How Focusing on Individual Achievement Favors the Upper Class
The way we assess achievement disadvantages lower class students and workers. Here’s how we can make it more equitable.
Founding Columnist
Andrea Dittmann
Andrea Dittmann is an assistant professor of organization & management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Her research focuses on sources of and solutions to inequality in workplaces, and in particular, on the role that employees’ social class backgrounds play in shaping the obstacles and strengths they experience later in life at work. She also examines how social class background interacts with other social identities like gender. Ultimately, the goal of her research is to identify ways organizations can shift their cultures, policies, and practices to reduce social class inequality and promote upward mobility. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Challenges for Working-Class Students Don’t End at Commencement
For many first-generation college students from working-class backgrounds, life after college is not devoid of obstacles to upward mobility.
Understanding Social Class as Culture
One of the key psychological sources of growing inequality seems to lie in the differences between the culture and norms of the middle class and those of the working class.