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