Justifying, concealing or owning privilege: how wealthy adolescents engage in emotion work to legitimise privilege

Amid rising inequality, scholars have emphasised the importance of further understanding elite legitimation. In this article, we draw attention to the emotional dynamics of elite legitimation, exploring how adolescents from wealthy upper-class families manage feelings of privilege and worth. Based on a one-year ethnography in a Swedish elite high school, we show that an upper-class background was experienced as morally problematic and a threat to one’s identity as a meritocratic high achiever. While shame played a central role in forming a set of feeling rules pertaining to privilege, students managed this feeling in different ways. Privilege was justified through a meritocratic narrative, concealed via far-reaching secrecy about personal biography and lifestyle, and challenged by attempts to own it. By comparing justification, concealment and owning, our findings indicate that access to an intergenerational self of upward mobility and cultural capital are classed interactional resources used to manage feelings of shame and to perform legitimate elite identities. The article thus contributes to the existing literature by drawing attention to the relationship between elite legitimation and emotion work, while also demonstrating important variations in how privilege might be managed by elite individuals.