The Competition and Competitiveness Project

Upcoming events

Interdisciplinary workshop, Friday 18 March and Saturday 19 March

Wivenhoe House Hotel, University of Essex

We're holding an interdisciplinary workshop on competition and competitiveness, aiming to bring together people who work on competition or related topics. The workshop will consider competition and competitiveness and aims to bring together people who work on competition or who have research interests close to it. Its purpose is to take stock of current and existing research on competition and competitiveness and to begin to establish a network of scholars who work in this and related areas. The format is intended to maximise opportunities for in-depth and interdisciplinary discussions, both formal and informal.

We ask that attendees, as far as possible, attend both days of the workshop.

Speakers

• Michelle Meagher (Law; UCL), “Who makes competition policy and for whose benefit?”
• Tobias Werron (Sociology; Bielefeld), “Competition as a social form: A sociological perspective”
• Heather Widdows (Philosophy; Birmingham), “The fairest of them all? Beauty, comparison and competition”
• Alfred Moore (Political Science; York), “Democracy as play”
• Will Davies (Political Economy; Goldsmiths), “Competition and the crisis of neoliberal authority”
• Pierre Régibeau (Chief Competition Economist, European Commission), “Securing a competitive environment for large tech corporations in the fields of big data and social media”

Register your attendance.

Current Research

Conceptual Questions

One stream of our research considers conceptual questions about competition and competitiveness. Research questions include:

• how should competition be defined?
• are there important differences between forms of competition?
• what are the purposes of competition?
• how can we measure competitiveness?

Meritocratic Competition

A society is meritocraticto the extent that access to important goods is allocated according to merit. Meritocracy is competitive, because the goods that it allocates are scarceand, often, positional. For example, in a meritocratic society, individuals compete for access to and success in selective education and desirable and well-paid jobs, and the honours and material rewards that come with that success.

A number of recent studies have pointed to problems of meritocratic societies (e.g., Robert H. Frank’s Success and Luck[2016], Jo Littler’s Against Meritocracy[2017], Daniel Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap[2017], and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit[2020]).

One stream of our current research looks specifically at thecompetitivecharacter of meritocracyand a number of related concepts, such as equality of opportunity, fairness and luck. Research questions include:

• how has the British Left conceptualised equality of opportunity?
• what is the role of luck in meritocratic competition?
• should meritocratic competition be governed by an ethics of competition?