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
