is argued, are the social outcome of the policies and practices of states that have embraced a cultural ideology of neoliberalism and an economy of neoliberal markets. The result is an increase in the complexity and growth of new markets that have generated capital growth of all kinds—material, social, and symbolic-cultural. In the history of accumulation, we live at a time when the current scope, size, and rate of accumulation has restructured the relation between state and citizen, one social class and another, and raised questions about access and equity. The education of new middle classes in many countries is viewed by neoliberal states as human capital that has a price in the market and contributes to growth in the new economy. 2
This book is an exploration of the question, how does the Turkish neoliberal state shape its economy and culture to form a new middle class, and how does that class reproduce itself? By default, we indirectly address the decline of an industrial core middle class. Ours is an ethnographic case study that focuses on Istanbul, Turkey's globalizing city.3 We argue that fields of competitive relations, primarily in education and property, but also lifestyle, are among the most important fields to interrogate.
In Turkey, the neoliberal state and market are institutionalized sources of agency that realize the (neoliberal) new middle class as an emerging global middle class. The Istanbul new middle class, we argue, is the expression and result of the neoliberal state's elevation of the private market over other institutions that were deemed important during the previous era of building a nation through the instruments of a welfare state economy based on state enterprises. We refer to the middle class of this era as the industrial core middle class. The neoliberal state, we argue, through the exercise of its hegemony over social spaces, class privileges, and access to quality education, creates the conditions for and is the instrument by which access and equity are regulated and controlled in this era of the accumulation of capital on a global scale. Within this framework of neoliberal state and market, we explore the agency of the family as the main institution of new middle class reproduction.
Urban Ethnography and the Ethnographic Object
How were changes in middle-class formation during the liberalization episode affected by globalizing processes, and how were these refracted in the changing cityscape of Istanbul? This question has embedded in it another prior question about how the middle class is constituted as an object of study. Before we had determined the exact subject, namely, education practices of families and households that are central to the question of how a middle class is reproduced and transformed, we had intuitions and made self-evident observations about what constituted a middle class. These were based on our knowledge from several sources, including the literature on social class and our many conversations with people in Istanbul about the salience of our concept of class for exploring the relationship between education and social hierarchies. To these sources were added intuitions and experience from living in the city as well as more formal and recorded observations and interviews.
In one sense, fieldwork in Istanbul began for one of us in childhood. Balkan, who was born and grew up in a middle-class household in Bakirköy, now the largest and most populous district of Istanbul, went to Kadiköy Maarif Koleji, renamed Kadiköy Anadolu Lisesi when the state created the first five Anadolu middle schools in the 1950s in an attempt to meet middle-class families demand for quality education.
During the academic year of 1991–92, Rutz taught at Bo
Methodology
Decisions about this book's problematic, methodology, and scope frame decisions such as what methods to deploy for gathering the necessary kinds of information from which to make interpretations and upon which to base conclusions. On the most general level, the book is about the multiple agencies of the neoliberal state, market, and family in making new middle classes in this era of globalization.
Ethnography is understood to include interpretations and conclusions based on extended periods of observation and interview. Ethnographers embrace both objectivities and subjectivities as information to be interpreted through their own methodology that nevertheless is recorded and transformed by our interpretation of their interpretations of themselves. Social and cultural knowledge remain incomplete, at times ambiguous, and open to scrutiny.
An apposite metaphor for our approach to methods is illustrated by Pablo Picasso's painting entitled The Studio (1927–28).4 To the viewer, the painting exists through the image of multiple planes on a two-dimensional canvas, each with different colors, hues, and textures, which together create meaning for the artist. His subject is the object of his gaze, but the observer also interprets what is painted on the canvas. In The Studio, the painter has placed himself in the painting, discernible as an outline of his figure, looking at his subject, who also is figured in outline in another plane on the canvas. The observer sees different planes signified by different colors in the space between the artist and his subject. The viewer discerns table-like, vase-like, framed picture-like planes that together suggest the context given in the title of the painting. The painting is a finished object of a project in the making in the artist's studio, without assuming that the viewers agree on the meaning.
Loic Wacquant captures an important social reality of middle-class formation when he states: “The middle class is necessarily an ill-defined entity. This does not reflect a lack of theoretical penetration but rather the character of reality. Theories of the middle class should constantly strive to capture this essential ambiguity of their object rather than to dispose of it” (1991: 57). This injunction needs to be kept in mind in any attempt to establish the reality of an Istanbul new middle class.
One way to conceptualize class ambiguity is to refer to a core middle-class fragment as less ambiguously constituted than either upper middle-class or lower middle-class fragments, which necessarily share more with capital and labor, respectively. The next chapter delves more deeply into the conceptualization of the Istanbul middle class. Here the concern is to give some empirical support to the realization of an Istanbul middle class by locating it in the cityscape.
One instrument we used to locate class in social space and to refine the social construction of class by district was a socioeconomic survey undertaken in the summer of 1993. The survey was named Global Integration of Turkey's Economy and Changing Household Consumption Trends. Throughout the book, it is referred to as the 1993 Survey (see Appendix A). The survey, conducted by eight university students, was administered to 550 households scattered across 104 districts of Istanbul. One of the aims of the 1993 Survey was to discover whether our presuppositions, based in part on university students' classroom perceptions, were supported by answers to standardized survey questions. The 1993 Survey was our main instrument for ferreting out patterned relationships among occupations, attained levels of education, and consumer lifestyles.
Interviews
In 1994 we narrowed our primary focus to the significance of the annual national Selective Middle Schools Examinations (SMSEs) as a window on the rise in importance of an Istanbul new middle class and its reproduction. Balkan's lifelong associations with friends and classmates, together with his wife's extended family (büyük aile) provided access to persons when we conducted twenty-six taped interviews with parents, teachers, school administrators, school entrepreneurs, and tutors during the spring of 1996 (see Appendix B).
Of thirty-six adults who agreed to be taped, twenty-six were parents, four were private school owners or administrators, three were
