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 production. By 1980, the core middle-class family could expect a comfortable life, secured by state provisioning of health, education, and pensions.
In the decades prior to 1980, the families of middle and upper middle-class fragments seemed to share consumption habits anchored in twin aspirations of living “a comfortable life” and attaining higher education. Perceived differences were embedded in a shared structure of feeling that the lives of their children would be better than theirs. In other words, the idea of improving class by means of education was common to both fragments of the middle class, belying the reality of the privileges already enjoyed by the established upper middle class.
The characteristics of and distinctions within the middle class of the post-1980 era in Turkey might best be understood within the context of the forces of global neoliberalism shaping developing economies. Over the past several decades, in one country after another, the logic of the globalizing market exerted pressure on nation-states to make wide-ranging policy changes favorable to free trade and economic growth. The policy of solving national problems through growth in capital opened virtually every sector of the national economy to the forces of global capitalist markets. Direct investment by foreign corporations became, in the eyes of many analysts, the most efficient cure for all social, political,
