Race in professional spaces

Abstract

The sustained policy focus on combating institutional racism at all levels of British society has given new impetus to discovering how racialized groups experience a variety of institutional settings. This article draws on research conducted amongst British Hindu women working as professional accountants to further understand how privileged institutional spaces are racialized. The narratives of the women discussed in this article demonstrate how professional occupations are important in understanding articulations of racial identity in privileged institutional spaces as not only empirically and historically contingent, but also complex, contradictory and ambivalent. The article suggests that although their professional work spaces were racialized, the experiences of the research sample did not seem to indicate that race was an all-determining influence in their career progression. Its influence did not appear to close all avenues for potential change and progression against discriminative employment cultures.