Abstracts (İngilizce özetler)

The simulating effect on class criteria of the consumption as strategy of identity of the industrial and post-industrial workers

ALİ ERGUR

The last century of the capitalism can be characterized by a relatively rapid transformation of the process of production and work, as well as the determinant changes in the structure of the capital. In an extremely accelerated range of possibilities in transportation and communication, contemporary capitalism has gradually became the sum of a globally intertwined networks, which resulted the dominance of an economic organization based particularly on world scale fluencies. Consequently, working patterns have radically changed during the last three decades. Today, most of the economic activities seem to be reorganized around postindustrial settings, though industrial activities continue to survive but in a relative atrophy and throughout a qualitative transformation. The result is, on the one hand, the emergence of white collar jobs, and, on the other, the progressive disappearance of the production as an identity-constitutive process. Instead, consumption arises as a much more ephemeral and short-termed identity provider. These well known changes are usually theorized today, through a polarized conceptual construction between industrial and postindustrial patterns of working, as if these were two isolated spheres in which opposing modes of consumption shape different trajectories of identity for workers. We assume that these patterns of consumption do not come to light as separated domains, and ways of life, but rather, as similar extensions of the same lifestyle receipts preached by the integrated system of consumption. Therefore, workers of the both kinds of organization share a remarkable amount of the lifestyle attributes closely related to the very act of consumption. Such an interpenetrated field of the identity-making instruments, invokes inevitably a widely shared psyche of classlessness. Indeed, this simulating effect on class criteria over-emphasizes consumption as a constant strategy for individuals, given that the self-defining mechanisms of the latter are now highly disoriented and fluid, though they can still dialectically extract some personal methods of emancipation. This article tries to show certain indicators of this simulation, through the results of a qualitative research on the workers of both industrial and postindustrial sectors in Istanbul.

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Solid waste collection as a form of informal labour

BETÜL ALTUNTAŞ

This paper contains sharing of knowledge and experience regarding the solid waste collection industry and its workers in the case of Ankara. Data used in the paper are based on a qualitative research made with the paper collectors in Ankara and the experience and knowledge I have gathered through the organizational efforts thanks to my position as founding member and chairman of the Waste Paper Worker’s Association in 2005. In depth interviews were made with the collectors in waste neighborhoods, storehouses and on the streets, most of which were executed during the active work process. We came together with the workers on various social and cultural occasions such as home visits, funerals and weddings, and demonstrations, actions and group meetings in order to clarify the demands and define a perspective for struggle. In these meetings, the networks of power in the industry, the features of major waste neighborhoods in Ankara, socio-cultural backgrounds of the collectors and their working conditions, their integration with/exclusion from the city, their political position, problems with the police and the municipality were discussed, as well as workers’ views regarding the operation of the industry and organization. What distinguishes this work may be its effort to discuss the issue from within, and to realize “what needs to be done” with the desire towards “something can be done”.

This paper recognizes waste collecting as a form of struggling with the most dreadful features of poverty. Nevertheless, it also claims that there is a huge industry behind all this debate which cannot be read solely through concepts of new urban poverty and emergent forms of subsistence. It is argued that the dynamics of taking up collecting, ethnical structures, political understandings, and views on organizing are significant variants in the process of workerization within this non-homogeneous group. I hope this work will provide insight for those who study the industry as well as the Waste Paper Worker’s Association and other democratic mass organizations.

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Migration waves from Turkey to Northern Cyprus: Excluded informal migrant labour in Nicosia

HATİCE KURTULUŞ - SEMRA PURKİS

Population exchange between Northern and Southern parts of Cyprus which took place as a result of Turkey’s intervention in 1974 led to profound fissures in the socio spatial scales that had existed before. The most urgent need to reconstruct these scales was labour force and this need was satisfied by Turkey as no other country but Turkey recognised Northern Cyprus as an independent state. This labour shortage still continues in Northern Cyprus’ certain economical sectors such as construction, service sector and agriculture and the labour demand of these sectors has been met mostly by migrant labour from Turkey. This article describes shortly three different migration waves from Turkey to Northern Cyprus since 1974 and focuses on third migration wave and argues that lots of parallelisms between this wave and other informal labour migration all over the world in terms of their condition of being migrant, their spatial, cultural, ethnic exclusion as well as their exclusion as a social class.. In contrast to general tendency of looking at migration from Turkey to Northern Cyprus as Turkey’s population engineering policy and a local phenomenon, especially this third wave migration share with other worldwide labour migration patterns the same characteristic of clustring in the spaces of urban poverty in addition to other global characteristics mention above. In this article we aimed at making two contributions by implementing an emprical research on migrant labour from Turkey whom clustered in Nicosia/Surlariçi. Our first aim is developing a fresh approach beyond dominant strategical approaches on the processes of migration from Turkey to Northern Cyprus and pointing out their nature as labour migration and second one is showing global and regional characteristics of this labour movement.

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Spotlighting silent category of young females: Everyday life experiences of ‘house girls’ in Turkey

G. DEMET LÜKÜSLÜ - KEZBAN ÇELİK

Societies always relate the roles, status and experiences of their subjects with age; thus all societies have an age-based stratification. Since this is a socially constructed stratification, its content changes according to time and space. Therefore the concepts of child, youth and elderly become debatable issues whose meanings are changing from country to country, from culture to culture and from past to present. In Turkish society, the word “youth” generally refers to young males, considered as dynamic, active, and “wild-blooded”, whose rights and duties have not yet been defined and/or recognised. The category of youth itself is not homogenous, changing according to social class, ethnicity, place, family type and socio-economic status of the family.

This paper examines everyday life experiences of young women in Turkey known as ev k›z› (the phrase literally means “house girl” in Turkish). The study is based on in-depth interviews conducted with a total of 30 house girls living in poor districts of Istanbul and Ankara. Our sample of house girls includes young women between the ages of 18-24, who are single and not previously married, do not participate in full-time education or in the labour market and live with their family. The paper aims to combine youth studies with women’s studies and to introduce gender in youth studies as well as introducing generation and age factor in women’s studies.

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Rethinking masculine domination: Pierre Bourdieu as an opportunity for masculinity studies

H. BAHADIR TÜRK

The purpose of this article is to rethink the debates concerning the question of domination, a central theme in masculinity studies, by focusing on Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments, particularly, the ones that are presented in his controversial text, La Domination Masculine. This article is structured as follows: The first section highlights main characteristics of masculinity studies with a particular emphasis on Connel’s theory of hegemonic masculinity. The second section provides a brief overview of the concepts such as habitus, doxa, practice, symbolic power and symbolic violence, which are crucial in order to make sense of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical universe, in a descriptive way. The next section provides an analysis how Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments concerning “masculine domination” can be read on the axis of masculinity studies. This section also tries to re-examine Connel’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity” under the light of Pierre Bourdiue’s arguments. The central argument of this aricle is that Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework and arguments may provide a significant contribution to the debates and problems in the existing literature of masculinity studies.

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Gender and place: Men’s coffeehouses

NURHAK POLAT

The masculinity is not something that men are born with, but also must be acquired and defended. There are numerous places such as traditional men’s coffeehouses, like many other similar kind of places in many countries, in which men construct and reconstruct the ‘manliness’. It is based on the fact that the social construct of masculinity is reinforced by gender separated spaces, particularly in a world where traditionally the gender identities are constructed and experienced permanently separate from each other. These spaces enable the socialization of men as ‘man’, away from any influences of other types of sexuality, i.e. women.

The focus of this paper is to discuss a case that I have experienced last summer in a men’s coffeehouse in a small town of northwestern Turkey where I went for a fieldwork. My main purpose is to discuss about the fact of ‘men’s coffeehouses’ with regard to masculinity studies and men studies. In this context I refer to the habitus theory of Pierre Bourdieu, the studies of Robert W. Connell and Michael Meuser as well as some studies from Latin America. I try to analyse the phenomenon of ‘men’s coffeehouses’ in the light of these theories and studies concerning the exclusion of women from these spaces.

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Life and politics at the crossroads: Hammer, sickle and refugees

AYTEK SONER ALPAN

The convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations in Lausanne Negotiations in 1923 created a historically distinctive experience. The distinctiveness of this historical experience rooted in the fact that it was the first compulsory population exchange. The economic, political and social impacts of the Population Exchange as a “project” of restricting the potential problems in modernization and nation-building processes of these two late-capitalized countries and the interaction of these impacts with each other constitute the focus of this article, however, this work tries to picture these impacts and interactions in a distinct context. This article focuses on the relations between refugees and the Communist Party of Greece and exhibits the economic, political and social conditions in Greece in the interwar era while investigating the course of this relation in 1920s and 1930s. The historical process investigated in this work shows how a political agent which has limited effect in the beginning achieves to a position of determining the fate of whole country as a result of a series of coincidences in national and international scales.

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Accumulation strategies, hegemony and the European Roundtable

EREN DÜZGÜN

This article has elaborated on how the transnational capital, which has been organized in and through the European Roundtable of Industrialists, has come to affect the accumulation strategies in Europe. It has been discussed that the intra-capital conflict between globalists and Europeanists has ended in favour of the former by the beginning of the 1990s. The globalists have succeeded to mould a hegemonic framework into which the potentially contending groups can be incorporated, although the framework itself has still been predominantly established with reference to the long-term interests of the transnational capital. However, the main contribution of this article lays in its effort to further understand the developments of the Lisbon process. The principles which were put forward at the Lisbon Summit has been claimed to have constituted a Post-Fordist accumulation strategy that has basically implied the institutionalization of the hegemony of the transnational capital in Europe. These assumptions have been backed by two case studies –EURATEX and ETUC– in an attempt to find out the extent to which the Lisbon strategy has successfully contained the potentially dissident groups. This would also be a litmus test for the validation of my earlier claims.

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Marxism in Weber: A comparative introduction to General Economic History

DENİZ KUNDAKÇI

Among the various analyses of the rise of capitalism, the most consistent were those of Weber’s and Marx’s. They were compared in different ways, mainly since the beginning of 20th century when Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was first published. Generally it is claimed that their perspectives are completely different from each other. Through the analysis of Protestant Ethic, Weber was put in opposition to Marx in terms of his analysis of the relationship between society and economy. This positioning of Weber is usually based on his writings on the sociology of religion and his Protestant Ethic. However, it is claimed in this article that Weber’s analysis was in close proximity with that of Marx’s and this becomes obvious in his work of General Economic History. Weber’s approach in General Economic History can be considered to be a Marxist one. Different from his earlier works he refers widely to Marx and elaborates the factors which he thought Marx had left outside of his analysis.