, that puts the individual as the exclusive responsible for the living conditions that she experienced. They do not mention neither cooperative social relations, nor the confrontational social interrelation (intra-class and between classes) when describing, explaining or evaluatinge their personal situation and the inter-generational experience in their family history. As a working hypothesis, we propose the incidence of this set of factors in the support by part of the working class for regressive, unequal and undemocratic political projects, such as the one carried out during Mauricio Macri ?s government (2016-2019). It is plausible that the progressive improvement that workers objectively experienced during the previous governments of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner was attributed by them to their individual effort exclusively, instead of being understood as a logical consequence of the redistributive policies promoted between 2003 and 2015.