Reproducing Class

Education, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of the New Middle Class in Istanbul

Henry Rutz, Erol M. Balkan

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780857455451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía política

Middle classes are by definition ambiguous, raising all sorts of paradoxical questions, perceived and real, about their power and place relative to those above and below them in a class-structured society. Focusing on families of the new middle class in Istanbul, the authors of this study address questions about the social construction of middle-class reality in the context of the rapid changes that have come about through recent economic growth in global markets and the global diffusion of information technology. After 1980, Turkey saw a structural transformation from state-owned and managed industry, banking, and media and communications to privatization and open markets. The idea of being middle class and the reality of middle-class practices became open for negotiation and interpretation. This study therefore offers a particularly interesting case study of an emergent global phenomenon known as the transnational middle class, characterized by their location of work in globalizing cities, development of transnational social networks, sumptuary consumption habits, and residences in gated communities. As the authors show, this new middle class associates quality education, followed by property and lifestyle issues, with the concept of a comfortable life.

1

CLASS MATTERS

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair reputedly was asked at a press conference about the value of education in today’s global economy, he is said to have responded gamely with the phrase, “the more you learn, the more you earn.” The stakes of becoming middle class and reproducing class have risen, increasing the demand for cultural capital in the form of education. New middle-class families, especially in globalizing cities around the world, from London to Bombay and New York to Istanbul, have awakened to the belief that the latest round of world capitalist accumulation constitutes a fundamental shift in their ability to provide their children with what they euphemistically refer to as “a comfortable life.”

We refer to those Istanbul families that are in competition with each other under conditions of globalizing neoliberal markets as a “new middle class.” While there would appear to be a global trend in economic, social, and cultural differentiation within a middle class, accompanied everywhere by a middle-class crisis of access to, and affordability of, quality education, the dynamics of new middle-class formation must be understood within both national and local contexts where the agency of state, market, and family mutually shape each other. Although neoliberal capitalist ideology emphasizes enterprise free from state interference, in reality the formation of the state has always played a major role in shaping the evolution of capitalism and vice versa.¹ Their interdependence and contradictions are part of the dialectic of capitalist social formation.

The Class Analyst Is Part of Class Analysis

Early in our research, we made a decision to focus on Istanbul middle-class households and families as agents of middle-class reproduction and transformation. At first, we focused on the meaning and content of changing household consumption habits because, we reasoned, these formed a nexus of activity at the intersection of economics and culture, a meeting of our respective professional fields of inquiry. The result was a survey we conducted in 1993 of five hundred and fifty households that (1) helped us to sharpen our understanding of middle-class social space, (2) gave us a picture of changing tastes in middle-class culture, and (3) provided us with a clear view of families that comprised a new middle-class fragment that were beginning to benefit economically, socially, and culturally due to the immanent structural transformation from welfare state into neoliberal state.²

The survey was invaluable for locating the new middle class in districts of the city, as well as confirming characteristics of new middle-class families, but it provided little information on the dynamics of middle-class formation. This came informally through endless casual conversations with friends, colleagues, students, and families. Slowly we realized that conversation gravitated toward children and their education. The mantra of “quality education” emerged as a metadiscourse for the reproduction of social class. The discourse of quality education was interwoven with another discourse—namely, the imperative for providing their children with “a comfortable life.” Together the meanings of quality and comfort framed our formal interviews that zeroed in on winning the national Selective Middle Schools tests. Money, social connections, cultural knowledge, formal schooling, and a general sophistication in the world seemed to have something to do with a determination to win the SMSEs.

The first national middle school tests were held in 1983, the iconic date for the appearance of important neoliberal reforms of the economy. The significance of these events and their meaning for the making of a new middle class are taken up in the next chapter.

Theorizing New Middle-class Formation

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu bridged the conceptual divide between social theory and empirical inquiry, on the one hand, and on the other by reconciling subjectivism with objectivism in an effort to form a coherent theory of practice that includes both. Thompson (1991), in his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, offers a succinct overview of the methodological issues that Bourdieu struggled to resolve in his earlier work:

By ‘subjectivism’ Bourdieu means an intellectual orientation to the social world which seeks to grasp the way the world appears to the individuals who are situated within it. Subjectivism presupposes the possibility of some kind of immediate apprehension of the lived experience of others, and it assumes that this apprehension is by itself a more or less adequate form of knowledge about the social world…By ‘objectivism’ Bourdieu means an intellectual orientation to the social world which seeks to construct the objective relations which structure practices and representations; it places the primary experience of the social world in brackets and attempts to elucidate the structures and principles upon which primary experience depends but which it cannot directly grasp.…Bourdieu’s view is that both subjectivism and objectivism are inadequate intellectual orientations…His alternative theory of practice is an attempt to move beyond objectivism without relapsing into subjectivism, that is, to take account of the need to break with immediate experience while at the same time doing justice to the practical character of social life (11–12).

While Bourdieu held onto the necessity of having an objectivist approach to social life that, by definition, was not solely dependent on the interpretation of the subjects of investigation, Loic Wacquant states that Bourdieu’s guiding belief throughout his long career was the view that lived experience is constitutive of class and “cannot be directly deduced from an objectivist understanding of class structure.” (Wacquant 1991: 52). He asserts that it is necessary to understand the middle class as a historical formation “through an analysis of the whole set of creative strategies…pursued by all the agents…situated at the various theoretically pertinent locations in social space” (1991: 52).

Once we take into account the subjective perspective of the class analyst in the otherwise objective analysis of class, much debate about class can be seen as having to do less with questions about what class is than with questions about the context and meaning related to issues of language and its interpretation. In other words, discursive practices of the actors need to be interrogated to interpret what it means to be new middle class and how this form of consciousness affects restructuration of the class system in place. We alluded above to different approaches that practitioners have taken to the analysis of class and the debates that have resulted over how best to do it. Mike Savage and his coauthors divide the literature into three broad categories. The first is abstract and analytical, and locates the middle class between binary relations of the capitalist and working class; the second is empirical and describes work, culture, and lifestyles in various groupings and their distinctiveness; the third has to do with theorizing middle classes as “distinct social classes in their own right” (Savage et al. 1992: 1–5).

Our approach to the appearance and reproduction of the Istanbul new middle class considers these alternatives to fall within a single methodology. Together, they constitute necessary thought processes that we have used, in no particular order, to frame our ideas, guide our research, and arrive at conclusions.

We interrogate the education system as an objective phenomenon in which we explore the rules and regulations of a field of competitive social relations created, controlled, and regulated by an office of the Ministry of National Education. To understand the practices of agents that provide market services and families that plan their children’s education and prepare for the SMSEs, we needed to explore Wacquant’s “whole set of strategies pursued by the agents” (1991: 52).

Accumulation, Multiple Capitals, and the
Reproduction of the Istanbul New Class

Bourdieu views the social world as one of accumulated history, “and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects.” (Bourdieu 1997: 46) Capital denotes any materials, knowledge, or ideas used to produce, transport, create, or alter commodities for the purpose of accumulation. Marketable intangibles, or what we refer to as symbolic capital, such as credit, promises, good will, copyrights, brand names, trademarks, patents, stocks, bonds, and franchises are among the items included as instruments of capital accumulation. Bourdieu (1997: 46–58) distinguishes among three forms of capital for purposes of analysis. The first he labels economic capital, “which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights.” The second is cultural capital, “which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications.” The third is social capital, defined as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition [that] provides each of its members with the backing of collectively-owned capital as actual and potential credit.” With regard to Bourdieu’s institutionalization of the forms of capital, economic capital is institutionalized as “property rights,” cultural capital as “education qualifications,” and social capital as “durable networks.”

In this classification, the principles that structure each form of capital fit into three kinds of stipulation: convertibility, ownership, and norms. The first is stipulations about what governs convertibility from one form of capital to another. The second is stipulations about what constitutes ownership of capital. The third is about sociability or moral norms that confer credit and incur debt. The main point is that material, cultural, and social resources can become forms of capital that vary widely in their historically specific institutionalization of convertibility, property rights, and moral norms. They are present in all historical social formations that include state, market, and family, and serve to locate and delineate different forms of value as different spheres of value formation.

As a working definition that reflects the scope of exchange in the social world, we define capital as any object or idea that can be used to augment “value” through exchange and conversion. Put this way, the problem becomes how to reconcile apparently incommensurable values with the empirical realities of their variable forms of exchange and convertibility.³ The economy, in the narrow sense of market prices, is embedded in the larger social world of value formation in which class reproduction is part of an accumulation history of any chosen entity. We argue that families are the proximate agents of middle-class reproduction in Istanbul, and it is their particular accumulation histories that need to be explored in an effort to understand the education strategies of a new middle class. Class formation refers to those exchange practices most closely associated with the accumulation of multiple capitals, with special emphasis on cultural capital—particularly in a competitive field of social relations that were structured by the state through its imposition of a selective system of tests that forced new middle-class families to compete for places in the best middle schools.

During the 1990s, cultural industries, including both cultural products and cultural property, constituted one of the fastest-growing sectors in the global capitalist economy. The commoditization of culture represented the decoupling of cultural capital from its previous irreducible social and cultural principles, thereby increasing the probability of converting cultural values into capitalist market value.

Cultural capital appears in three forms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. In its embodied state, it appears in the form of enduring dispositions of the mind and body of a person. In its objectified state, it appears in the form of cultural goods such as books or paintings, which are the traces of the ideas, theories, interpretations, critiques, puzzles, or problematics that are recognized publicly and collectively as knowledge. In its institutionalized state, it appears as “a form of objectification which must be set apart because it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee” (Bourdieu 1997: 47). Bourdieu’s example is educational qualifications such as certification and credentialing, representations of cultural capital that are central to the subject of this book. The different capitals are not mutually exclusive. From the perspective of practices, any or all types may be implicated in the strategy options of families competing to win the SMSEs. These remain empirical problems to be subjected to scrutiny and interpretation in the last chapters of the book.

Information and knowledge gained through popular culture is a different form of cultural capital from that acquired through formal education. They are objectified in different ways. The accumulation of education credentials in all their forms create sharper distinctions than, say, the distinction conferred on taste. Language is a vehicle for symbolic interpretation of all the capitals but also can serve as a more defined class marker than other media. All the forms of cultural capital have their own principles governing their forms of value but also possess the potential of being converted into each other in the service of reproducing the new middle class. Certain foreign languages that are associated with specific schools in Istanbul, for example, are among the most important markers of elitism sought after by upper middle-class families and hold a near absolute value for them. They also can be converted into an economic value when their credentials are priced in the labor market. They acquire additional symbolic value when converted into social capital that adds to the prestige and privilege accorded them by society. Cultural capital is used to reinforce other principles of social inclusion and exclusion.

Accumulation is a process that is segmented into different institutionalized spheres, each with its own rules, such as social networks of families, an organized system of schools and education, and an organized capitalist labor market. These spheres can also be conceptualized as different fields of competitive relations in which families of similar class compete with each other in a struggle that reproduces the class as an entity. Our focus is on the competitive field of education, specifically the state-controlled national competition for places in the best middle schools in Turkey, many of which are in Istanbul.

Our purpose in using the concept of cultural capital to frame issues in middle-class formation by means of education is to explore embodied, objectified, and institutionalized practices similar to the ones that first motivated Bourdieu, namely, an analysis of the state’s hegemony over access to elite education and its relation to the reproduction of a new social class. Our aim will be to elucidate the relationships among cultural capital, its conversion into educational qualifications, and the social basis of class solidarity in Istanbul during this era of economic globalization.

In a capitalist society, economic capital is hegemonic. Economic logic dominates as a cultural ideology because the tendency is toward conversion of all forms of value into that of the capitalist market, symbolized by money, a commodity that stands for the value of all other commodities but which has no use value of its own. Bourdieu acknowledges the domination of economic capital in a capitalist society when he argues that social and cultural capitals function as disguised forms of economic capital. But he goes on to say that cultural and social capitals are “never entirely reducible” to economic capital (1997: 54). The tautological reason he gives is that social and cultural capitals have their own respective “efficacies.” We would add that they have their own socially bounded spheres of valuation, rules of exchange and communication, and institutionalization. It remains an empirical question whether these capitals perform the function of hiding economic capital, presumably because of the dangers associated with revealing class relations of inequality.

The social world is indeed a world of accumulated history. In the context of middle-class formation in Istanbul, to be or become an upper middle-class family requires not only material wealth but also social and cultural capital. Cultural capital in its objectified and embodied form of education and certification of individuals requires long-term collective planning and execution. It begins at birth with a plan for an education path that leads to a top university. From the standpoint of the multicapitalized family and its middle-class norms, employment follows education, marriage follows employment, and family follows all three in the life course. The sequence is enacted through many conversions of the forms of capital. The long march of family members, or embodied capital, from primary school to university is the sine qua non of a process of accumulation that is meant to ensure not only the reproduction of the person but also the reproduction of the family as upper middle class. Person, family, and class are mutually constituted through multiple capital conversions and the practices associated with them.

Notes

1. See Karl Polanyi’s class work, The Great Transformation (1944).

2. Bronwyn Davies and Peter Bansel (2007) explore how qualitative studies fit into the discourses and practices of neoliberalism in ways that enable us to understand state policies toward education and how they affect the making of a new middle class.

3. For issues related to spheres of social and economic exchange and how different forms of value are converted from one to another in different societies, see Sahlins 1965. For historical examples of the same issues, see Polanyi, Erensberg, and Pearson 1957.

2

THE NEOLIBERAL LANDSCAPE

A coup in 1980 marked the end of national developmentalism in Turkey and the beginning of the country's liberalization episode. The aim was to remove trade barriers in order to increase the rate of economic growth through an export-oriented strategy aimed at entry into global markets. By 1980, Turkey had a modern class structure built on the foundation of a combination of state-owned and state-guided private enterprises. There was a thriving national market for consumer goods produced by Turkish manufacturers and nursed by state promotion of a cultural ideology of consumption. The captains of industry had achieved the status of a national bourgeoisie, which, in turn, had come to rely upon the entrepreneurial, managerial, technical, and professional services of an urban, university-educated upper middle class. The core fragments of the middle class consisted of the salariat, which distinguished families of the middle class from a class of wage earners and those who held the means of pro...