ANOINTED

For many years, in his work as a professor and tenured faculty member at some of the most celebrated universities in the country, Toby Stuart has been obsessed with trying to understand what he calls anointment—the phenomenon that explains why status hierarchies exist, how people are sorted into positions within them, how they quietly shape who has copious opportunities to advance, and who stalls in disadvantaged social and economic positions.

Here, Stuart convincingly argues that by understanding anointment we learn a fundamental truth about human society: prestigious individuals—those at the higher rungs of the social hierarchy—have more opportunities than others simply because of their status. It’s not that these advantages arise because the anointed are more skilled at the task at hand; they occur because prestige itself creates a competitive edge. As much as we culturally cling to the narrative that hard work determines who prospers—that social positions and economic success are achieved—this is not how things often work. In context after context, anointment is an enormous advantage and it is surprisingly divorced from initial merit. The undertakings of high status actors are held in high regard by the majority of us, even when the meat of these endeavors is in fact no different or better than those of persons of lower notoriety. If you’re prominent enough, you almost always receive the benefit of the doubt and people will assume you are more able than you probably are, inducing self-reinforcing dynamics that stabilize your position. But if you’re at the bottom of it, you confront the opposite expectations. Worse, when we understand that success can be more about becoming anointed, rather than becoming outstanding, we begin to see that anointment can lead to extreme outcomes that are incompatible with most of our senses of fairness in how resources and opportunities should be distributed.

Blending a range of lively stories from different aspects of our culture, ANOINTED will reveal how being wired for social hierarchies and status plays out quietly but forcefully in our lives, shaping them while posing incredibly profound consequences for society at large. If uninterrogated, Stuart cautions, anointment contributes to some of the most divisive and prevalent forms of inequality.

In the vein of WINNERS TAKE ALL or books like THE BLACK SWAN and CONTAGIOUS, ANOINTED reveals a hidden architecture underpinning our lives and once you see it, it becomes impossible to ignore. Toby Stuart has taught at some of the most celebrated universities in the country and holds a chaired professorship (with a very long title) at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is also the cofounder of the Black Venture Institute, and has an extensive network of corporate relationships with whom he has consulted or lead trainings at over the past twenty-five years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Toby E. Stuart is the Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Innovation and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program. Previously, he taught at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he received his first chaired, full professorship at the age of 32.

Stuart is the recipient of the 2007 Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, which is granted every other year to recognize one individual’s contributions to entrepreneurship research. He has received teaching awards at Columbia Business School and Berkeley Haas. He has won the Administrative Science Quarterly’s Scholarly Contribution (best paper) award, and other recognitions for scholarly contributions. He is a Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Center for Corporate Reputation.