Free to those who can afford it: The everyday affordance of privilege

Abstract

Zero-priced goods (which we call ‘free stuff’) are an overlooked foundation of privilege. From corporate perks to meal accoutrements and easy access to bathrooms, free stuff does work of a number of important types, from easing everyday personal routine to solidifying economic ties. We trace the flow of free stuff using an ‘affordance’ perspective on privilege, a useful way to examine the micro-situational foundations of inequality. This perspective focuses attention on exactly how resources, from cash to cultural capital, are made useful in day-to-day life. We examine the transaction of freebies in three ideal-typical networks: that of the professional, the culture industry broker, and the poor urban dweller. Through comparison of each of these cases, we argue that freebies and perks are affordances of class position, whether in their abundance, as in the case of the professional's ease with perks, or in their absence in the case of poor people's subsistence. Free stuff can be an important medium of exchange in a number of worlds, and often serves to seamlessly provide recipients with important situational resources. The poor, however, are often left out of valuable networks of exchange, thus facing considerable retrieval costs for free stuff others take for granted.