Privilege in place: How organisational practices contribute to meshing privilege in place

Abstract

Studies of social difference have often focused on segregation and oppression, leaving out the ‘up -side of discrimination’: privilege. Privilege is the unrecognised advantage positioning certain people in a favoured state and systematically conferring power on groups of people in specific contexts. Privilege is also situated: it accumulates in place. Building on processual understanding of space and place, the purpose of this paper is to add to our understanding of processes of privilege accumulation in place by exploring the relationship between privilege and place when both are considered processes rather than entities. Building on Doreen Massey’s work (2005, 2011) for analysing an empirical case, Nordic Outdoor, the article shows that privilege can be understood as meshed in place: privilege accumulates in the same process of configuring trajectories that gives shape to the place in which privilege emerges. Mobilising the concept of place, trajectories and power geometries enables us to direct our attention to constructions of convergence. These concepts are thus not only helpful in studying privilege and power, but they also allow us to treat privilege accumulation as sociomaterial process, taking form locally as the throwntogetherness of a place is negotiated, but also related to many other places and times.

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