cliquery

From clique +‎ -ery.

cliquery (countable and uncountable, plural cliqueries)

1. (countable) A social structure characterized by cliques.
   • 1883, George Bentley, After Business: Papers Written in the Intervals of Work, page 58:

     He was a keen observer of manners, and had a wholesome contempt for the little cliqueries which are generally formed by persons of narrow mind and sparse acquirements.

   • 1926, Theodore Hildreth Eaton, Education and vocations: principles and problems of vocational education, page 103:

     Instances of loyalty to the smaller group as against the larger are innumerable, ranging from the strife of ' organized labor ' with ' organized capital ' through intra-labor-union and intracorporate conflicts, to the cliqueries and cabals of departmental groups in universities and the petty snobberies of medical men of different ' schools in their dealings with one another and the laity.

   • 1967, Eugene Heimler, Resistance Against Tyranny, page 54:

     As mentioned earlier, in the strange cliqueries of South Africa, even a wayward white remains white, and is judged by standards of his own tribe.

2. (uncountable) Cliquishness.
   • 1844, Joseph Smith, Views on the Government and Policy of the United States, page 10:

     Democracy, Whiggery, and Cliquery will attract their elements and foment divisions among the people, to accomplish fancied schemes and accumulate power, while poverty, driven to despair, like hunger forcing its way through a wall, will break through the statutes of men, to save life and mend the breach in prison glooms.

   • 2016, Benjamin Kohlmann, Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, page 26:

     What garnered contempt from the pair were the criteria upon which admission to the poshocracy depended, criteria founded on the cliquery of the English upper classes, a cliquery that, disseminated as 'team spirit' (14) in public schools and perpetuated by the most privileged and credulous of undergraduates, found its way full-circle in the mentality of the graduating elite.

   • 2017, Tom Schuller, The Paula Principle:

     ...or to the nursery assistant who cannot progress to a more senior level because taking a full-time job would mean losing more in childcare costs than she would gain in salary, as it does to the vice-president or deputy CEO blocked from the top job by covert discrimination or male cliquery.

   • 2018, Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading:

     As well as the growing cliquery of school, where the girls had taken to forming and reforming into tiny splinter groups in accordance with a logic as convoluted as it was unspoken, work was becoming harder.