University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Retailed lives: governing gender and work in globalizing Istanbul

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Retailed lives: governing gender and work in globalizing Istanbul

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RETAILED LIVES: GOVERNING

GENDER AND WORK IN GLOBALIZING ISTANBUL

by

Cenk Ozbay

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Cenk Ozbay

ii
DEDICATION

For my mother, Güzin Yazgan Ozbay

I am sure she sees

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Shopping malls, apparel stores, and retail workers have never been only an academic
interest or a bare research question for me. Long before even the first and most abstract
questions that eventually triggered this research came into my mind, I was a sales
assistant and cashier at an apparel store owned by a transnational corporation in an earlier
stage of my life. My own (indeed troubled and troubling) experiences at retail work, and
more significantly, my witnessing of other workers’ hardships, dilemmas, and struggles
that were saturated in my ‘sociological imagination’ initiated and shaped this study.
Therefore, I owe the first and the deepest thanks to the people who worked with me, who
were my managers, who told me their stories, who had fights with me, who had gossip
with me, who invited me to their social meetings and who accept me as a fellow worker
and as a friend. In the text, I changed their names due to the reasons of research
anonymity but their lives and their most welcoming attitude towards me will always stay
with me in my heart.

This project was funded by a grant provided by the Middle East Research Competition
(MERC). I thank them for their generosity and cooperation. I have also received small
financial supports from the Sociology Department as well as from the College of Arts,
Letters and Sciences at the University of Southern California.

iv
I am deeply grateful to my advisor Mike Messner. He has been very inspiring and
influential in how I designated my research as well as in how I came to deem myself as a
sociologist. I have benefited tremendously from his encouraging, stimulating, and
liberating approaches. I would like to thank my committee members Macarena Gomez-
Barris and Nancy Lutkehaus who were extremely reassuring and understanding towards
me throughout the courses of research and writing. It has always been a great honor and
pleasure for me to feel their support and criticism.

Gul Ozyegin has played a crucial role in my education and in my ‘self’-formation(s)
throughout the last decade. Her senses of humor, respect, friendship, and commitment
have intensely affected my way of seeing others and myself.

The Department of Sociology at USC has provided great collegiality and the most
inspirational academic environment during my graduate studies. I must thank Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Tim Biblarz, Nina Eliasoph, Ed Ransford, Lynne Casper, Sharon
Hays, Stachelle Overland, Lisa Rayburn, Melissa Hernandez, Amber Thomas, James
Thing, Edson Rodriguez Cruz, Kristen Barber, Huong Ninh, Suzel Bozada-Deas, James
McKeever and every other member of this department who shared a cup of coffee, a
sandwich, or an idea with me.

I was lucky enough to share my topsy-turvy life in Los Angeles with Joy Lam, Glenda
Flores, and Evren Savci. They all have indispensable imprints in this research as well as
v
in my life. Engin Volkan was also an endless source of exuberance and camaraderie in
LA and now we sustain this in Istanbul. I owe their companionship a lot.

In Istanbul, I have discussed this project with my former professors, colleagues and
friends Nukhet Sirman, Ferhunde Ozbay, Ayfer Bartu Candan, Yesim Yasin, Aysecan
Terzioglu, Demet Lukuslu, Sevgin Akis Roney, Banu Yilmaz, Armagan Ozturk, Welat
Ay, and my students at Bogazici University, Yeditepe University, and Istanbul Technical
University. I am deeply indebted to them all.

My enduring friendships with Muge Leyla Yildiz, Kerem Bozok, and Nigar Yavuz made
the processes of research and writing possible and enjoyable at numerous instances.

My family consists of Guzin Ozbay Yazgan, Alper Tumbal, Nur Ozbay, Levent Ozbay,
and Ali Okay. Of course, without their unending fondness and unfailing support I could
not survive this. I am afraid I cannot express my unlimited love and gratefulness to them
with words.

vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication............................................................................................................. ii

Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. iii

List of Tables ..................................................................................................... viii

List of Figures...................................................................................................... ix

Abstract..................................................................................................................x

Chapter 1. Introduction...........................................................................................1
Finding a Retail Job..................................................................................13
Towards A Sociology of Work at Shopping Malls ....................................24
Retail Workers in Istanbul: Navigating Between Two Classes ..................28
A Note on Research Methodology ............................................................35
Outline of the Dissertation ........................................................................42

Chapter 2. The Making of Neoliberal Turkey .......................................................45
The Turkish Experiment of Neoliberalization ...........................................47
Istanbul: Make-Believing a Global City....................................................67
Shopping Malls: Spaces of a Non-Western Modernity ..............................80

Chapter 3. The Store / The Workplace................................................................100
“It is Different Here, Welcome to the Kids’ Store”: Getting a Job and the
Two Workplaces.....................................................................................102
“Each Sale Like a Duel”: The Organization of the Workplace.................127
“Nobody’s Born to Become a Salesclerk”: Managers, Workers, and
Customers...............................................................................................184

Chapter 4. Governing Workers...........................................................................226
Instances from a ‘Full’ Day.....................................................................226
What is Governmentality? ......................................................................232
Creating a ‘Serious Profession’ from ‘Just a Trivial Job’.........................241
Strategies of Control and Intervention through Bodies and Labor............272
Emotional Government...........................................................................285

vii
Chapter 5. Retail Workers’ Subjectivities ...........................................................297
The Worker-Subject: Production of Neoliberal Subjectivity at Work ......308
Resistance and ‘Life’ ..............................................................................335
Wannabe White Turks: The Disposition of Modernity and Class ............361

Chapter 6. Gender and Sexuality at Retail Work.................................................376
Governing Gender and Work ..................................................................378
Organizing Gender / Gendering Organization .........................................387
Gender Remakes Class, and Vice Versa..................................................420
Masculinity and Retail Work ..................................................................434
A Queer Sector? .....................................................................................469

Chapter 7. Epilogue............................................................................................490

Bibliography ......................................................................................................514

Appendix. Informants.........................................................................................536

viii
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Work Schedule 1 ..................................................................................119

Table 2: Work Schedule 2 ..................................................................................121

Table 3: Courses.................................................................................................247

Table 4: Attributes of a Retail Worker................................................................269

Table 5: Gender ratios of employees within stores..............................................381

ix
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Offer Letter ...........................................................................................23

Figure 2: Hisarbank advertisement .......................................................................58

Figure 3: Privatization advertisement ...................................................................60

Figure 4: Pan Am advertisement...........................................................................63

Figure 5: Map of Istanbul .....................................................................................69

Figure 6: Levent Business District........................................................................75

Figure 7: Printemps advertisement........................................................................82

Figure 8: Stradivarius flyer.................................................................................316

Figure 9: Dudullu Postasi ...................................................................................504

Figure 10: Detail from Dudullu Postasi ..............................................................506

Figure 11: The Demonstration against deunionization 1 .....................................508

Figure 12: The Demonstration against deunionization 2 .....................................508

x
ABSTRACT

This study examines the conditions and possibility of the emergence of a new working
class, or a novel sort of a lower-middle class, alongside other parallel social inequalities
in the city of Istanbul. Through participant observation in retail stores and conducting
interviews I explore the interplay of individuals (retail workers, store managers and other
professional employees of corporations, and customers from different segments of
society), transnational capital, and the State in the rapidly neoliberalizing Turkey. I show
that the logic behind the creation of “the army of retail workers” can be grasped through
the concept of governmentality in which certain populations, problems, tactics, and
technologies have been developed in order to present modernity and globality to a
particular group of the urbanites. I contend that when the glitzy apparel store, or the
shopping mall, is framed as a workplace instead of a non-place of consumption and
pleasure, the silence of the army of the retail workers can be broken and the hidden class
relations is rendered visible. I demonstrate how a significant aspect of this phenomenon is
about constituting subjectivities of workers –i.e. the specific desires, aims, aspirations,
fears, and channels of resistance, to push them take up modern, decent, successful, self-
improving subject positions and identities. I maintain that gender and sexual relations
play a foundational role in the formation of this new class. While a different, alternative
sort of masculinity is produced and consolidated in the shopping mall and queerness
becomes mostly tolerable and acceptable in apparel stores, new types of femininity are
also designated and imposed. Retail workers are seemingly freer than their peers to pick
xi
up their own gender and sexual identities and construct who they are in terms of gender
and sexual relations. Here, I specifically focus on the case of Istanbul to explicate how
the transpositional processes of neoliberalization and globalization create new gaps,
mechanisms, mentalities, populations, and subjectivities, and how they actually affect and
reshape ordinary people’s lives in the Global South.

1
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

She folds in the store, as if she wears them,
She also daydreams, like all other people.
She desires a nice home and a rich husband,
But she never has them, the store girl weeps.
1

I am interested in shopping malls, retail stores, and workers in apparel stores, for three
interrelated reasons. The first reason is personal and affective. I worked as a cashier and
sales assistant at a Citron
2
store between 2004 and 2005 when I was writing my master’s
thesis. It was my first formal work experience in an official workplace. While I was
working there, to my surprise, I started to connect with other workers and managers in
not only professional matters but also in intimate ways. I befriended them, the unnamed
characters of the flourishing retail industry, listened to their stories, witnessed their
predicaments, pondered over how they lived, and learnt how they felt across public and
private spaces. Their complicated everyday struggles with their oppressive families,

1
“Mağazada kat yapar, sanki kendi giyer gibi,
Yaparken de hayal kurar, bütün insanlar gibi.
Bir evi olsun ister, bir de zengin kocası,
Ama bu hiç olamaz, ağlar mağaza kızı...”
This is an adaptation from the very popular Turkish pop song, Fabrika Kızı (The Factory
Girl), recorded by Alpay in 1970, which recounts the difficulties that young working
class women encounter in their everyday lives. It is a well-known, or well-remembered,
song among retail workers and I heard different adaptations of its lyrics to the shopping
malls and stores. My coworkers frequently called each other as factory girl with reference
to this song and they make ironic jokes such as “the only thing absent in our lives is the
factory siren to call us start laboring in the morning.”

2
A pseudonym. I will not use the real names of people and stores that I worked at in this
dissertation to protect my informants’ privacy. The names of shopping malls and the
companies that I did not work at are real.
2
despotic managers, temperamental customers, belittling friends, and more importantly,
the structural disadvantages they dealt with (such as state neglect, cultural
marginalization, poverty, the multilayered power of transnational capital and dynamics of
the new economy, which they never fully comprehend, and finally, a rapidly changing
cultural world of which they could not make any sense) made me aware of how lucky and
privileged I was, as a graduate student in my middle-class life so far. My coworkers’
unfailing wit, creative solutions, shifting priorities, smart alliances, and the incredibly
high ability to adapt on the one hand; the meticulousness, indefatigability and diligence
of the governance over the incessant flows of bodies, goods, services, and emotions
exercised by the management on the other, affected me so deeply that I thought what I
saw –or, better, experienced- might be worth telling other people, whether through the
existing genres of social sciences or not. Therefore, I started to keep a diary, in which I
wrote about the significant actors in the store and the controversial occasions that took
place without exactly knowing my purpose. Retail workers became my friends as well as
coworkers and I felt a deep responsibility or an urge, to let more people (the fragments of
the emerging neoliberal public in Turkey) know who my coworkers really were and what
was they underwent. Saying that, I have never had an Enlightenment-spirited aim to
‘save’ them from the oppression of transnational capital or improve the immediate
workplace conditions in which they cope despite my clear political affinity with them as
members of an enduring, new, urban working class. I was emotionally linked to them
through the labor process and charged myself to reflect upon their (and indeed my own)
work experiences in shopping malls.
3

There were also practical reasons. In fall 2006, the second year of my PhD studies at the
University of Southern California, I needed a topic for my qualitative research methods
class and I needed it immediately. While I was desperately looking for a solution, I
remembered my diaries from my shopping mall days and started to think about making a
small research about retail workers in Istanbul for my class project. In the winter break, I
came back to Istanbul, reached 9 of my former coworkers and conducted interviews with
them. These interviews later formed a crucial preliminary basis for this project. During
the spring semester of the same academic year, I was writing papers for my project and
commenced to explicate the sociological and political reasons of my concern with the
phenomenon of shopping malls in Istanbul. The number of shopping malls, the amount of
available retail spaces within them (the gross leasable area), and the urban economy they
created or contributed to were exponentially increasing every year. The urbanites and the
suburbanites in Istanbul, the mass media, and the local and national politicians seemed
well informed and elated about this ubiquitous economic and socio-spatial development.
Shopping malls, as they became newer, bigger, ritzier turned out to be a focus of popular
attention via the apparel brands, type of restaurants, and number of movie theatres they
house; their architectural achievements; the feeling, ‘aura,’ and pleasure they give to the
wanderers; and the celebrities who stroll and shop in the corridors and whose images are
captured by paparazzis. In the discourses about shopping malls, nobody was talking about
the workers who have jobs in these gigantic consumption palaces and no single discourse
addressed ‘shopping malls as workplaces’ as if no one in town toils in these modish non-
4
places of leisure. Retail workers and the multifarious forms of labor they performed were
always taken for granted and systematically rendered invisible, imperceptible, and
unheard. Thus, one of my most basic motivations for this research was to present a
glimpse of these consistently unrecognized and uncategorized people’s lives and to make
the multiple quandaries they come across more visible.

The last concern of mine about the retail workers in Istanbul was shaped through my
engagement with the growing social scientific literature on how different peoples, diverse
groups, various segments of societies perceive, imagine, experience, mediate, and
response to the process of globalization, the ‘new’ neoliberal economy, and the ‘actually
existing neoliberalisms’ (Gledhill 2007) around the world. For example, both Denise
Brennan (2004) and Steven Gregory (2007) explore the dynamics of globalization, the
development of transnational tourism, social effects of neoliberalism and the participation
to sex work through taking a close look into real people’s life struggles in the Dominican
Republic. While Brennan focuses on the multiple motivations and ways of imagining of
rural Dominican women, who migrate the city of Sasua to enter the global ‘sexscape’ (a
la Appadurai 1996), and the process in which they turn themselves out “transnational
lovers” (and eventually spouses of foreign men) in order to escape local poverty; Gregory
examines how the lives of individuals and communities in the informal economy were
juxtaposed with the transnational tourism such as male motoconchos, vendors, and
female sex workers were affected by the experiments of globalization in the region of
Boca Chica. Both writers articulate that through the encounter between peoples, capital,
5
policies, images, subjectivities, and ideas about what a ‘good life’ should consist of, of
the wealthier and more powerful Western-Northern nations and the impoverished and
frail Eastern-Southern nations, novel forms of liminality, disappointment, resistance,
exasperation, and discontent are produced and percolated. Different portions of the
globalizing societies across the world come to interpret and react the complex
globalization process and its multifarious manifestations rather differently; while
globalization—far from being a linear, homogenizing and pacifying force- destabilizes,
rearranges, and re-constellates existing symbolic hierarchies, class(ed) differentiations,
and economies of difference based on sex, gender, race, ethnicity, the body, and other
components of social inequality. In this sense, my informants’ and coworkers’
experiences of globalization and neoliberalization –the specific hopes and desires they
foster, the available means they find, the service-sector jobs they dispassionately get, the
‘ideal lives’ they imagine, and the deep disappointment and melancholy they eventually
engender- significantly resemble to the Dominicans’ relations with the simultaneously
local and transnational, social and political, symbolic and spatial forces of the global(-
izing) culture and economy.

Globalization is the most influential cultural discourse of our times,
3
which effectively
reshuffles and re-coordinates both the interrelated social, political, cultural, and economic
phenomena, the macro structure of the world we live in, and the personal, subjective,

3
Also, it becomes “the cliché of our times: the big idea which encompasses everything
from global financial markets to the Internet but which delivers little substantive insight
into the contemporary human condition” (Held et al. 1999: 1).
6
relational, affective processes in which we identify ourselves, think critically about us
and others, map intricate forms of belonging, reconstruct memories, and relocate our
bodies in the multifaceted social encounters through our everyday lives. As an outcome
of globalization more and more people actually ‘move’ around the planet. They migrate
for better job opportunities or to escape from political violence; they travel for revisiting
their home countries or enjoying every single corner of the earth embellished by distinct
and ‘authentic’ cultures; they connect with each other via the Internet or mobile phones
that utilize satellite technology; they do business with the aid of the advancements in
transportation technologies and the globally permeable banking and finance systems.
Virtually everything, tangible or immaterial (bodies, capital, ideas, images, values, and
goods) circulates freely around the world, which is incrementally compressed in terms of
time and space (Harvey 1989). Interlacement, interdependency, interpenetration,
entanglement, and the sense of a reciprocal awareness about others’ existence around the
world, the idea of ‘globality’ (Featherstone 2006), are always highlighted in discourses of
cultural globalization as, for example, Inda and Ronaldo (2008: 4-12) accentuate
“[globalization] refers to the intensification of global interconnectedness, suggesting a
world full of movement and mixture, contact and linkages, and persistent cultural
interaction and exchange. […] A world in motion, a shrinking world.”
4

4
Globalization is also framed in terms of consumption patterns, ‘the global
consumerism’ as the prevailing ideology of our times, in social sciences. For a classical
account of consumerism as the novel paradigm of social differentiation, see Baudrillard
1998[1970]; for an articulation of globalization and postmodernism to consumerism, see
Featherstone 2007. While scholars insistently defined globalization as yet another form of
cultural imperialism (for example, Tomlinson 1991 and Ritzer 2002) which ultimately
engenders cultural loss of authenticity and homogenization of culture in most parts of the
7

On the other hand, cultural discourses of globalization that proselytize the sense of a
‘global identity’ within a coherent and unified ‘global society,’ hide growing social
inequality in the formerly ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world --or, in other words,
the formerly colonized and the colonizer-- as well as the increasing social exclusion,
marginalization, abjection, disintegration, resistance, countermovement, and ‘friction’
5
.
As globalization speeded up the transfers around the world and created the sense of being
out of spatial and temporal constraints (‘homogeneity at large’) it also proliferated the
feeling of alienation, disillusionment, and dis-belonging. It might be true that the world is
now smaller and more shrunken without borders, regulations, limitations, and tariffs; yet,

world, i.e. Americanization and deterritorialization; another view highlights agency,
interpretation, resistance, hybridity and re-territorialization of cultural meaning within
specific contexts. Therefore, global values, hierarchies of taste, symbolic economies, and
consumer goods are imagined diversely and incorporated in time and space by various
actors in unpredictable and often contradictory ways. See, for example, Amin and Thrift
2004; Du Gay and Pryke 2002; Sasssen 2007; and Miller 1995. Although it explores the
relations that are primarily located in shopping malls, this research does not address
consumption patterns, burgeoning consumerism in Turkey, the meaning of shopping in
Istanbul, or how these have changed through the course of globalization. In other words, I
do not focus on the action of shopping but on relations that surround and make shopping
possible. As Falk and Campbell (1997: 3) note, “the change in question is not only about
the increasing ‘dominance’ of shopping sites and practices but also about the
restructuring of the relationships between public and private, individual and social, and
the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’.”

5
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes (2005: 4-5), “As a metaphorical image, friction reminds
us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture
and power. […] At this confluence, universals and particulars come together to create the
forms of capitalism with which we live. There is no point in studying fully discrete
‘capitalisms’: Capitalism only spreads as producers, distributors, and consumers strive to
universalize categories of capital, money and commodity fetishism. Such strivings make
possible globe-crossing capital and commodity chains. Yet, these chains are made up of
uneven and awkward links. The cultural specificity of capitalist forms arises from the
necessity of bringing capitalist universals into action through worldly encounters.”
8
it is also obvious for observers that now more people are constantly reminded that they
are transfixed, their access to global opportunities are denied, and they are deemed as
useless and improper (‘disposable’) for the workings of global capital. In other words,
“the very processes that produce movement and linkages also promote immobility,
exclusion, and disconnection” (Inda and Ronaldo 2008: 6).
6
As Brennan (2004) and
Gregory (2007) demonstrate for poor Dominicans, at the bottom line, or though the
margins, of globalizing cultures disappointment, hopelessness, despondency, and
disempowerment is deeply felt, harshly experienced, and collectively shared by people
who work for (or, serve) global forces and receive nothing as in exchange for their
commitment.

While some writers have argued that globalization represents the decline in the power of
the nation state, if not the ultimate end of it, it is now more broadly argued that the
process of globalization transforms and reorders the State mechanisms and puts them into
a more flexible web of governance between international political, military and economic
institutions (such as the IMF, NATO, and the World Bank), transnational non-
governmental (civil) organizations (including networks of health, education, and charity),
global capital, and the persisting nation states (Held et al. 1999; Sassen 2007; Hardt and
Negri 2000). Increasingly, the coalition between different forms of national and
transnational power exercises authority over citizens’ bodies and souls and reshapes the

6
See, for example, Bergeron (2001) and Gibson-Graham (2006) for an account of
resistant (feminist) subjectivity to the conventional narratives of globalization especially
through the discourses of political economy.

9
world they live in.
7
Aihwa Ong (2006) documents how definitions of citizenship and the
state territoriality radically changed under the ‘postdevelopmental government’ that
Southeast Asian states undertake in order to be able to compete in an increasingly
rampant global capitalism. She elucidates that the national economy within political
borders is not the conceptual or practical priority for the states in the region. Instead, the
legal system, policy-making, state bureaucracy, and armed forces designate and treat
different regions (and populations who live and work there) in unequal, specialized ways.
Ong calls these ‘the zones of graduated sovereignty’ in which citizens are regarded and
classified based on their potential contributions to the transnational capital by their
qualifications, productivity, or docility. For his part, Max Kirsch (1998) narrates the story
of Pittsburgh’s economic restructuring, deindustrialization and the rise of service sector
jobs in the age of globalization: Lower wages and the diminishing purchasing power,
boosted social inequality, more part-time and seasonal jobs, high unemployment, and
weaker hopes and mechanisms for upward social mobility. These are more or less the
global effects of economic restructuring programs, or reforms, that researchers encounter
in diverse geographies around the world. The resemblance is uncanny: As I contend in
this dissertation, these are also the contours of the picture my informants in Turkey have

7
For example, among many others, see Jaffee (2007) for the impact of the concept of
‘fair trade’ both as a marketing strategy and a social movement amongst coffee producers
in Mexico; Riain (2000) for dynamics of global informational sector and the transnational
social spheres in Irish software developers; Miller (1997) for how global and local
economic forces are intertwined in ‘global-local’ as well as ‘local-global’ companies in
the national consumer market of Trinidad; and Franklin (2005) for the assemblages of
local situations and specific regulations with global, timeless, and placeless needs and
possibilities in stem cell research in England.
10
to face through their everyday struggles while they strive to found their adult lives as
decent, proper citizens.

Scholars from a wide array of social disciplines have elucidated that gender relations,
sexual identities, and emotional / erotic bonds as well as systems of sexed and gendered
oppression and prejudice (such as sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, heteronormativity,
heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia) are also subject to profound change in
relation to the multiple processes of globalization
8
. For example, Lisa Rofel (2007)
registers the term ‘transcultural gay identities’ instead of the concept ‘global gay’ in order
to create a discursive space to understand and analyze the cultural context of emerging
gay identities in the neoliberalizing China, “neither a wholly global culture nor simply a
radical difference from the West. Rather, Chinese gay identities materialize in the
articulation of transcultural practices with intense desires for cultural belonging, or
cultural citizenship, in China” (2007: 89). She delineates the classed notions of modernity
and the possibility of ‘proper identities’ (whether gay or not) in the non-Western regions
and searches for the desire, the very roots of neoliberal subjectivity, for being articulated
to global culture, belonging to the world. In other words, Rofel’s concentration on the
existence of modern Chinese gays is not limited to showing only how really global they
are but also how they mediate global cultural flows in order to find a place for themselves

8
See, for example, Altman 2001; Connell 2002; Brennan 2004; Puar 2007; Farrer 2002;
Binnie 2004; Manalansan IV 2003; Enloe 2004; Griffin-Cohen and Brodie 2009; Pease
and Pringle 2001; Plummer 2003; among countless others.
11
in the existing local pattern of class and modernity through globalization (also, Povinelli
and Chauncey 1999).

Raewyn Connell (1998; 2005a; 2005b; Connell and Wood 2005) developed a series of
concepts, such as ‘the world gender order,’ ‘global gender order,’ ‘global masculinities,’
and ‘the transnational business masculinity,’ for exploring the rapidly changing character
and linkages of the gender order in the world vis-à-vis economic and cultural
globalization. Most basically, she argues, “Global history and contemporary globalization
must be part of our understanding of masculinities. Locally situated lives are (and were)
powerfully influenced by geopolitical struggles, Western imperial expansion and colonial
empires, global markets, multinational corporations, labor migration, and transnational
media” (2005a: 72). While focusing on the connections between local and globalized (or,
ubiquitous) forms of masculinity, Connell does not problematize the claim of ‘global
society,’ which was preceded by the age of colonialism.
9
She also suggests to look closer
to the gendered and gendering practices within multinational companies and especially
the white-heterosexual-masculine elite class (CEOs, top managers, etc.) within these
structures in order to better grasp the characteristics of the rising ‘transnational
masculinity,’ hegemonic forms of being and doing masculinity in the globalizing world.

9
See, for example, Inda and Rosaldo (2008) for a counter argument to the unified,
coherent, homogenous global society. Many writers meticulously documented the
situated specificities of colonization processes in different geographies, by different
colonizing powers, and in different time periods. Therefore, it requires a subtler
discussion to claim that colonization, as a whole, “the predecessor of globalization,” had
a single, ‘global,’ gender and sexual order. See, for example, Sinha 1995; Aldrich 2002;
Stoler 2006; Ouzgane 2006; Trexler 1999 and Bleys 1995 among others.
12

This research aims to expand Connell’s significant thesis in two ways. First, I would
argue that the intertwined processes of cultural globalization and economic-politic
neoliberalization do not produce a set of unified social consequences that are
appropriated equally by all citizens in any given society. Instead, while a new (‘global’ to
a certain extent) hegemonic masculinity is molded and promoted in cultural channels,
alternative and dissident forms of manliness also appear and subjects may incorporate
these forms of masculinity instead of developing uncritical complicity to the compelling,
hegemonic, culturally exalted forms. In this dissertation, I would contend that the
transnational capital, in the case of shopping malls in Istanbul, engenders a new form of
the idealized masculinity that focuses both on the male body and the relations between
men and women (also between heterosexual and gay men). Some of my informants and
coworkers enact forms of resistance against this sort of manliness and try to find exodus
from this (globally) gendered and gendering –as well as sexualized and sexualizing,
order.

Secondly, I would propose to examine not the superordinates –managers and the
businessmen, ‘the surfers’ of neoliberalism, who fly from one international airport to
another in business class and spend most of their times in five-star hotels far from home-
10
but I would rather focus on the regular, normal, ordinary workers who are subordinated

10
Examining the more powerful, ‘Studying up,’ is a significant and, methodologically,
more demanding task. See for example, Nader 1972 and Nugent and Shore 2002.
Messner (2007) elucidates that social studies of masculinity can be seen as an example of
13
within a globalizing economy, ‘the servers of neoliberalism,’ to comprehend how the
gender and sexual transformations are framed, experienced, embraced, and resisted at the
grassroots. Connell’s previous work on hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987; 1995;
2001) informs my comprehension of multiple masculinities that a specific model of
manhood, which is elevated in culture and masculine subjects are interpellated to take up
such a form of manliness, can only become hegemonic in a society through the
participation, approval and acceptance of masses, men of middle and popular classes. I
would argue that scrutinizing gender practices of the nondescript men in the neoliberal
order, whether these could be complicit or dissident, juxtaposed to the upper classes that
Connell’s research focuses on will make us see the big picture of gender transformation
in clearer terms.

With these issues and questions in my mind, I started to look for a job in shopping malls
in Istanbul in the late summer of 2008.

Finding a Retail Job

In order to find a job as a sales assistant at a relevant store location, I went to 8 shopping
malls
11
and checked shop windows if there were any signs for ‘we are looking for sales

‘studying up,’ exploring the superordinate, alongside other more recent fields of
whiteness and heterosexuality.

11
After visiting all shopping malls in the center districts of the metropolitan Istanbul, I
went to these 8 shopping malls closest to where I was living (Akmerkez, Metrocity,
14
assistants’ or ‘would you want to be a part of our team’. In some of these shopping malls
(including Kanyon, where I got my first job) there was not a single sign at the store
windows for available positions. I was frustrated and discouraged by the fact that most of
the stores that I wanted to work were not actually looking for new workers. However, I
could realize the very conditions when I looked at empty corridors of the shopping malls
and very few customers in the stores, ‘just looking’ and not buying anything. Indeed, the
retail sector had been growing quickly, just like the Turkish economy in general since
2001, but the late summer and early fall of 2008 was a sudden slowdown in relation to
the economic crisis in the U.S. and the rest of the world. This discouraging context was
crystallized on a sales assistant’s face in a Lacoste store when I asked her how I could
apply for a job. Before saying “sorry, but we are not looking for workers right now,” she
looked at me really hopelessly and pityingly as if I was naively unaware of the burning
situation. Her gesture implied to me that it was not the best time to look for a job.
Without a word, her face seemed to asking as if I was really looking for a job in the
middle of an economic crisis. That was exactly what I was doing. However, I could not
help myself thinking what I would do if I were somebody else who was really in need of
a job when the economic stagnation haunts.

I was deeply demoralized because of the economic downturn; but I continued to apply for
positions whenever and wherever I could. Although I kept telling myself that there was

Kanyon, Istinye Park, City’s, Cevahir, Profilo and Astoria) for a second time to
understand the possibility of finding a job at a relatively larger store for research
purposes.
15
nothing to be ashamed of, this was a job that I did before, it was quite ordinary for people
to enter the stores and ask for application forms; I still had a difficult time while I was
trying to apply jobs. Whenever I entered a store to talk to a cashier I became nervous and
started to sweat, I could not look directly into her eyes and could not prevent my voice
from trembling. Eventually, I was able to control myself a little bit by constant self-
inculcation. I reiterated the fact that it was quite normal to look for a job at the stores and
I endeavored to prepare myself for possible encounters with cashiers and managers about
my applications without having a sweating face and trembling voice.

Then, the age problem surfaced. Some of the stores that were actually looking for
workers at that moment rejected me from having application forms since I was already 28
years old. I was told at different stores that they had maximum age limits of 24, 25 or 26
for starters. Most of other companies had the age limit of 28 that I could apply, however
the managers in these stores also warned me not be hopeful since a 20 years old is always
more desirable than a 28 years old. It was not a secret that there are thousands of 20-year-
olds who were desperately looking for a job on the streets of Istanbul. Despite my
diffidence, the age factor, and the negative impact of the economic crisis, I could be able
to apply for positions at seven stores at the end of four days I spent in these shopping
malls.
12

12
These stores were Marks & Spencer, Benetton, River Island, Nike, Top Shop, Polo
Garage, Mango and Koton. Polo Garage and Koton were Turkish companies (owned and
managed by Turks). All other ones were managed in Turkey by their Turkish associates
except Mango. Only Mango, like the other major Spanish retail company, the Inditex
Group, has its own office in Turkey. Aside from the companies who rejected me because
16

I made a plan. I knew that with my age and educational degrees the only way to be hired
as a sales assistant was to act as if I was planning to stay in the retail sector and build a
career for the future, for example, working in human resources departments. Only such a
professional ambition may include the cultural justifications such as ‘starting from the
bottom’ (en alttan başlamak) and ‘doing all sorts of work’ (her işi yapmak) in order to
know the business better when I would become a professional worker in the retail sector.
I knew that otherwise people, who made interviews with me (managers or human
resources specialists), would not recommend me to be hired as a sales assistant. I would
be too overqualified for such a deskilled starter position.

A week later my phone rang and a woman asked me if I was still looking for a job. I said
yes and then she asked me if I was interested in working at a Dorothy Perkins store. It
was not one of the brands I had applied but I knew that companies’ human resources
departments transfer applications from one brand to another when there is a need. I said
yes again and she gave me an appointment for the following day in the Metrocity
shopping mall. I went to Metrocity early, looked at the store windows to see if there was
any other place looking for workers, I checked myself at the mirror in the restroom, put
on some perfume, tried to relax, and went to the store. The cashier told me to wait for the

of my age and those which did not search for new workers at that time, I did not apply to
the Inditex stores (Zara, Zara Home, Bershka, Stradivarious, Oysho, Pull & Bear,
Massimo Dutti) since I worked for them before and I knew that they would not hire the
same people for a second time. I also did not apply smaller stores and boutiques in which
less than five people work.
17
manager since she was doing another interview. I was looking at the garments when she
came in. She invited me to Starbucks to talk. She was at the same height with me, around
the same age, no make-up except lipsticks, wearing pale, unpretentious clothes. She was
really kind towards me and she was sincerely smiling before and during our conversation.
Or, that was the way I interpreted her behavior. She asked me everything I already wrote
on my CV that she was holding in her hands. She seemed a little intrigued about my
application and me for not being a typical candidate. After listening to me carefully and
taking some notes, she said, “we think you are not suitable for a sales assistantship at
Dorothy Perkins or other Al-Shaya Group stores. But, we consider that you would be
perfect as a manager or a second manager at a store, including one of the Starbucks.” I
thanked her and explained that I wanted a career in the retail sector for the future and for
that purpose I needed to learn everything from the possible lowest rank. She seemed
understanding and concerned, yet obviously this was not what was in her mind. She
asked me if I was interested in a position at the head office regarding my degrees and my
foreign language abilities. I declined that offer too and thanked her. She finally asked me
what was the minimum wage that I would demand for work for a sales assistantship
position. I did not expect this question and I hesitated. I was finally be able to tell her that
it was more important for me to have work experience at a professionalized retail group
and a great company like theirs than how much I would earn. Her face showed me that
she did not like this answer at all. She thanked to me and promised to call me if she
would ever have a sales assistantship position suitable with my qualities. She never called
me again.
18

A couple of days passed and I started to think that maybe I should have developed
another research strategy than finding a sales assistantship job during the downturn in the
economy. Then, I received another call, this time from the Xano Retail Group Human
Resources Office. I thought it was about my Marks & Spencer application but the woman
on the phone told me they were not hiring at Marks & Spencer at that instant; however,
there were available positions at another brand of the same group, ZIP Turkey, and asked
me if I was interested in working for them. She invited me to join a public interview at
the Marks & Spencer store in the Metrocity shopping mall.

The turnout for the public interview was very low. They said they invited 30 applicants
and there were only six people besides me. We were in one of the spacious but
uncomfortable rooms behind the walls of the selling floor. There were people from the
human resources, a woman of early 30s and a man of late 20s. The other six people (four
men, two women) were obviously younger than me. I wrote in my notebook that my
clothes (blue jeans, tennis shoes, t-shirt, and a black designer jacket) seemed too middle
class to me against their more informal and working class attitudes. I regretted that I did
not wear more casual, more ‘typical’ clothes of sales assistants. Yet, I understood later
that this difference (as well as other differences I was supposed to have) helped me stood
out and grasp their attention.

19
We watched an instructive video about how Marks & Spencer came to Turkey, how it
grew and became one of the most significant retail outlets in ten years, and the reasons
behind why Marks and Spencer became so successful. It was underlined in the movie that
the customer satisfaction, teamwork, and honesty towards ourselves, to the store and to
the customers were crucial principles of this success story. After the movie, the human
resources expert repeated all the principles with a PowerPoint presentation. Then, he
asked if we had any questions. I asked him what is the minimum and maximum working
hours for part time workers in their company since the movie told us that part time
workers work 30 hours per week on average. He said 20 hours is minimum for part time
workers, and there were no fixed maximum hours because it depends on the store’s
necessities as well as workers’ availability. After asking if there was anybody who
disagreed with what they already told us about the company and did not want to stay any
longer (nobody left) they put us though a psychological test. The test consisted of two
parts. The first part had 36 questions including very basic arithmetic calculations and
questions to evaluate visual perception and precision. The second part was named as ‘the
personality test’ and it had 75 questions. The same topics and issues were rephrased
many times through the questions. One of the recurring themes can be summarized as
‘tolerance and patience for diversity.’ In this group of questions, expressions such as
“homosexuals are as normal as non-homosexuals,” “I think political prisoners are
mistreated,” and “I would not disturbed if a person from a different race, religion,
nationality, or political ideology than mine work or live near me” were listed and tested
in multiple times. We would answer these questions from 5 options: Strongly disagree,
20
disagree, have no idea, agree, and strongly agree. There are other questions, which were
trying to observe qualities that a sales assistant should or should not have: tidiness-
untidiness, punctuality-tardiness, competitiveness-collaboration, sociability-
unfriendliness, aggressiveness-meekness, being easily annoyed and stressed or being
relaxed and cool, making fast decision or taking time to think, being meticulous or
prioritizing the big picture, etc. The answers were too obvious for me. Of course a retail
worker should have no problems with diversity among customers and coworkers, she
should be well kept, nonchalant, punctual, and hardworking! During the test and when I
was leaving I did not forget to smile to the human resources people who were incessantly
observing us.

A week later I received an invitation for an interview. The woman from the public
interview at the Marks & Spencer told me that I passed the psychological test and they
wanted to see me for a final meeting at Xano Retail Group’s human resources office
building in Levent. I went to the building and waited for an hour for other interviews.
When the receptionist finally called me in I was alone with the same woman from the
public interview. She took me in a very small room. Our interview lasted for more than
half an hour. She asked me everything about my life starting from my family, schools
that I attended, books that I read, where and with whom I live, what is the division of
labor at home, what my room looks like, what is my style in terms of clothes, the cities I
visited including my favorite holiday spots in Turkey, etc. I am not sure if it was her
purpose, but after a certain while I was totally relaxed since it turned out to a friendly
21
conversation instead of final-stage job interview for a low-wage position. She asked me if
I was a shopper myself, if I visit stores to buy garments. I told her sometimes I did but I
could not call myself a regular shopper. She asked what would I look carefully at and
what would disturb me most when I went to a store to buy clothes. I thought for a second,
and told her if somebody followed me step by step, I would be disturbed. I added that I
would not want to shop at an unkempt store where clothes were not exhibited neatly. She
smiled and said she approves me to start as a sales assistant at ZIP store in the Kanyon
shopping mall. After having my final acceptance she said I would receive an offer email
that evening.
13

I received a list of necessary documents to start working with the email. Although a
private company was about to hire me, the ghost of the Turkish state imprinted the entire
process.
14
At every step I took in order to satisfy the requirements I had to deal with

13
I was hired by ZIP because of my foreign-language skills, my desire to have a future
career in the retail industry, and most importantly, timing. I witnessed many times that
my coworkers call this “kısmet” (fortune or serendipity): If a job is on your kısmet then
you will get it. Many pessimistic friends, who did not believe I could get a job at this age,
told me this was my kısmet. Amongst the companies I applied for sales assistantship
positions during this period, only Mango called me back eight weeks later to check if I
was still interested. When I replied positively they asked me if it was possible for me to
work at a new store in Beylikduzu, a nearby city, which takes more than two hours to get
by public transportation. I told them I could not work in Beylikduzu because it was too
far from where I was living, but I would love to work for them in a store in central
Istanbul. They told me if there was any position they would call me again. They never
did.

14
Unlike neoliberalizing China, where “state authority [declines] in the workplace. […]
Employees are primarily subjected to managerial domination and the market forces of
supply and demand, rather than the political-ideological control,” (Lee 2006: 3). While I
was writing this chapter, the government (once again) declared that they were working on
22
different state institutions. The list included a photocopy of my official (state) identity
card, an official document for verifying my address, six passport pictures, a medical
report and test results for my lungs from official (state) medical institutions, the
photocopy of the last degree I received from an educational institution with the state’s
official approval on it, a report on my criminal history from the district attorney’s office
(the certificate of good conduct), (if I had one) a photocopy of my insurance card, (if I
worked before) a document of service from my previous employer, and if I am a male,
the official document which shows my status regarding compulsory military service. I
had to complete these documents as soon as possible and submit them to the store where
they would send them to the human resources department. When everything was all right
with the papers, they would call me to say I could start working.

I also received an offer letter. Figure 1 below presents a translation of the offer letter.

a new reform plan to lessen state control and bureaucracy in workplaces as well as tax
cuts involving the social security system in order to inrease employment rates.
23

Dear Cenk Ozbay,
We are happy to meet with you. We present our job offer and conditions for the “sales
assistantship.”

Weekly Working Schedule:
• Six days a week, total 45 hours of work.
• One day of weekly leave will normally be on weekdays.

Total Monthly Stipend:
• Monthly stipend is 640 TL [$425] before tax.
Figure 1: Continued

• In addition to the stipend, a weekly sales promotion will be calculated. It depends on
the performance and the rate of achieving the targets for the store.
• Depending on the weekly sales of the store, the sales promotion changes between 50 TL
[$33] and 125 TL [$80] before tax. In special terms like the New Year, the sales
promotions will increase.
• Total income may change between minimum 840 TL [$560] and maximum 1265 TL
[$840] before tax.
• Everyday that the worker works more than 4.5 hours, she will receive food support for
9.5 TL [$6]. It will be paid through a special card that she can use only for food
purchases.
• Payment for work at national holidays will be included in the ‘general holiday
overtime.’
• Our offer is personal. You should not share it with third persons.

Other Opportunities:
• Social security system membership from the first day of work.
• Individual insurance for accidents in the workplace.
• Shuttles for the closing hours.
• Education and trainings.
• Unspecified work contract with 2-months trial period.

We hope you will accept our offer. Have a good day.

Figure 1: Offer Letter

I will provide a partial summary and description of the encounters I had throughout the
period I worked at the two ZIP stores with a portrayal of the most important actors in
24
Chapter 3. Now, I want to turn my attention to a description of the shopping malls as
workplaces.

Towards A Sociology of Work at Shopping Malls

Throughout this dissertation, I will strive to provide an analysis of the back-stage, the
hidden details, and the real, existing conditions of the production of service in shopping
malls in Istanbul. Despite the sound commonsense belief that is shared by many, I would
argue here that there is a complicated social life consisting of stories, acts of governing,
forms of subjectivity, modes of resistance, a rich variety of hopes and desires and all
other intimate manifestations of power behind the virtually smooth and the neatly
standardized organization of service, which is almost always taken for granted in the
satisfaction of global consumerism. The middle class Istanbulites as consumers,
shoppers, customers, or strollers who frequent shopping malls in greater numbers every
year and turn it into the most explicitly pleasurable way of time killing within a city,
which rapidly loses its non-commercial public spaces, seem not to give a second thought
about the contingencies that make possible the production of the services they
unhesitatingly receive. Shopping mall is a place where urban citizens enjoy visiting and
hanging out while sociologists
15
, and particularly sociologist in Turkey, do not pay

15
In her dazzling monograph, which she examines social relations in toy stores in the
United States, Christine Williams (2006: 3) writes: “Sociologists have not had much to
say about the business of toy selling, or indeed about any kind of selling. For the most
part, we have ceded the study of buying and selling to economists.” This seems
absolutely true for the case of Istanbul, or Turkey in general.
25
sufficient attention to unravel some of the most vital contemporary circumstances of
everyday life in the non-west as well as the forces which persistently shape it such as
globalization, modernity, formation of the new middle-classes, and Westernization.

The backstage of the voguish, immaculate apparel stores, through the dark locker rooms
and storages, and behind the masked faces of ever smiling, docile, and deferential sales
assistants there is the mere fact that shopping malls are ‘workplaces’ for the very people
who produce services of any sort. Therefore, shopping malls are colorful sources for
shopping, consumption, and leisure in order to participate and indulge oneself in the most
up-to-date version of global modernity while these spaces simultaneously come to
represent labor, exploitation, alienation, coercion, discipline, oppression, surveillance and
subjection for workers just like the factories of the industrial age. Life is defined,
experienced, and actually lived in shopping malls for workers who have jobs in stores,
restaurants, cafés, movie theatres or who work at the gates as security guards or as
cleaners at every dark corner of the mall. As Paul Willis notes, “It is always forgotten that
the main reality for most of the people, for most of the time, is work and the sound of
work –the grind of production, not the purr of consumption, is the commonest mark of
our industrial culture” (2004: 108). The sound –the chaotic electronic buzz and the
perplexingly high volume of music- and the artificial lighting –manipulated in distinct
ways at each store- of the shopping mall might be seen as the mark of our postindustrial
culture (of work) with all its implications about meaning and human experience, finding
and losing oneself through labor relations.
26
The exact consequences of the new developments regarding deindustrialization
16
–or the
shift from production to consumption as the basis of sociability- such as the increase in
employment in the retail and services sectors in terms of workplace governmentality and
the construction of worker subjectivity, which I will talk about extensively in the
following chapters, are yet to be seen. Nevertheless, based on my research, I would
maintain that the terms of employment (what kinds of jobs are available to whom; what
sorts of demands, requirements, and responsibilities these jobs assign; how the labor
process and labor control are attained) and the formation of self-identities (classed,
gendered, sexualized etc.) of workers that are deeply connected to work and workplace
are going through significant transformations that create subjects who desire to govern
their own lives against the oppressive forces of capital over their bodies and selves and
get closer to the middle class ideals shaped by global culture and bourgeois consumerism
in order to cope with the sense of social exclusion and abjection.

Shopping malls as post- or high-modern workplaces (or, ‘the work regime’ itself in such
[non-] places) also raise crucial issues regarding the deep rooted theoretical discussion
between agency and structure. How the potentiality of human beings meets with the rigid
borders of social institutions has always been one of the central contestations in social
theory. While a significant portion of classical social theory, including the works of Marx
and Weber, has been criticized for its over-emphasis on the structural constraints on

16
For a comprehensive review of the structural conditions and social outcomes of
deindustrialization across countries, see Esping-Andersen (1999). See Allen and Du Gay
(1994) for a documentation of how service sector jobs have been represented as radically
different from the manufacturing jobs in the deindustrializing economies since the 1970s.
27
human social action with no or few mention of the subjective aspects of behavior; more
recent post-modern theories, for example, have come to represent an exaggerated
conceptual space for individual creativity and choice without paying sufficient attention
to the institutional forms of regulation. On the other hand, many scholars have
endeavored to compromise the two sides of the structure-agency argument and
formulated new concepts in order to reflect on the tension between human choice and
institutional limitation. These include Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1998) and ‘habitus,’ Judith
Butler (1999) and ‘performativity,’ Anthony Giddens (1986) and ‘structuration,’ and
Michel de Certeau (2000; 2002) and the ‘tactics and strategies’ within the course of the
everyday.

The workplace, like other core institutions across different societies (i.e. the family,
religion, and the state) has been deemed one of the central sites where the relations
between human agency and multiple forms of organizational inhibitions are renegotiated
and reconfigured. As the workplace evolves from the industrial, Fordist organizations of
production to the post-industrial and post-Fordist nodes that people, goods, images,
services, and relations constantly flow via new temporalities and spatiality, the distinction
between structure and agency also takes novel forms. The corporate power of the
employer —manifested through workplace rules, rituals, discipline and surveillance as
well as the systematic desire to control and manipulate workers’ lives and bodies— and
the maneuvers of the employed —resistance and reconstructing subjectivity— encounter
28
in the workplace through a meticulous sense of governmentality about which I will talk
more comprehensively in Chapters 4 and 5.

Retail Workers in Istanbul: Navigating Between Two Classes

On a usual, slow day at the ZIP Kanyon store we were mostly talking to each other in the
store since there were not any customers around. A middle-aged woman with a destitute
look walked to in the store. I was watching her while she was approaching Tugba, one of
my coworkers. The woman asked her how she could find the manager. From her clothes,
her manners, the way she spoke it was clear that she was not, indeed could not be a
customer. As she comprehended this, Tugba asked her what was she going to do with the
manager although such a question was inappropriate and against company policy.
Normally, Tugba would direct the customer to the manager or the second manager, if the
customer were middle-class. The poor woman told Tugba that she came to the store in
order to apply for a job. Tugba, without hiding her mocking smile, asked what kind of
jobs she was able to do in such a store. The woman replied that she was a tezgahtar
(salesclerk) in her workplace until she got fired because of the economic crisis. She was
unemployed for a week and she walked from one place to another to get a job everyday.
Somebody had told her that salesclerks were wanted at Kanyon and she came here to ask.
We were listening to her almost under hypnosis because we all were aware that it was
quite rare that such a person, who was obviously lacking the cultural and social capital,
resisting the not-so-invisible class boundaries and exceeding symbolic hierarchies, the
29
sense of marginalization and exclusion shopping malls diffuse, dared to enter a store and
ask for a job as a salesclerk—just like us! Her action not only subverts the intangible
class divides, but also equalizes her with the ‘salesclerks’ in the store, although we learnt
not to name our jobs like this in public. We were ‘sales assistants.’ Meanwhile, the
woman kept talking, saying she desperately needed a job because she did not have any
money to buy stuff for her children. I was wholeheartedly touched by her urgent poverty
and sincere helplessness while I noticed that my coworkers were both scorning and
getting angry with her. I did not feel or identify myself as a salesclerk, therefore the
wretched woman’s claim that she was also a salesclerk did not bother me; I did not
interpret it as a threat, or insult, to myself. On the other hand, my coworkers’ collective
attitude aimed to show her that she was not (could not be) equal to them, the educated,
‘almost middle-class’ workers of such a store, a modern, global apparel chain. She
became abjected by my coworkers; she was exactly who they were not; who they were
saved themselves from becoming. She also could not be like them. She represented the
cultural other who cannot be thought in the same picture with them. They did not pity her
because she was not aware of this fact, they were angry with her because of her boldness,
because she did not know her right place.

I took initiative and helped her to fill a CV like all other normal applicants, who were
younger, more educated, and wealthier than her. She could barely read and write. She
was graduated from primary school. I surprised that she was just five years older than me
although she looked much older. In the standardized manner, I told her that it would be
30
better if she had a picture to attach her CV. She was surprised and asked what they would
do with her picture. Before my answer she said “of course, they will look whether my
hair is closed (Islamically) or not. But, I am not covered [do not wear a headscarf].”
While she was trying to fill the boxes with my help, it became clear that she was working
as a tea-person (çaycı) the individual who prepares and serves tea and coffee especially
in large offices) in an advertisement agency. Since the word tezgahtar (salesclerk) was
derived from tezgah (counter) on which she used to prepare tea, she thought we were
looking for a tezgahtar to prepare and serve tea in the store. When I told Deniz, the store
manager, about this misunderstanding she also felt very sorry for the woman and decided
to send her CV to the company that hires cleaners for the shopping mall. “It is the only
job here she can get” Deniz said. After it came out that the woman did not present herself
as a tezgahtar like them, I observed that my coworkers became uneasy a little bit,
changed their attitude towards her and showed their good will to her when she was
leaving the store, thanking everybody generously. This poor woman obviously came to
represent who my coworkers did not want to be, whom they could not imagine as one of
them. My coworkers envisioned themselves that they were doing much better than her
(under-) class position.

On yet another slow day at the ZIP Istinye Park store, my second research site, I was
working at the counter with two coworkers. The manager, Tolga, was not around;
probably he was working in the locker room, which was also used as the office space and
storage for the store. An ordinary, unremarkable woman customer came to the counter
31
and asked for a garment that was supposed to come back from the tailor that day.
Although she had a receipt in her hands, she did not give it to us. Instead, she described it
for us to find it in the messy closet. We could not find it there. We told her that we were
sorry, the garment was not in the store yet, and it would probably arrive the following
day. She thanked and left. Ten minutes later, the same customer walked in to the store
with another woman in her company. The woman she brought in was obviously more
affluent, self-confident, authoritative, and furious. She approached the counter and yelled
at us saying that we were all stupids since we could not even find a garment although she
sent us a receipt with her assistant. Tolga immediately ran to the event scene and started
to navigate the procedure (things to do to mollify a customer when she goes crazy). He
exaggeratedly apologized to her and told her that it was our mistake that we could not
locate her garment. He asked for the receipt, she gave it to him, and he found the garment
in the closet with the help of the numbers on both the receipt and the garment. Then, one
of my coworkers told the angry customer that her assistant (now we understood that the
first customer was her assistant) did not give us the receipt and she just described what
the garment was like (clearly it was a wrong description, too) hence it was not our fault
but her assistant’s. The indignant customer became even incandescent and shouted that
she was having a cup of tea at the Chanel boutique and we did not let her finish her tea,
we forced her to come to our store (here she made a gesture implying it was not nice for
her to leave the top floor where Chanel and other luxury stores are located and had to
come down here, the first floor, where middle class stores like ZIP and fast food
restaurants are placed) because we could not solve her problem and still we were finding
32
excuses to her, blaming her assistant. Tolga theatrically apologized again and she finally
left the store with her garment and assistant.

Everybody that witnessed the event or heard of it was making jokes about it, imitating the
assertive customer, and underlining the importance of having a cup of tea at the Chanel
boutique. Obviously, we could not understand the meaning or importance of having a cup
of tea at Chanel’s. Who in this world could have a cup of tea at Channel and send her
assistant to pick up a garment from the ZIP store where normally she would not visit? It
was not only a type of human being that my coworkers did not feel like themselves; they
also could not even imagine what kind of a human being, what sort of a lifestyle they had
just encountered. This particular instance, among numerous others in the retail stores, set
the standards for that day. My coworkers in this store, just like the ones in the previous
store in front of the poor woman above, reconfigured who they were and who was not
like them, who were different than them whether through being superior or inferior in the
cultural maps of intricate social hierarchies. Some people were on the top of my
coworkers like the woman who had a cup of tea at Chanel, and some were on the bottom
like the destitute woman who did not even know the proper meaning of the word
tezgahtar. With the help of these encounters my informants and coworkers develop and
constantly refashion a sense of social identity, who they are and where they stand in the
increasingly neoliberalizing society. They navigate and recalibrate themselves between
these two poles of those who they cannot become, and those who cannot become like
33
themselves. They re-learn to respect, imitate, and fear some; while they belittle,
intimidate, and demean others.

Here, the class identity of my coworkers appears as an instantiation, a contingent
positionality between and against class identifications, representations, and embodiments
that are appropriated and enacted by multiple others in the course of the everyday. I tend
to frame social class in poststructuralist terms (Gibson-Graham et al. 2000) as not
reproducing essential, structured and constraining categories; but instead destabilize them
and open up new possibilities for the fluidity, hybridity, fragmentation, and performative
aspects of class identities alongside other forms of social hierarchy such as race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the body. In this sense, I do not consider social class as
the natural centre of analysis, the given paradigm, the taken for granted subject of inquiry
in this project.
17
The processes of class-identifications among my coworkers, their
unending struggle to recreate their class locations as decent members of the new middle
class in the contemporary map of social difference in Turkish society, and their endeavor
to alleviate the class contradictions that they face in different social sites, such as the
workplace and their families, constitute the most powerful undertow I have encountered
in this research. Unlike most people in Turkey, retail workers frequently and reflexively
think and talk about their class identities, reconfigure and verbalize their class
backgrounds, and develop visions concerning their existent and desired class positions.
This extraordinary preoccupation with class identity amongst my informants is an

17
For an excellent review of theories of social class in a historical framework, from
classical accounts to postmodernist interpretations, see Joyce 1995.
34
inevitable effect of the service sector jobs through which a variety of classes encounter
and interact on a regular basis at the workplace as well as the fact that performing the
(middle) class mannerisms is produced and promoted as a salient signifier of success at
work.

Such an active concern and investment in class positions among my coworkers can better
be outlined as what Julie Bettie (2003) calls ‘class performativity’ or ‘doing class’ with
particular reference to Judith Butler’s (1999) concept of ‘gender performativity’ and
Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s (1987) thesis on ‘doing gender.’ In her
ethnographic work, Bettie simply maintains that class identities of individuals (or, social
groups) are not innate, fixed, pregiven, assigned, or unchanging. Instead, class is
projected, achieved, accomplished, and embodied in a repetitive, stylized fashion in
relation to cultural codes within a given context. Thus, class is performative just like the
way gender identities are constituted through systematic reiteration and socially imposed
and monitored performances: “Social actors largely display the cultural capital that is a
consequence of material and cultural resources to which they have had access. Cultural
performances most often reflect one’s habitus –that is, our consciously enacted, socially
learned positions, which are not natural or inherent or prior to the social organization of
class inequality, but are in fact produced by it. Here it is useful to think of class as
performative, in the sense that class as cultural identity is an effect of social structure”
(2003: 51). As Bettie demonstrates the details for the Mexican American high school
students in the United States, a person imagines and manages her classed and gendered
35
identification processes / projects at the same time. The desire to become or to pass as
middle class or to imitate the working class characteristics always entangles with
gendered specificities, such as the codes of middle class womanhood and the elements of
working class masculinity. My informants are also attempting to remake themselves, to
acquire and display particular classed and gendered identities, and tofind their voice in
the setting of postmodern workplaces, vis-à-vis subjective, interpersonal, and structural
routes. Social class –parallel to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and political / ideological
positions of the workers- is actively constructed, consciously performed, reflexively
calculated and meticulously displayed while the acquired class identity becomes the
backbone of the new subject positions retail workers take up, as I will mention in Chapter
5.

A Note on Research Methodology

This is a qualitative study, which is informed both by ‘the extended case method’
(Burawoy 1991; 1998) that underlines the situated character of everyday interactions in a
global and historical context through the tension of reflexivity and generalizability (or,
observation and replicability) and ‘institutional ethnography’ (Smith 2005; DeVault
2008)
18
. The basic research technique for this project was participant observation. My

18
“Institutional ethnography emphasizes connections among the sites and situations of
everyday life, management/professional practice, and policymaking, considered from
people’s locations in everyday life […] [The] location anchoring the research is
fundamental to institutional ethnography, but the research is not confined to the everyday
lives of the anchor group […] [It] traces how those lives are organized through the social
36
first research location was the ZIP store in Kanyon shopping mall at which I worked as a
full-time sales assistant
19
. Kanyon is located in the Levent Business district–a liminal
zone between the informally built working class neighborhoods such as Gultepe and the
highly prestigious upper-middle class zones of the city such as Etiler and Ulus. Kanyon
was opened in 2006. It received quite wide popular attention because of its extraordinary
architecture (the first open-air shopping mall of the city) and new brands it introduced for
the first time in country such as the posh British department store Harvey Nichols and
Wagamama, a London-based Asian-fusion restaurant. ZIP Kanyon was a middle-size
store with nine regular workers, a second manager (“responsible administer” in the
vernacular), and a store manager. Its clientele was more homogenous (upper-middle
class) than other shopping malls in the area such as Profilo, Cevahir, and Metrocity. I
worked there for ten weeks (481 work hours in the store). After I had a saturation point of
observations about the actors and occasions in the store, I was transferred to the ZIP store
in the Istinye Park shopping mall. Istinye Park was built in 2007 in Maslak
(approximately 6 miles from Kanyon) and surrounded by the Istanbul Technical
University’s main campus, a smaller private university, a military base, informal squatter
settlements and expensive housing projects. The ZIP store there was bigger and its

relations of their contexts […] The researcher strives always to attend to the activities of
the people constituting and operating institutional machinery. In most settings, texts of
various kinds are key to these activities and especially to linkages among sites; texts and
their uses are often the sources of translocal coordination […] [This] approach is
especially well suited for analysis of economic restructuring as it unfolds. The dominant
mode of contemporary governance is now discursive, and institutional ethnographers pay
particular attention to textually mediated social organization” (DeVault 2008: 4).

19
In ZIP stores all sales assistants can (and should) work at the counter. There are not
cashiers as a distinct category of worker as in other stores such as Citron.
37
customers were more heterogeneous in terms of social class. I worked there for 7 weeks
as a part-time sales assistant (153 work hours) with 23 coworkers and 2 managers.
20

During the time I made ethnographic research in these two stores, I took almost 100
pages of field notes about the daily rhythm in the shopping malls as well as events I
experienced, witnessed, and heard about. I could also be able to gather company’s
employee guidelines, messages from the center office, training brochures and other
written documents.

20
I did not tell my coworkers and managers that I was doing dissertation research at the
beginning of my tenure in both stores. I wanted to see how exactly they would treat me as
a ‘normal’ retail worker. I spent three weeks in the first store, and two weeks in the
second store, busy with hiding that I was actually an observer and not a real worker.
After having establishing a mutual sense of rapport, I told them that my intention was to
learn about the stores, the retail workers and their lives. Nobody was surprised or found it
strange. It seemed to me that my carefully constructed ‘coming out’ scene, in both stores,
as a PhD researcher did not affect anybody. When I talked about this indifference later,
they told me in the apparel stores there were always collage and graduate students
working with other workers—the real retailers. As long as I do my job in the store, fulfill
my responsibilities and satisfy the company requirements, they elucidated that I could be
whomever else I wanted in my parallel routines. Deniz, the manager of ZIP Kanyon, even
made a joke about it and told me that I should have definitely saved them from their
miserable lives by writing a book about them. While it was indeed my purpose to write a
book about them, disregarding my seriousness and care about the subject, Deniz and my
coworkers laughed at this idea.
38
The second stage of my research includes conducting 48 recorded interviews
21
and 11
unrecorded interviews
22
as well as three recorded focus groups—2 with sales assistants
and one with professionals, who were born in the 1980s, graduated from college, able to
speak foreign languages and work in white collar jobs at multinational companies. I opted
for a conventional snowball technique in order to reach my informants for both individual
interviews and focus groups. A professional transcriber transcribed all interviews and
focus groups and I translated the parts that I directly quote in this dissertation.

The biggest difficulty I have encountered throughout interviews was about timing. It was
extremely troublesome to find a suitable time for appointments with sales assistants since

21
Of these, one interview was with a flight attendant, one was with a hotel receptionist,
and one was with a waiter. These were supplementary interviews I conducted because my
informants and coworkers frequently referred to these three service-sector occupations as
similar to theirs and I wanted to inquire the real conditions in these jobs. There is a
certain lack in sociological analysis of these occupations as well as the services sector in
general in Turkey with the exception of Aslihan Aykac’s (2009) recent book on hotel
workers in southern Turkey.
Among the 45 interviews, 3 were with store managers, one was with a merchandiser, and
one was a brand manager (‘director’ as they name the position in retail organizations).
For the remaining 40 interviews I have talked to 42 sales assistants and/or cashiers who
work in apparel stores at that moment. Two interviews were conducted with 2 informants
at the same time. There is a table, which demonstrates the details of participants, in the
appendix.

22
There are different reasons for the unrecorded interviews. The most important one was
that some of my informants did not want to be recorded under any circumstances. In two
interviews, my recorder did not record properly for mysterious technical reasons. One
was a conversation on the phone with a former coworker of mine who left Istanbul. I also
visited the grocery shop of another former coworker and sat in his place and talked about
everything while customers came in and purchased things. In two other cases, I was not
prepared to conduct interviews while opportunities to talk to people developed
spontaneously and I simply did not want to miss them. We just sat at Starbucks and
talked. I took notes right after the unrecorded interviews.
39
most of them work 6 days and almost (sometimes more than) 50 hours weekly and they
do not have any spare time in their weekly schedules to meet with me, sit somewhere and
talk about things for a couple of hours. All the interviewees showed great effort and
sacrifice to talk to me. 12 informants have stood me up. Among them, 8 of them
rescheduled and 5 of them met with me at our second and 3 of them met with me at out
third attempt while the rest of them (4 people) could not make it (or, did not want) to
meet me again. During this project, I did not pay any money or other sorts of
compensation to my participants. I only paid for the food and beverage we consumed
during interviews in the coffee shops.
23
However, I talked to them and shared information
about the working conditions in other companies than theirs as well as giving them
contact information of human resources departments of some of the transnational
companies I knew, which could offer better positions to them. However, I did not
intervene into the hiring processes, I did not talk to the personnel departments about my
informants, I did not recommend them to the companies, and I did not make a request in
favor my informants.

On average, in the first half an hour of the interviews, most of my informants
systematically defended the jobs they have at shopping malls and drew attention to the
(existing or assumed) advantages they have against the other lower and lower-middle
class workers in the city in relation to the stable jobs and ‘opportunities’ for the future

23
14 interviews were conducted at my apartment while we met in shopping malls or
boulevards around the city and went to public spaces such as cafés and coffee shops to
talk for the rest of interviews in this project. All focus groups were also arranged at my
place.
40
they had. During these times, they often employed the elements of the official discourses
of the retail companies (also, the language of the textbooks of the sales assistantship trade
high school program that I examine in Chapter 4) that are shaped and promoted by the
human resources literature borrowed by the personnel. After a certain point in the flow of
their speech and through answers they gave to my specific questions about the workings
of the organization, I believe with the help of my clarity towards them as well as my job
experiences and my insider position, they started to become more open about the real
conditions in the workplace and their suffering and they incorporated a more
complaining, grumbling, bitter, pessimistic, angry, and hopeless tone toward the
companies, the State, and their hard, unequal, and unjust lives in the metropolis.

During most interviews, I did not feel a symbolic distance between my informants and
myself although I was well aware and actually vigilant that I could easily be otherized
and stigmatized as ‘the rich kid’ (zengin çocuğu) or more probably, ‘the wiseacre from
the university’ (üniversiteli ukala, çokbilmiş) who does not know anything about ‘the real
stuff’ and tries to subjugate others. In order to alleviate this danger, first of all, I
underlined my information and sincere appreciation for the hard work they do and the
amount of labor they put in the shopping malls. My work experiences from Citron and
ZIP also helped me to frame my stand as ‘one of them’ since I was actually a sales
assistant. I kept reformulating my thoughts and questions within a language closer to
theirs instead of my academic and obviously non-local terms. I presented myself as
researching for my PhD dissertation but after a couple of questions this was translated by
41
them as I was making a sort of homework for the school that I attend in the United States.
In this process, it was also crucial that I had already knew some people from this
business, kind of ‘key informants’ for me, with whom I worked years ago and became
friends. Nevertheless, the most important factor behind my satisfaction with the
interviews and the lack of symbolic violence –at least, from my point of view- is my
informants’ open minds, their habit to talk to people from other social classes and
backgrounds, their practice to narrate, and their talent for adaptability. In a great number
of interviews, my initial questions such as “how come you have decided to work retail?”
or “what’s going on in the stores?” were sufficient for them to grasp what was I trying to
do and what really mattered in their lives, and after that point, they shared their lives with
me with great sense of meaning and coherence.

The last methodology I utilized for this project was analyzing written documents and
class curriculum that is used for the Sales Assistantship Program taught at the vocational
‘trade high schools’ in Turkey (Ticaret Meslek Lisesi – Satış Danışmanlığı Programı).
These are public high schools located around the country. The State commenced this new
educational plan in order to train professional sales assistants in 2003. It is an ambitious
and comprehensive educational program that includes classes about the details of the
‘Store-logy’ (rational science of retail management, Mağazacılık), or ‘Retail-logy’
(Perakandecilik), such as logistics, interpersonal communications and customer relations
as well as basic classes on mathematics, history, and sciences. Through this new
curriculum, it becomes clear how the Turkish State perceives shopping malls, or retail
42
outlets of sorts, and employment opportunities in the sales within novel terms of
governmentality. Accordingly, retail jobs are a valid solution for the problem of
unemployment and idleness of a particular population (lower-middle class youth in urban
areas without proper education, language skills, and other forms of capital) in the new
economy. Transnational capital and public institutions, including the local governments
which negotiate with the capital for the required permissions to construct shopping malls,
are articulated with the aims and entailment of the Sales Assistantship Program to
produce rational, proper, competitive worker-subjects who will be employed in the stores.
I will explicate the governmental approach to the retail sector in Chapter 4.

Outline of the Dissertation

In Chapter 2, I have scrutinized the story of Turkey’s neoliberalization since the military
coup on September 12
th
1980. Neoliberalism today is the major governing force of global
economic, political, social and cultural relations through the logics and mechanisms it
assembles. The subject of this research, the number and quality of young lower-middle
class population in the Istanbul metropolitan area and their involvement with the service
sector jobs concentrated in shopping malls, can only be grasped and interpreted fully by
making Turkey’s neoliberalization experience visible. The particular (non-Western, or
non-American) geography and history of shopping malls in the Global South and their
role in the contemporary cultural mapping of Istanbul deserve a special mention in the
43
efforts to trace the constitution of hierarchies of taste via class, modernity, ethnicity,
gender, and conflicting political views in Turkey.

Chapter 3 presents the ethnographic core of this research. Here I focused on the apparel
store located within a shopping mall as a workplace in which three different actors
(however heterogeneous they actually are) encounter and foster relations of power among
themselves: Store managers, retail workers, and customers. Their complicated
relationality is an outcome of power that is constantly regenerated through axes of class,
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, the body, organizational culture, and dispositions of affect.

Chapter 4 addresses questions of governmentality regarding the formation of ‘retail-logy’
(perakandecilik) as a field of expertise and the proper subject-workers, who can govern
themselves within the setting of the retail sector, by both the state (through establishing
an educational program at vocational high schools) and transnational capital (through
discursive policies and practical implementation of training). In this context, emotional
states and interiorities of workers are redefined as a legitimate field of intervention by
store managers and human resources staff in the name of stabilizing and optimizing
worker’s lives and performances.

In Chapter 5, I deal with the issue of subjectivity more closely and pay particular
attention to the construction of the ‘ideal worker’ (designed employee) by transnational
corporations, resistance as a crucial field of constituting worker subjectivity, and retail
44
workers’ aspirations and struggles to become modern, urban, middle class citizens
through their attempts in the name of self-improvement, consumption patterns, reframing
of gender and sexuality, and excluding the undesired others (Kurds, Islamists, and the
poor).

Chapter 6 is devoted to deciphering the rapidly transforming gender and sexual dynamics
among retail workers in Istanbul. While heterosexual male and female workers face a
significant need to reform their conceptualizations of gender identities, embodiments, and
relations, queer workers (especially gay men) encounter a different set of opportunities
and struggles to survive and prevail in this assumingly ‘queer sector.’

The last chapter is a short Epilogue. Here I describe the latest developments in some of
my key informants’ professional lives as the macro movements in the Turkish Economy
and the retail sector in Istanbul intersect with them. I also make space for the issue of
representation because although my informants and coworkers always highlighted their
silence and the public’s inattention towards them –that they are not representable as much
as other marginal or socially excluded segments of Turkish society- they now seem to
have a few channels to express their public voice and inform different audiences about
their predicaments. There is an appendix, which details the informants’ age, sex,
education, and occupation at the time of the interview, at the end of the dissertation.

45
CHAPTER 2: THE MAKING OF NEOLIBERAL TURKEY

In this chapter, I will briefly outline the recent history of neoliberalization in Turkey with
the changing image and role of the Istanbul metropolitan area as a global city and
shopping malls emerging as spaces of modernity in Istanbul. The rigidly statist Turkish
nation-state has been reorganized as a globalized and neoliberalized state apparatus
through this process of socio-economic transformation and structural reforms. Almost all
of my informants and most of my coworkers were born after the year 1980 and all of
them experienced their childhood in the neoliberalizing Turkey of the post-1980 term.
Thus, decoding this transformation can present significant clues for their comprehension
of self-identities they form as well as the public culture that they live in.

Turkey became an independent state in 1923. It was one of the remnants of the Ottoman
Empire like most of its neighboring countries, including Greece, Bulgaria, Syria, Iraq and
several former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Mustafa K. Atatürk (1881-1938) was the founding leader and the first president of the
new republic during the formation years when Turkey was governed through a
multilayered modernization project, a strict statist economic policy, a highly centralized
state regime with only one political party, a solid nation-building ideology, and a rigid
secular reformism to replace the sacred Ottoman institutions and customs (Zurcher 1993;
Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997).

46
After the first elections with multiple political parties in 1950, the new Prime Minister
Adnan Menderes prioritized economic growth, modernizing the agricultural sector, and
liberalizing the nation-state’s economic organization, especially with the help of U.S.
Marshall Aid and loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Menderes’
governments also signified in the popular imagination a transition from the highly
Enlightenment-spirited state secularism, ‘laiklik’ (adapted from the French word laïcité),
of the Atatürk era to a more tolerant, if not stimulating, attitude for repositioning Islam at
the center of public life (Zurcher 1993). Menderes was convicted many accusations and
executed right after the 1960 military coup.

The twenty years between 1960 and 1980 passed with interlocked problems of political
instability and impotent governments, the radical division and conflict between rightist
and leftist ideologies (only in 1979, 1500 were killed in the name of political opposition),
everlasting coalition negotiations and failing cabinets, another military intervention in
1971, and serious foreign problems regarding the military operation to Cyprus in 1974 in
order to terminate the existing political regime on the island. The operation ended with a
Turkish military victory. However, a compelling four-year international embargo (of
arms and trade) came afterwards and put the country into a devastating economic crisis
(Altug and Filiztekin 2006a; Zurcher 1993; Kalaycioglu 2005). Since then, Turkey of the
late 1970s have been represented in the popular imagination with images of daily oil or
bread queues that people spent hours and the unprecedented words that is believed the
Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel said, “Turkey is in need of 70 cents,” (Ilicak 2008). A
47
bankrupted state, which needed even 70 cents to buy gas or wheat, and its official
declaration from the mouth of the prime minister were unimaginable and unacceptable
for the citizens who had been growing up with the stories of a young but strong state,
national honor and integrity, victorious past, and the desire to become a ‘little America’.

The Turkish Experiment of Neoliberalization

While Turkey was in the midst of a potent economic crisis, which was destabilizing and
disillusioning in terms of cultural belonging and politics of hope, the world economy was
also experiencing a predicament that eventually triggered a sharp turn in the organization
of Keynesian capitalism towards neoliberal ideas. It was not an arrant rupture, but a
thoroughgoing shift in the capacities of capitalism, which is a performative, experimental,
and perpetually unfinished project (Thrift 2005: 3). The doctrine, or the program, of
neoliberalism emerged as a solution to the ongoing fiscal crisis at that moment, firstly in
Chile and then especially in the United States, Britain, and China (Harvey 2007; Dumenil
and Levy 2004; Connell 2007). Neoliberalism basically was “a theory of political
economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by
liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”
(Harvey 2007: 2). According to the neoliberal theory public spending must be reduced;
foreign direct investments must be encouraged; free movement of capital and goods must
be supported; protectionist trade barriers, subsidies and tariffs must be abolished; and the
48
floating exchange regime must be accepted. The state ought to institute necessary
infrastructure for the proper functioning of the free market. Other than this goal, it must
‘downsize’, ‘contract out’ and never intervene in field of economic relations. If free, self-
regulated markets are not existed in some (in some countries of socialist history, all)
sectors, i.e. housing or mining, the state should take part in creating them and leave the
field for private actors of the market to operate (Cohen and Centeno 2006).

National economies were radically transformed through policies of deregulation,
privatization, liberalization of international trade, and an absolute shrinking of the state’s
economic hand. In this framework, labor power was cut while unemployment and
poverty were transmuted from social problems to be solved to the expected, if not
inevitable, costs and outcomes of the functioning of the free market. The state was not
responsible for protecting citizens’ health, happiness and security any more; instead, it
must provide markets with tools of competition at a multi-scalar spatial regime, i.e.
urban, regional, national, and global. In the neoliberal world order, when there are issues
in a national economy, the nation-state should search for answers and remedies in
cooperation with transnational economic organs that govern global neoliberalism such as
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade
Organization (WTO). Through these and other macro-scale policies neoliberalism, which
is a ‘strong discourse’ that makes itself true and adds its symbolic force (Bourdieu 1998)
“has become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of
49
thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many
of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (Harvey 2007: 3).

Neoliberal ideas and principles as well as the contested policies and entailments were
naturalized, normalized and rendered common-sensical under the names of ‘structural
readjustment programs’ or ‘neoliberal reforms’ (George 2000). The British Prime
Minister, and one of the leading figures of spreading neoliberal ideology, Margaret
Thatcher once stated, “there is no alternative [to neoliberalism]” (Peck and Tickell 2002:
381). According to Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant’s (2001) “Summary Table of the
Elementary Forms of Neoliberal Thought,” the state and what it characteristically implies
(constraining, closed, rigid, immobile, fossilized, past, outdated, stasis, group, lobby,
holism, collectivism, uniformity, artificiality, autocratic, and totalitarian) are
transmogrified to the market and what it comes to signify (freedom, openness, flexibility,
dynamism, move, self-transformation, future, novelty, growth, individuality,
individualism, diversity, authenticity, and democracy). Once accepted as the solution to
the previously transfixed world economy, neoliberalism created its own truth effects.
Pondering opposition, imagining alternatives, or envisioning resistance turned out as
unthinkable, unsayable, and undoable. The other possible ways of development or socio-
economic organization were abjected –became ‘constitutive others’ to draw borders and
redefine what is possible within neoliberalism. It was an unarticulated yet legitimate
meta-narrative, an ‘implementation of a utopia’ (Bourdieu 1998), a doxa –an
“unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were the objective truth” (Chopra 2003:
50
421), or the ‘ideological software’ (Peck and Tickell 2002) of the growing inequality and
social suffering in most segments of different societies of the late- or post-modernity and
advanced global capitalism (George 2000; Narayan 2007; England and Ward 2007;
Bourdieu 1999; Bourdieu et al. 2000).

The organization of the nation-state (consisting of policies, practices, discourses) passed
through a serious structural transformation for completing the process of
neoliberalization. Its role from a major, if not the only, unit of government evolved into a
part of a larger system of multiple mechanisms of governance. In other words,
governance within traditional political boundaries was now shared between the state (as if
it is a united, harmonious entity), different transnational political and non-governmental
(civil) institutions, and multinational companies. Basic fields of autonomy and
possibilities of exercising power that formerly belonged to the nation-state evaporated or
eroded. The technical functions of the state as well as its capacities to produce and govern
citizenship was redefined and repositioned according to the dynamic and flexible
demands of the free market regime and its conveyors (Hindess 2002; Ong 1999). In the
neoliberal order, the state is not the authority; but, it is the responsible interlocutor in the
negotiations with transnational organizations to improve and expand the business-
friendly, profiting environment it is supposed to govern (Wiener 2001). Not only the
positions of the state and the political sphere, but also relatively freer and more
autonomous areas of ‘the cultural’ and ‘the social’ started to be seen as inferior to the
economic field in the map of governance. The meanings attached to the ‘modern’ balance
51
between political, social, cultural and economic aspects of human societies
24
changed in
order to better serve global economics and the competitive finance systems. The field of
‘the social’ started to be deemed as dysfunctional and even dangerous for the
implementation of the neoliberal project because the unit of governmental attention
shifted from the society at large, or certain groups of conflict within it (for example
workers), to the neoliberal individual and the possibilities of what he can achieve. While
‘the social’ turned into a governable space in which specific social illnesses like poverty,
delinquency, marginality, and terrorism can grow; democracy was reinterpreted as a
threat, as a route to serious troubles in its voicing forms of contestation, dissent,
resistance, and rejection against the neoliberal ideology. As the tides of individualism and
anti-collectivism were mainstreamed through neoliberalism –and symbolized again in
Margaret Thatcher’s words “[there is] no such thing as society, only individual men and
women” (Harvey 2007: 23), the sociologist Michael Burawoy argues that all channels of
social formation are under attack by the neoliberal abnormalization of ‘the social’
25
, “the
last hold out against this economic tsunami is society itself, composed of associations
with a measure of collective self-regulation, movements expressed in the formation of a

24
Karl Polanyi (2001: 71) underlines the role of the social over other fields, especially
the economic, “As a rule, the economic system was absorbed in the social system […]
Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together. The self-regulating market was
unknown.” Susan George (2000: 28) agrees with Polanyi and maintains that, “the whole
point of neoliberalism is that the market mechanism should be allowed to direct the fate
of human beings. The economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way
around. And just as Polanyi foresaw, this doctrine is leading us directly towards the
‘demolition of society’.”

25
Pierre Bourdieu also defines neoliberalism as “a programme of methodical destruction
of collectives” (1998: 95-96, original emphasis).
52
collective will and publics of mutual recognition and communication” (2007: 356,
original emphasis).

Neoliberal policies widened the income gap between different countries and between
various groups within societies. They dramatically increased social inequalities since the
early 1980s simply because neoliberalization “was from the very beginning a project to
achieve the restoration of [ruling] class power” (Harvey 2007: 16; also Dumenil and
Levy 2004). The top 1 percent of income earners’ shares of national incomes increased
noticeably in all neoliberalizing countries starting from the U.S. and Britain. Therefore,
economic elites of national and transnational capital gained not only strategic support and
assistance from the neoliberalizing states, but they also reconstructed their privilege and
wealth, which had been dwindled in the fiscal crises of the 1970s. Finance, information
technologies, and service sectors became predominant in the ‘new’ neoliberal economy
while sectors of factory-based manufacturing and agricultural production were
repositioned as secondarily important regarding their relatively low potential for capital
accumulation (England and Ward 2007).

Raewyn Connell (2007) highlights that neoliberalism is not socially homogenous at a
global scale: It brings different groups together through contingent relations at different
localities and makes them talk to each other and produce multiple outcomes in the
diversity of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ (Gledhill 2007; Brenner and Theodore
2002). Nevertheless, this multiplicity and heterogeneity of the neoliberal publics should
53
not underestimate the endurance of the neoliberal subjectivity, however fragmented and
contingent it is. Simply because, neoliberalism cannot be explicated only in terms of
macro economic programs and processes of structural readjustment; but, “it is the
ideology of the period in which capitalism deepened to embrace the production of social
life itself, seeking to commoditize the most intimate of human relations and the
production of identity and personhood” (Gledhill 2007: 340). For example, Nigel Thrift
highlights how homo-economicus of sorts –who reads and interprets the world from the
prism of ‘financialization of everything’- becomes ubiquitous, “the language of
economics has become common linguistic currency, making it increasingly difficult to
conceive of the world in any terms except those of a calculus of supply and demand”
(2005: 4). Peter S. Cahn (2008) lists some of the tenets of neoliberalism that his
informants in Mexico internalize including a strong belief in the market system and its
ultimate fairness; not to expect support from the state but try to save herself; when things
are not good enough not to blame neoliberalism but to question herself; an unfading
motivation to work harder; and equalizing middle-class respectability with certain
consumption patterns, among others. The neoliberal subject, before anything else, is also
constituted through reiteration in the “dehistoricized and desocialized” (Bourdieu 1998:
95) discourses of rationality, opportunism, productivity, entrepreneurialism,
competitiveness, individualism, self-interest, and financialization of human feeling. As
Michael Peters points out, “The social is redescribed in terms of the economic,” (2001:
15) and the inconvertible social elements of human life, i.e. collectivism and solidarity, to
the economic terms are destined to be underrepresented and eventually be erased through
54
this redescription. Aihwa Ong (2007) elucidates the two different methods that
neoliberalism enacts for shaping and administering selves: Technologies of subjectivity,
in which self-making and self-government is orchestrated via certain knowledges, and
technologies of subjection, in which populations are regulated in time and space in order
to consolidate the dynamics of free market. Lisa Rofel (2007) warns us against the pitfall
of imagining an identical, deterministic, and homogenizing neoliberal subjectivity in
virtually everywhere and she argues that contingent, context-bounded, experimental
neoliberal subjecvities are produced via proper ways of desiring. So, “this [neoliberal]
model of human nature has the desiring subject as its core: the individual who operates
through sexual, material and affective self-interest” (2007: 3). Desire, in this sense, does
not evoke a transhistorical meaning, but it is linked with the rational techniques of self-
making that are increasingly driven by the economic life, or the ‘financialization of
everything’. Accordingly, to learn how to desire (i.e. yearning for things or relations,
fighting for them, pursuing them, talking about them) and to govern the proper fashion of
desiring is fundamental in the constitution and the constant re-shaping of neoliberal
subjectivities. The contingent, situated, historical neoliberal subjectivity must be
comprehended through the encounters of public space, public culture, sociabilities, and
stories told through neoliberal adaptations, relations, obligations, disorientations,
possibilities, exclusions, successes, and failures. The significance of the intersection of
the overlapping neoliberalizing agencies (of the state, citizens, transnational nodes of
power among others) and culture in the construction of neoliberal subjectivities requires a
55
closer look at the Turkish structural readjustment programs in the 1980s, which
transmogrified the country into a novel regime of free market.

On 24
th
January 1980, the Turkish government inaugurated an economic program with
cooperation of IMF, the Organization for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD),
and the World Bank to re-institute the country after long years of the international
embargo of 1974-1978, the Oil Crises of 1973-1974 and 1979-1980, and the paralyzed
industrialization model for import-substitution that had been implemented since the
Second World War (Yeldan 2003). Ayse Bugra notes, “The objective of reform was
simply defined in terms of radically reducing the economic role of the state to make the
unregulated market the main mechanism of resource allocation” (2003: 459). The 24
th

January Decisions included a gradual decrease in the export barriers and opening the
national economy to international trade, the dismissal of policies that protect publicly
owned economic institutions, devaluation in the Turkish currency (TL) approximately for
30%, inducements for export-oriented large-scale establishments for the production
sector, the deregulation of financial markets, and the articulation with foreign finance and
exchange centers in order to successfully integrate the weak and fragile Turkish economy
with international capitalism and the Western trade system (Kumcu and Pamuk 2001;
Rittenberg 1998). Right after the declaration and early implications of the 24
th
January
Decisions, another military coup occurred in Turkey at 12
th
September 1980. This
military coup was more effective than the previous two in silencing all democratic
channels of opposition and social critique, preventing the leaders of the Leftist ideologies
56
in participating public discussions, repressing universities and academic freedom,
establishing a rigid censorship over mass media and other ways of expression, and
cancelled labor unions’ recruitment and negotiation possibilities. Approximately 150.000
people were arrested, interrogated, and tortured countrywide while 15 people were
executed, including a 17 years old student (Zurcher 1993; Cemal 2000).

The ruling military elite assigned the architect of the 24
th
January Decisions Turgut Özal
–a former World Bank worker, manager in private sector, and high level bureaucrat- as
the new Minister of Economics in the interim government to sustain the economic
program of liberalization and integration to foreign trade. He was indeed keen to continue
the economic reforms. After years, he said, “I have always believed that it is not possible
to solve the problems and to overcome the crisis without a transformation, a massive
restructuring. It is possible only by increasing exportation, industrialization, new
infrastructure, and acting simultaneously with the World. I have always believed this”
(Barlas 1994: 14). Özal won the first post-coup democratic elections and became prime
minister in 1983. Therefore, from the 24 January Decisions (1980-1983) to his two terms
of government (1983-1989) and presidency era (1989-1993) Özal was the first and
foremost designer, engineer, guiding force, and the legitimate political authority behind
the neoliberalization process of Turkey.

Özal’s neoliberalizing years inevitably transformed the whole social organization and
cultural life in Turkey while creating a new market-oriented, ‘free’ economy and a new
57
reconfiguration of state apparatuses. The Turkish society experienced an ‘opening up’
(Farrer 2002) especially through the dissolving étatiste (statist) ideology, the
disempowerment of the oligarchic bureaucracy, and the decline of obsolete and inflexible
state institutions. As Aihwa Ong elucidates neoliberalism is “a new relationship between
government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical
and nonideological problems that need technical solutions” (2006: 3). Everyday life as
well as cultural expressions and identities in Turkey were oppressed, depoliticized and
gradually translated into a language of ideology-free multiculturalism, while an
artificially homogenous public, which desperately aimed material and technological
development and enrichment, was constituted in public discourses. Within this apolitical
and non-ideological social space, tropes like liberalization (serbestleşme), transformation
(transformasyon), free market (serbest pazar), privatization (özelleştirme),
democratization (demokratikleşme), mobility (hareket), competition (rekabet), flexibility
(esneklik), lunge (atılım), entrepreneurship (girişimcilik), seizing the era (çağı
yakalamak), surpassing the era (çağ atlamak), integration (entegrasyon), and opening up
to the world (dünyaya açılmak) as well as the negative connotations such as inflation
(enflasyon) and corruption (yolsuzluk) became central concepts of everyday speech
during the establishment of the neoliberal Turkey in the 1980s. Modernity and modern
values had long been desired and yearned by Turks (Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997;
Bozdogan 2002; Ozyurek 2006). Özal was introducing neoliberalism and neoliberal
policies that he choreographed as the ultimate prescription to the belated Turkish
modernity. Actually, Özal’s solution was presented as the only pathway, the last chance
58
to be a part of global modernity. Therefore, citizens of the Turkish state would finally be
able to grasp modernity and become contemporary by following Özal and the Özalist
discourses of Turkish neoliberalization.

Figure 2: Hisarbank advertisement.
A symbolically significant full-page newspaper advertisement from the Özal years: The
astute entrepreneur is now happy with his bag full of money although he did not work
thanks to the high interest rates. “Last year I opened an account at Hisarbank and today I
am rich with the interest. I am in love with my bank. My bank is Hisarbank: A bank like
a castle.” Hurriyet, 07-01-1981

59

While Margaret Thatcher lucidly expressed for the British context that “economics are
the method, but the object is to change the soul,” (Harvey 2007: 23) a new type of ideal
citizenship and subjectivity was drawn through appraisals of individualization,
utilitarianism, and pragmatic adaptability in Turkey. Özal designated and promoted a
novel model of the neoliberal subject who (particularly ‘he’) was smart enough to
become rich immediately, who can calculate the circumstances and risks effectively, and
who can disobey or bypass the law when necessary for his (and his only) further material
or symbolic benefits. Özal defended the principle of ‘economic punishments for
economic crimes’ (Onis 2004) which legitimates contravening law or social norms in the
name of economic competition. This extreme laissez-faire attitude was symbolized by his
words “my [state] officers know how to conduct” or “my [state] officers knows how to
get things done” (benim memurum işini bilir), which hint that the state officials and
bureaucrats can, or actually do, receive bribe instead of complaining from their low
salaries or expecting increases in their paychecks. Accordingly, it is the officers’ own
problem of surviving with their given low budget, so they should find a solution instead
of being passive receivers from the state. An opportunist, pragmatist, pseudo-capitalist
type of citizen (who is increasingly goal-, success-, and wealth-oriented) was
implemented against the previously hegemonic ideal of citizen who celebrates the
Republican humbleness, national(istic) ideals, obedience to law and tradition, loyalty to
the state, and prioritizing internal peace instead of material abundance. ‘Anything could
be done to get rich’ (zengin olmak için her yol mübah), ‘to become rich immediately’
60
(köşeyi dönmek, literally to turn the corner) and ‘giving one and getting three’ (bir koyup
üç almak) became expressions of common desires and dreams of large parts of society
throughout the “Özal decade” throughout the 1980s (Gurbilek 1992; Gurbilek 2001; Onis
2004).

Figure 3: Privatization advertisement.
Another full-page newspaper advertisement by the Office of Prime Minister in order to
gain popular support for the structural adjustment program: “The greatest economic
reform of the history of our republic”. Privatization (özelleştirme) is promoted with the
motto “The genuine owner of country has a word in the economy.” Hurriyet, 10-21-1987
61

Distancing from the étatiste (statist) ideologies, decentralizing the state apparatuses in
social life, privatization, liberalization in the economy, and endeavors to integrate to the
Western world brought certain forms of relaxation, democratization, and freedom in
social and cultural life in Turkey as well as an increasing recognition to the concept of
human rights. Not only was the Turkish economy adjusted in order to be a part of the
global market, but also popular culture and everyday life were transmogrified through the
decreasing levels of the state domination and censorship; permits to import various
consumer goods and technologies; construction of highways and promotion of auto-
mobilities; establishing infrastructure for mass international tourism; celebration of the
consumption boom; and wide circulation of more liberal ideas in every domain of social
life from Islam to sexualities (Altunisik and Tur 2005; Bugra 2003). Some historians
called this period as “the third republic” (Zurcher 1993; Kalaycioglu 2005). When he was
the president, the reformist Özal performed his routine military ceremony in shorts and
flip-flops instead of official suits in order to symbolically destroy the militaristic
authority over civilian politicians in the post-coup environment. His wife Semra Özal was
drinking alcohol and smoking in public places, wearing outstanding costumes, and
actively participating in her husband’s social and political life as well as organizing her
own as a chairperson for a charity group. She was trying to embody the new modern
Turkish woman, while the famous transsexual singer Bulent Ersoy, who was banned from
singing in Turkey by the military government in 1981, was freed and started giving
concerts open to the public in 1987. The first private television channel of the country
62
started to broadcast in 1989 even before the law permitted it by Özal’s direct personal
support. Other television channels and radio stations followed the first one during early
1990s. What else was repressed under the strict state control on cultural life and politics
surfaced (including issues of sexuality, gender, love and eroticism; political torture;
human rights; the Kurdish existence; the Alevi identity; the fundamentalist-Islamist
resurgence; the notion of varoş and lower class cultures including the arabesk music
which was also banned by the state) through the liberalization of broadcasting.
Multivocality emerged in public discussions of democracy and the slogan ‘Speaking
Turkey’ (konuşan Türkiye) became extremely popular (Gurbilek 1992; Gurbilek 2001;
Bali 2007).

Although the opening up process in the economic field had nearly been completed, at
least in theory, in the mid-1990s, there were still serious gaps, misuses, disfunctionalities,
and embezzlements in the national economic regime and its political articulations.
Among these, erroneousness, the governments’ increasing spending without sufficient
foreign currency stock, lack of legal infrastructure, unbalanced international loans and
accumulating debts, uncontrollable public spending to sustain the state’s economic
initiatives, and the crisis in the banking system can be listed (Yeldan 2003; Onis 2004).
These different but overlapping factors triggered two great national economic crises in
1994 (devaluation of TL about %30) and in 2001 (interest rates increased up to %7500
per night, the Turkish economy had -%7.5 annual growth rate) in addition to grave
63
impacts of the Asian (1998) and Russian (1999) economic crisis (Kazgan 2008; Yeldan
2003).

Figure 4: Pan Am advertisement.
Another newspaper advertisement that reflects the desires, motivations, and anxieties of
the early neoliberalizing Turkey: Connectivity with the rest of the World, speed, and
prosperity. It reads, “Today, the only 747-Jumbo flights start from Istanbul to the entire
World with Pan Am! The Pam Am Experience cannot be outclassed.” Hurriyet 04-26-
1982

The Islamist Tayyip Erdogan won the 2002 general elections and became Prime Minister.
He and his political cadre followed the new economic program that was prepared by the
64
former World Bank economist Kemal Dervis. This new program was the last step taken
by the Turkish economy in terms of the completion of privatization (Okten 2006) and the
process of neoliberalizing virtually everything, such as the state’s spending, welfare
system, healthcare organization, agricultural sector, banking system, and autonomous
position of the Central Bank among others. Erdogan governments redefined the functions
of the welfare state as well as the public expectancies from it through its unfailing
popularity among wide segments of the electorate (Bugra 2008). During the Erdogan era
(2002-present) inequality and mass poverty were normalized, depoliticized, and became
an inseparable part of everyday lives through certain strategies of the state such as
delivering free schools books to all students in public education or giving food packages
and coal sacks to millions of households around the country especially before the
elections. The welfare state was juxtaposed, if not replaced at all, mostly with various
transnational Islamist social solidarity and support organizations (Bugra 2008; Erdogan et
al. 2007).

The Turkish economy was stabilized with the help of the economic restructuring plan
after 2002 and constantly high growth rates were achieved until the mid 2008 (Altug and
Filiztekin 2006b). Meanwhile, a distinction between ‘the real sector’ manufacturing,
which is sometimes called ‘the real economy’ (reel ekonomi), and the evil, immoral,
untrustworthy finance sector was constructed while agriculture and service sectors turned
discursively invisible in the discourses of journalists, economists, high bureaucrats, and
politicians. This pop-economics discourse is highly linked with economic crises that
65
Turkey experience frequently. The most significant signifier of an economic crisis is still
the image of a shut down factory and not (or when there is, secondarily and marginally)
an empty shopping mall, a bankrupted insurance agency, or a farmer who could not make
money out of his harvest.
26
Although manufacturing is discursively underlined as the real
sector, data demonstrates that service sector is currently the biggest segment in terms of
economic size in Turkey: Service sector takes sixty five percent while manufacturing
nineteen percent, construction five percent, finance four percent, and agriculture seven
percent of the gross national product (GNP) according to the National Planning
Institution (DPT) numbers for 2008. In terms of employment, approximately twenty five
percent of the population is working in agriculture, twenty percent in manufacturing, five
percent in construction, and fifty percent was in services in 2008
27
. In accordance with
the simultaneous industrialization and deindustrialization processes of Turkey,
agricultural employment decreased about %13 and construction sector employment
decreased about %5, while employment in manufacturing increased %37 and service
sector employment increased about %61 between 1988 and 2003 (Tunali and Baslevent
2006). Another crucial ‘fact’ about the contemporary Turkish economy is the high

26
Official numbers dispute with this public image that equalizes economic crisis with
manufacturing. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (http.www.turkstat.gov.tr)
urban unemployment reached to sixteen percent in August 2009 and almost half (forty
eight percent) of the currently unemployed people had jobs in the service sector. People
who had job experiences in other sectors including manufacturing, agriculture and
construction shares the rest of the unemployed people in Turkey. With these numbers, it
may be possible to conclude that the last economic crisis (started to be felt in Turkey in
Fall, 2008) hit the service sector and its employees hardest.

27
Ratios are from the official National Planning Institution website,
http://www.dpt.gov.tr/PortalDesign/PortalControls/WebIcerikGosterim.aspx?Enc=83D5
A6FF03C7B4FC90748F8888CFBDA9. Accessed on 08/21/2009.
66
unemployment rates (Altug and Filiztekin 2006b). The characteristics of this ‘jobless
growth’ include low inflation and high growth rates, high and persisting rates of
unemployment
28
, and the demographic pressures of the excessive numbers of young
people, which is named as ‘the youth bulge’ (Ozbay 2009a). According to Ferhunde
Ozbay, the number of young people (aged between 15-24) is stabilized around 13 million
after the year 2005. Hence, my informants and other members of their generation are
facing with the debilitating problems triggered by the demographic factors (they are too
many young people), high unemployment rates (there are not enough jobs for all) as well
as the deep and persisting social inequality, which is basically stemming from (or,
reproduced in) the public education system (Duygan and Guner 2006).
29

“Neoliberal populism” (Onis 2004) under the rule of charismatic leaders in order to
mitigate the compelling social effects of neoliberalization and the sustainability of
structural readjustment started with Turgut Özal thirty years ago and came to the present
with Tayyip Erdogan. Özal, an educated engineer who had work experiences in the
United States and could speak in English, and his wife with her flamboyant lifestyle

28
According to the official data of the State Statistical Institution, unemployment rate
within the labor force is %12-13 in 2009 (www.turkstat.gov.tr). However, it has always
been emphasized in the news media that real numbers of unemployed people can double
the official rates since many (especially women) do not officially look for work, i.e.
going to the state offices and filling forms for finding a job.

29
Ozbay (2009a) shows how public education system in Turkey is incapable of placing
millions of high school graduates into university education. Every year, approximately
1.500.000 young people try to enter universities and fail. Some try their chances in the
exam again while the majority of them (including most of my informants in the retail
sector) start to search for a job immediately after they fail in the university entrance exam
with feelings of failure, hopelessness, and impotency.
67
became representatives of the long desired modernity, globalism, and to a certain extent
Americanism in Turkey. Erdogan, on the other hand, educated in less prestigious
religious schools, had no previous contact with the Western world, cannot speak in
English (but he is fluent in Arabic) and his Islamic-style veiled wife with their
conservative lifestyle turned out to symbolize a shift in Turkey’s orientation from the
West to the East (or, from European modernity to Islamic nostalgia of the Ottoman
golden-age) and the strongest reinsertion of Islam in social life after the Menderes
governments of 1950s. Thus, the neoliberalizing economy and the increasingly Islamic
everyday routine are the two significant contexts that inform my informants’ daily lives
and identities in the late 2000s.

Istanbul: Make-Believing a Global City

Istanbul emerged as the singled out urban exposition of Turkey’s transformation from the
national-developmentalist country to a globalizing, neoliberal one in the last thirty years.
This process is characterized by the gradual withdrawal of Ankara, the Turkish capital
city, from the decision-making mechanisms and public funds of the city and the rise of
the local government (Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the private companies it
owns) and transnational capital via both direct investment as well as cooperation with
Turkish companies. While there are intersecting and sometimes conflicting systems of
governmentality across different scales (i.e. urban and local, national, global) co-exist in
68
the city, Istanbul turned out to be an ungovernable city because of its monstrous size and
enduring socio-cultural and spatial polarization.

According to the World Bank numbers, Turkey’s economy is among the world’s 20
largest.
30
The city of Istanbul has a share of more than 26% of the national economy. In
terms of demography, which is crucial in understanding Istanbul’s current position and
circumstances, Turkey’s population is approximately seventy-one million while
12.600.000 people live within the relatively small Istanbul municipality borders
31
in 2008
according to the Turkish Statistical Institute numbers.
32
In other words, almost 18 percent
of the citizens of the Turkish State reside in Istanbul. In terms of density, while the
average of Turkey is 91 people per one-kilometer square, for Istanbul this number is

30
www.worldbank.org.tr.
The Turkish economy is also the 7
th
largest among the European countries in terms of
disposable income and consumption expenditure volumes in 2008 (Research for the
Retail Market and Shopping Centers in Turkey) although there are serious ZIPs in
income distribution as well as regional inequality (Kurmus et al. 2006; Senesen 2004).

31
This number excludes people who live within the neighbor municipalities, including
Tekirdag and Izmit, while they come to Istanbul for work or leisure purposes on a
regular, even daily basis (Ozbay 2009b). For example, half a million people resides in the
closest eastern neighbor of Istanbul, Gebze (a heavy industrial town that I lived for four
years) and visits Istanbul frequently. Therefore, including people from the surrounding
cities, business people, undocumented workers, and tourists, we are talking about almost
15 million people in the greater Istanbul region. At the regional level, this is an
approximately 250-kilometer-long {155 miles} urban corridor that starts at Tekirdag on
the west and ends at Sakarya on the east while the city of Istanbul and the strait is located
at the middle. When considered as the center of its surrounding regional development, the
urban experience of Istanbul looks similar to the formation of some of the Latin
American meZIPolises like Mexico City and Rio/Sao Paolo Extended Metropolitan
Region (Davis 2007: 5).

32
www.turkstat.gov.tr.
69
9000. Istanbul, my ethnographic site, is the densest, economically most developed but at
the same time the most unequal, busiest, and culturally most heterogeneous, complex and
vivid city in Turkey.

Figure 5: Map of Istanbul
The City of Istanbul with an emphasis on rising business districts including Levent,
Etiler, Maslak, and Sisli where shopping malls also concentrate. The two major highway
systems and the bridges over Istanbul strait that connect the two sides of the city can be
seen. (Resource: Colliers Market Report 2008)

Having an imperial inheritance as well as ‘geographical and demographic disunity’
(Keyder 1999a: 5), Istanbul had always been a city of migration, especially after 1950s.
33

33
Keyder (1999: 12) shows that in 1973, “44 percent of all private manufacturing
establishments employing more than ten workers were located in Istanbul, accounting for
51 percent of total employment in Turkish private industry.” Thus, long before the
70
However, the post-1980 migrations to the greater Istanbul region exceeded previous
waves of migrants. Istanbul’s population was over one million in 1950, four million in
1975, and more than twelve million in 2008 (Keyder 1999b). The forced and voluntary
migrations of the last 30 years multiplied the city’s population by four times (Ozbay
2009b). These millions of newcomers to the city formed vast illegal squatter settlement
areas of informal and illegal housing (in Turkish gecekondu, and later varoş) at the
previously uninhabited northern, eastern, and western outskirts of the formal, zoned,
legally planned neighborhoods within the old core of Istanbul –around the coasts of the
Istanbul Strait (the Bosphorus) and Marmara Sea.
34
Especially after the construction of
the second bridge on Istanbul Strait that connects the European and the Asian sides from
the northern border of existing dwellings at 1987, immense unoccupied land owned by
the government became available for illegal and informal constructions for the recently
migrated people under the supervision and silent approval of local politicians. Today, the
neoliberal Istanbul of late 2000s seems like an atomized nucleus of recurring urban
problems of Turkey including unbalanced and unplanned rapid urbanization, gigantic
squatters and shantytowns, insufficient infrastructure and lack of public services,
unceasing unemployment and high urban poverty, the rise of informal economy including
housing, and deep social and cultural exclusion based on class, ethnic, religious and
political reasons (Keyder 1999a; Keyder 2005; Yukseker 2003; White 2004).

implementation of neoliberal policies, Istanbul was a center of attention for job seekers
from smaller cities of Anatolia.

34
For a detailed portray of such overnight constructions, see Neuwirth 2006.
71
In contemporary Istanbul, one of the emerging issues is urban mobility, in which the
homogenization of most neighborhoods and even of the larger districts (administrative
‘cities’, in Turkish ilçe) takes place (Ozbay 1997; Ozbay 2009b). Accordingly, central
districts like Beşiktaş, Şişli, and Kadiköy receive educated and upper-middle class
residents from peripheral districts of Istanbul and from other cities, while peripheral
districts (such as Esenyurt, Pendik, Ümraniye) receive relatively uneducated, displaced or
financially disadvantaged people especially from rural areas of Anatolia. Voting behavior
is also shaped regarding the class and educational patterns of inhabitants of different
districts. The central right-Islamist AKP wins elections in almost all peripheral districts
of the migrant Istanbul and the central left-secularist CHP wins in almost all central
districts of the old, well-established Istanbul since the mid-1990s.

Beginning from the late 1980s, some of the previously insignificant corners of the
peripheral zones of Istanbul were suburbanized. They were appropriated and articulated
to the city by the middle classes via both ‘mega-projects’, such as artificial towns with
social facilities, initiated by the state (i.e. Ataköy, Bahçeşehir, Ataşehir) and privately
owned, luxurious, gated conglomerations called site, for example in Beylikdüzü, Akfırat,
Göktürk, and Çekmeköy (Oncu 1997; Bartu Candan and Kolluoglu 2008). Class identity
has a certain spatial characteristics in Istanbul depending on one’s current location in one
of the central, suburban, or peripheral districts, and sometimes on the basis of specific
neighborhoods and streets. Therefore, where a person lives (in which district or
neighborhood of Istanbul) more than where she grew up, works, hangs out, or visits
72
frequently, have the first and foremost signifier of the class position of this person. I will
talk about the effects of location in my informants’ lives in Chapter 5.

The majority of the officially uninhabited zones that were not taken up by state initiatives
or private developers left out for immigrants’ housing needs. Newcomers build enormous
shantytowns (slums) most of the time starting at the borders of the legal, formal housing
zones and ending at the natural barriers such as lakes, mountains, and the sea. After the
1960s the first examples of these squatter settlements were named as gecekondu (literally,
‘built overnight’). The word gecekondu and its multiple uses in public discourse had
senses of ephemerality (that it is a temporary solution, they will integrate to the formal
city life), liminality (they arrive from rural areas and before integrating to the city they
are getting used to urban life at the edge of it) and illegitimacy (this is illegal to build
these houses and the state can appear at any time to punish). The terminology around
gecekondu shifted in the late 1980s to a more hostile, otherizing, and belittling discourse
as they outnumbered the residents of the formal Istanbul. Now, people who live in the
gecekondu regions were hailed as maganda, kıro, or hanzo (roughly ‘redneck’ or ‘hick’)
and lately varoş by the middle classes and the established Istanbulites (Istanbullu
35
) who
construct and consolidate their identity in contradistinction to varoş (Oncu 1999; Oncu
2002; Erman 2004). Here is a quote from cultural critique Yildirim Turker’s (2005) piece

35
According to a large quantitative study done in 1999, fifty five percent of residents in
Istanbul see themselves as Istanbullu (Istanbulite) while the rest do not. Fifteen percent
also think that “squatters, immigration, and informal housing” is the most important
problem of the city (Kongar 1999: 121-145).
73
titled “Who owns this city?” depicting the hostility towards varoş and their compulsory
indifference against this attitude:
Some members of the powerful elite wants to transform Istanbul,
which they designated as a chic world city as appropriate to its
reputation: from struggles of benefit, sharp inequality, and its
varoş zones to a city like a diamond that all of its stones are
painted and all of its streets flowered. These members of the elite
are bothered by the dumb of the varoş who are out of urban
circulation, who hide themselves while looking at the city from its
margins, and who keep growing without listening what is told to
them. Having many unreachable hills and unconquerable castles,
and revealing itself to varoş people only in national holidays,
İstanbul presents its compatriot status only for [who has] fame or
wealth. Nasty varoş kids and thief varoş youngsters with their
crowded families become more and more visible within the city.
They do not have a desire to prove their İstanbulite identities
either. They know that they will never look good enough within
this city even if they would be ameliorated and disciplined.

For his part, Gunduz Vassaf (2005) marks the pessimistic future of the social polarization
in the city: “The governments –who turned Istanbul into an unlivable city, who
sympathized slum people with promises of heaven, who got bribes from constructions of
condominiums, who measures their power through new skyscrapers, who marketed the
city to tourists and investors- are not aware of where they push the future youth of
Istanbul which is surrounded with slums and gated communities […] They are not aware
of the abysses between different groups of youth in urban life, that [religious] belief and
consumption may not be enough to bring peace and harmony, and how they divide youth
which is presented as the future of the country.”

74
Another piece from the pop-sociologist Can Kozaoglu’s depiction of the change from
squatter (gecekondu) to varoş is: “A liminal life between the rural and the urban had been
experienced in the shantytowns [gecekondu mahallesi]. The rural had lost its influence to
a certain degree by time; however, it had never been lost at all. The new varoş areas are
parts of the city while they lack many classical attributes of urban life. They navigate a
unique urban life at the margins of the city” (Kozanoglu 2001: 47). Therefore, denizens
of varoş neighborhoods experience stigmatization, social exclusion, and marginalization
within the city especially through accelerating social and cultural polarization, this
formation is not a complete isolation, insularity, ghettoization, or ‘hyperghettoization’ as
encountered in some United States metropolises and ‘cités-ghettos’ in Paris (Wacquant
2008).

75

Figure 6: Levent Business District.
A view from the Levent business district where office towers, luxury residences and
shopping malls (including two that I worked in) neighbors lower-middle class residential
areas. (Picture from www.milliyet.com.tr -accessed on 03/13/2009)

Hence, varoş is the most important and permanent name among similar others given by
the middle-class, tax-paying, law-abiding resident-citizens of Istanbul, or as Norbert Elias
puts it ‘the established’ (Bauman and Lay 2001: 33) to the illegal squatter settlement
neighborhoods around the central districts of the Istanbul metropolitan area and to the
migrant people who built houses there and worked in the temporary jobs in the informal
sector (White 2004). The term varoş was used in a sense of border-work in order to draw
76
boundaries between the Istanbulites
36
, which denotes qualities such as being ‘modern’,
urbanized, secular, westernized versus the peasant, insular, religious, uneducated classes
that lack certain forms of cultural capital to amalgamate within the urban culture. In this
sense, varoş became synonymous with a regressive, ‘pre-modern’ subjectivity that is
abjected and disenfranchised. “[T]he immigrant operates as a repository of negative
attributes, through whom the refinements and distinctions of being an Istanbulite is
reflexively understood. On the other, the immigrant operates as the invading outsider,
whose unjustified presence in the city establishes, by extension, a seamless chronology
for Istanbulites as the basis of their authenticity and moral superiority.” (Oncu 1999: 97)

In the 1990s, the term varoş started to designate urban poverty instead of backwardness
and rurality while people living in varoş areas were increasingly identified as the
‘threatening Other’ (Erman 2004; Demirtas and Sen 2007). Varoş was constructed as a
space where fundamental Islamism, Kurdish separatism, illegality, criminality, and
violence met. Through media representations, varoş was otherized in terms of culture,
economy, ethnicity, and politics. Accordingly, the ‘dangerous’ varoş quarters of the city
housed beggars, terrorists, gangsters, smugglers, and other components of the informal
economy (Etoz 2000). At the same time, inhabitants of varoş reclaimed and appropriated
the word as a way to identify their own cultural position distinctly from the Istanbulite.

36
Ayse Oncu underlines the border-work performed by the circulation of the term
Istanbulite (Istanbullu): “In a metropolis of numerous and fluctuating plurality of cultural
hierarchies, the word Istanbullu [Istanbulite] stands guard over the boundary between
high and popular culture.” (1999:96)

77
For the first time, ‘varoş culture’ appeared not as a humiliating discourse directed
towards the varoş people, but as a resurgent medium to voice their own subjectivity.

Today, Istanbul seems socially, culturally, economically, spatially, and politically
segregated, divided, and polarized between the middle class Istanbulites, or ‘the White
Turks’ (Arat-Koc 2007), and the varoş segments of the city. In the city, “A two-tier
system emerged and the two spheres grew apart whenever lifestyles and consumption
patterns could be segregated […] It might be more realistic to think of Istanbul, in terms
of its economic transformation and employment structure, as not a ‘dual city’ but a
‘divided city’. In one part of it global material flows operate, whether they be formal or
informal, and bring about the expected results of class formation, consumption patterns,
and employment creation. However, there is also a second part in which denizens largely
remain immune to these flows; material life is conducted under the old patterns of
regulation, in the informal sector, in shantytowns, in centers in the periphery that might
as well be separate towns, using networks deriving from the preimmigration world and its
urban transformation” (Keyder 1999a: 24-25). In this context, Caglar Keyder proposes to
examine social inequalities in the global cities in ‘the third world’ of transformation into
the neoliberal capitalism via the concept of ‘social exclusion,’ which “refers to a failure
of social integration at economic, political, and cultural levels… Within the urban
context, social exclusion also connotes spatial segregation and consisting inequality in the
experience of space” (2005: 128). The concept of social exclusion has been designated to
express the complexity and combinations of exclusionary processes, formulated as “the
78
denial (or non-realization) of the civil, political, and social rights of citizenship” (Byrne
2005: 2). Thus, instead of a ‘state of poverty’, social exclusion denotes a dynamic,
changing process that is constantly reproduced by institutions, policies, and actors (Byrne
2005; Munck 2005).

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, local municipality and national governments
repositioned and reordered Istanbul in order to better satisfy expectations from a global
city –or, more realistically, a regional node. While (infra-) structural steps were taken
such as modernizing and enlarging the city airport, constructing a second bridge on the
Istanbul Strait, and building new broad streets and boulevards passing through the city,
Istanbul was rapidly opened to a new digital, financial, and global economy with the
establishment of a stock exchange market, increased funds to exercise localized
governance, the rise of modern private office spaces in new business districts (still
expanding), the initiation of urban renewal projects, the emergence of branch offices of
foreign banks and finance companies, constructions of glamorous five stars hotels,
erecting Western-style shopping malls, and introduction of the global retail and fast-food
brands. After long decades of being abandoned and uncared for by both national
governments and international actors, Istanbul was remembered and represented as an
accessible, consumable, business-friendly global(izing) city which “emerged as the
showcase and gateway for Turkey’s new era of integration into the world scene […]
beyond orientalist clichés” (Keyder 1999a: 15-17).

79
While most of the urban studies literature on Istanbul focused on the living conditions,
social arrangements, physical environments (i.e. housing, immigrant networks, violence,
poverty) of the varoş neighborhoods (for example Erder 1996; Isik and Pinarcioglu 2002;
Erdogan et al. 2007; Erman and Eken 2004), another group of researches studied up
exclusively upper-middle class neighborhoods and their ‘habitus’ (for example Maggonul
2005; Perouse and Danis 2005). On the other hand, some scholars tried to develop
different frameworks in order to better comprehend the urban dynamics through the
overlapping segregation and exclusion processes. For example, Ayse Oncu (1999; 2002)
looked at representations of varoş people in upper-middle class youth magazines, Meral
Ozbek (1997) examined arabesk music’s urban travels in middle-class atmospheres, and
Ayfer Bartu Candan and Biray Kolluoglu (2008) comparatively analyzed upper class
residential enclaves and a project of public housing where people from varoş areas were
forcefully relocated.
37

In this context, shopping malls were presented and broadly interpreted as one of the
connective public spaces in the city. In Keyder’s words the “the two poles of the social
spectrum,” in Istanbul are the “globalized spaces of commerce and leisure […] and
secluded residential areas on the outskirts of the city” (2005: 124). Although such a
division within urban life is verified by a number of studies, there are also apertures
through which different groups encounter and share social and physical spaces even when

37
Although her research took place in Ankara, Gul Ozyegin (2001; 2002) also puts a
light to the mediation between modern urbanites and migrants varoş through her study of
‘the doorman’ of the apartment buildings and cleaning ladies that middle classes hire.
80
they are playing radically different roles and attaching contradicting meanings to their
interactions. At a global basis, as David Byrne (2005: 116) notes, “There is a mass of
poor people and a mass of poor work.” His analysis of poor work includes ‘pink-collar’
jobs that consist of “the mass of personnel service, catering, and related employees with
low wages and poor working conditions”. So, shopping malls as cohabitated,
heterogeneous spaces for increasingly disconnected parts of the urban public in Istanbul
and the ‘pink-collar’ jobs that the socially excluded varoş youth struggle to take as well
as their desires, targets, and investments attached to these sorts of jobs provide a point of
entry into the multidimensional urban relations, negotiations, and mobility across the
layers of urban segregation.

Shopping Malls: Spaces of a Non-Western Modernity

Contemporary Istanbul is a city of shopping malls. It is difficult to decide whether
shopping malls are imitating the city and they create simulated urban environments, or
the city itself is being transformed to an assemblage of such hyperspaces like shopping
malls, luxurious private hospitals, gated residential areas, airports and other
transportation hubs, and the new off-city private school campuses. Shopping malls are the
most crystallized, materialized, and visible manifestations of urban segregation and social
polarization. They represent at least two different but actually related social phenomena:
First, a globalizing, and simultaneously Westernizing, Europeanizing, Americanizing,
modernizing urban culture and economy; and second, the unavoidable interaction of
81
various classes (and their cultural hierarchies of taste) such as the globalized, upper
classes who use these spaces for consumption and recreation purposes, and the lower-
middle classes who work there to serve the professional flâneurs and flâneuses.

The first modern shopping mall Galleria, consisting of 43,000 square meters, opened in
1988 with a celebration, which Prime Minister Turgut Özal also participated. This new
‘palace of consumption’ was housing many retail stores of local and global brands, the
first Printemps department store, offices, fast-food restaurants, cafés, an ice-skating rink,
and an entertainment center for children. It realized Özal’s decade-long efforts to
liberalize the country, integrate the economy into global trade, and cultivating a taste of
modern consumerism. The opening of Galleria was symbolically articulated to Özal’s
reforms for a neoliberal transformation from an underdeveloped and impoverished
country to a prosperous, flourishing one in which globalism and consumerism prevails.
With everything ‘new’ it signified, Galleria became an ordinary and even outdated
shopping mall after openings of new, more spacious, more comfortable, more luxurious
shopping malls, Capitol and especially Akmerkez, in 1993.

82

Figure 7: Printemps advertisement.
The whole-page advertisement for the French department store Printemps, “A heaven of
shopping,” that was opened in Galleria shopping mall in 1988. While Printemps salutes
Istanbul in French, some of the consumer goods (virtually everything) it sells were flying
with the yuppie customers. Hurriyet, 10/10/1988

Constructions and openings of new shopping malls in different sizes, different targeted
audiences at almost every corner of the city accelerated after this point. Carousel,
Grandhouse, Profilo, Carrefour, Nautilus, Kale, Migros, Metrocity, Cevahir, Uptown,
Mayadrom, Atrium, Capacity, Mass, Town Center, Kanyon, Istinye Park, Meydan,
Olivium, Palladium, City’s, Istanbul Outlet, Viaport, Optimum, Neomarin, Astoria, and
Historia can be listed as the major shopping malls of Istanbul among many others. The
83
gross leasable area in shopping malls in Istanbul was 42.974 square meters in 1988 (only
Galleria) and reached to 1.363.572 square meters in 2007.
38
Almost all of these malls
have numerous retail stores, fast food and international-style restaurants as well as
expensive diners, bistros, cafés, movie theatres, gyms, and other leisure spaces such as
video games arcades, bowling saloons, even bars and night-clubs. In September 2009, the
Istanbul metropolitan region houses seventy-four shopping malls while the rest of the
country have 144. When the projects and constructions will be completed there will be
117 shopping malls in Istanbul at the end of 2011.
39
Although it is not possible to know
exact numbers, I calculate that approximately 400.000 people will be hired in shopping
malls only in Istanbul at the end of 2011.
40

38
In the same period, the gross leasable area in shopping malls in Turkey was 42.974 m2
in 1988 (only Galleria) and reached to 3.518.974 m2 in 2007. In almost twenty years the
leasable space in shopping malls was multiplied by eighty times (Research for the Retail
Market and Shopping Centers in Turkey). On the other hand, the leasable area size in
shopping malls in some European countries with similar population sizes like England,
France, and Germany, has two to three times bigger than Turkey’s, which may denote the
possible growth of leasable size in shopping malls in Turkey in the near future.

39
According to a report prepared by the private company Jones Lang Laselle (2009) and
published by the sectoral website perakande.org
(http://perakende.org/haber.php?hid=1249568392)

40
According to Multi Turkmall (a company that built and manages 25 shopping malls in
Turkey) CEO Levent Eyüboğlu while the smallest shopping malls employ 1000 people,
6000 can work at the largest ones. I took the average 3500 people and multiplied it with
the envisioned number of shopping malls (117) at the end of 2011 in the city of Istanbul.
The numbers probably include managers, sales assistants, security guards, cleaners,
technical staff, cooks, waiters, carriers and others who work at visible or invisible jobs in
shopping malls.
84
At the beginning, shopping malls were presented as the most rational and efficient spaces
to buy consumer goods easier, cheaper, and faster without spending time to move
between different locations. One of the first pedagogies that was taught (or dictated from
above) to Turkish consumer-citizens through the liberalization process was to ask ‘how
much’ for the same consumer good at different places, to compare prices and qualities, to
calculate and find out the best option, and then to buy it. Shopping malls were a simple
solution for such a demanding comparative search since all the stores were under the
same roof although the prices were much higher than the traditional stores on the streets
and in bazaars. Later, shopping malls were transmogrified in the public imagination as
places to visit, to stroll, to see people and being seen by others, to encounter friends, and
to ‘kill time’. Instead of taking part as the basic location in the stories of the rationalistic
and functionalistic shopping, after the mid-1990s, shopping malls adopted the title of
‘field of life’ instead of ‘shopping mall’, or ‘shopping centre’, in order to separate
themselves from the bare act of shopping and reposition themselves as the center of
(social and cultural) life. The newer shopping malls mostly welcomed daylight through
glass domes and transparent ceilings and had much larger corridors, higher ceilings, more
spacious restaurants and cafés. The utmost purpose to go to these places turned out to
socialize and enjoy every single minute instead of fulfilling a task, i.e. buying a particular
need at a cheaper price. Shopping became a secondary function within shopping malls in
Istanbul especially after the late 1990s. Different shopping malls acquired and designated
different identities through advertisements and word of mouth while visitors incorporated
these images and re-constructed their social identities accordingly. Thus, hanging out in
85
the Cevahir Shopping Centre (working class, younger clientele as well as visitors from
rural areas and Arab countries) meant totally different things than spending time in
Istinye Park (older and wealthier frequenters and tourists from the Western world) even
when the event will be exactly same such as having coffee at Starbucks. Where one is,
the location of hanging out (or, shopping) started to mean who one is.

Shopping malls are modern urban spaces in the sense that they bring different groups and
‘strangers’ together with civility, heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism, ambiguity, and
anonymity like the ‘urban life’ of the large and crowded boulevards of the early modern
city (Simmel 1971). However, the unpredictability of intermingling urban crowds is
indeed regulated and controlled in the ‘fortified enclaves’ (Caldeira 1996; 2000) such as
gated residential units, office buildings and shopping malls through latest technologies of
surveillance. Therefore, shopping malls in Istanbul constitute liminal spaces between the
public and private, and between the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In deep contrast
with their competitors, traditional cadde (the street) and çarşı (the bazaar), where the
space is open and uncontrollable, the regulation of climatic conditions, sounds, lights,
safety and cleanness are always marked in shopping malls.
41
The private security officers

41
During 1990s and early 2000s Istanbul was a really violent city in terms of both
terrorist bombings in the public spaces such as squares, bridges, and streets by Kurdish
separatist groups, fundamental Islamists, and Al-Qaeda; as well as numerous cases of
individual purse-snatchers. Shopping malls provided visitors with a guarded and bomb-
free milieu in which they could wander in peace. This violent urban atmosphere helped
shopping malls’ rapid development. On the other hand, this public image of ‘safe
heavens’ was rather destroyed when one person fell from stairs because of low stringers
and died in Cevahir Shopping Centre; when urban legends spread about drug trafficking
in food courts of some shopping malls; when a middle-aged man was stabbed by a male
86
in shopping malls in Istanbul particularly eliminate beggars, the homeless, gypsies, street
children and sometimes transvestites in the entrances.

Shopping malls in Istanbul, especially the bigger, more popular ones within the center
neighborhoods with the upper-middle class clientele such as Akmerkez, Kanyon, and
Istinye Park, formed social mechanisms of regulation over their visitors. In addition to
explicit exclusion of marginalized groups listed above, tactics of an implicit exclusion
based especially on class and ethnicity were developed. Accordingly, members of the
lower-income groups and Kurdish citizens were treated impertinently and they are made
unwelcome and uncomfortable in these shopping malls. They may not be denied access
to the shopping malls at the entrances like gypsies; however they are tacitly manipulated
not to feel belonging these spaces through everyday interactions with the staff. On the
other hand, some other social hierarchies such as gender and age were actively
dismantled in shopping malls. Women are the most significant single group of customers
in shopping malls in Istanbul (followed by families with children, and then men, single or
in groups) and these places are a convenient and proper place that a woman can spend
time, eat, shop, and watch a movie alone. Youngsters are also welcome, especially if they
are from higher classes, therefore they feel free to wander in the corridors, having coffee,

teenager who claimed that he was sexually assaulted by him in Olivium Shopping Mall;
and when the hidden camera view of one street kid was getting beaten by Akmerkez
safeguards was published on the evening news.

87
and spending money on their own.
42
There are other more implicit, tacit mechanisms of
inclusion at work in shopping malls, including the existence of tourists, who are visiting
the city. When local shoppers receive equal treatment with tourists from the shop
assistants, they feel that they are the same with the Westerners and assure their modern
identities.
43
Hierarchies of location can also be undermined in the shopping malls
especially when a wealthy person who is not from Istanbul, and thus is not Istanbulite,
would visit stores and shop from the stores. Sexuality-based social organization is also
more flexible in the shopping malls than it is in most parts of the city. ‘Out’ gay men and
lesbians normally do not have any problems wandering or shopping in the malls.
44

42
Saying this, I think it is difficult to claim most of the shopping malls in Istanbul as
youth spaces because they are highly monitored, controlled, and even repressive places
for young people to feel entitled to act freely and ‘subvert’ the space. Instead of shopping
malls, various youth spaces (cafés, pubs, bars, second-hand bookstores, music stores,
tattoo workshops that are visited mostly by younger segments of population and
definitely not by families) are concentrated in old neighborhoods such as Kadikoy,
Besiktas and Beyoglu.

43
While seeing Western (and mostly Asian) tourists makes local frequenters of the
shopping malls happy and self-confident, encountering with Arab tourists makes them
feel humiliated and discomfited. It is a well-known incident among workers that when an
Arab customer likes an outfit, a Turkish customer, who was trying it before the Arab,
would give it up and leave the store ashamed, thinking she likes the same object with the
supposedly tasteless Arab tourists. Therefore, cosmopolitanism for urban middle-class
Turks is a highly selective perception, and sharing social and physical space only with
some (modern) tourist groups makes them content.

44
I will mention the visibility of gay workers in shopping malls in chapter 6. However,
shopping malls in Istanbul should not be imagined as ‘queer spaces’ in the Western
sense. When gay men or lesbians perform actions to destabilize ‘the heterosexual regime’
of the mall such as kissing each other they will probably be warned by guards. During my
research, as well as my previous tenure of work in the malls, I have never encountered or
heard such a story.
88
Shopping malls emerged as spaces of (post-) modernity counter to the official ‘from
above’ and ‘state-dictated’ sense of modernity that Turkey has experienced since the late
19
th
century (Keyder 1997). Instead of an official state modernity, what shopping malls
construct was a new social experimentation of modernity, under the effects of conflicting
definitions of multiple modernities especially in the Third World, or the Global South
(Gaonkar 2001; Gole 2000). Modernity in the shopping malls is an entirely private
enterprise, not depending on the decisions and desires of the nation-state institutions; but
connected to the multiple webs of rest of the world, and immune to the rising Islamism
within the city and its public spaces since the mid-1990s.
45
The Prime Minister Turgut
Özal’s participation to and appropriation of the opening of the first shopping mall
Galleria was rather meaningful in the sense that global culture and economy is realized in
the shopping malls in Istanbul while the private entrepreneurship prevailed against
protective state developmentalism. The free, non-ideological and apolitical but globalized
individual can now emerge in the new public spaces of consumption.

Istanbulites have loved shopping malls. These are crowded places. I have numbers of
visitors from three shopping malls with rather different customer profile and different

45
Scholars documented how the Islamization of the public sphere especially through the
increasing visibility of covered (veiled) women in the city went together with the
discussions of the Islamization of the public spaces, such as the desire to construct a huge
mosque in the city center, Taksim Square, which was a crucial demand and promise of
Islamist politicians in the 1990s which never came true (Bartu 1999; Navaro-Yashin
2002).

89
locations in January 2009. Capacity, which is a middle-class (B+)
46
mall located in the
suburban Bakirkoy district and opened in 2007, had 1.764.715 visitors. Kanyon, which is
an upper class (A+) open-air ‘life center’ in the central business area of Levent and
opened in 2005, had 825.880 visitors. Palladium, a upper-middle (A) class shopping mall
in the suburban Atasehir in the Anatolian Side and opened in 2008, had 1.534.250
visitors within January 2009. With some temporary exceptions such as national holidays,
shopping malls in Istanbul are open from 10:00 AM till 10:00 PM. However, a mall’s
characteristics (i.e. location, the targeted visitors, nearby attractions) determine the timing
of visitors. While more than half of their visitors enter to Capacity (fifty one percent) and
Palladium (fifty-five percent) between 6:00 PM and 9:00 PM, Kanyon is busiest during
the lunch hours, from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM. Since Kanyon is in the business district, its
weekends are just a little bit more crowded (ten to fifteen percent difference) than
weekdays, the suburban Palladium and Capacity both have at least double (sometimes
four times) more visitors during weekends than regular week days. Unfortunately, there is
no (cannot be) data about gender and age divisions regarding whom visit shopping malls
when. However, very roughly, it can be noted that while in the early mornings the visitors
are older and they tend to be single. As time passes, groups (mostly women and middle
age) start to appear. Afternoons are the most heterogeneous times including youngsters

46
ZIP-Turkey and its Turkish associate Xano Retail Group that I did my research uses a
classification system for shopping malls and street stores regarding their clientele.
Accordingly, there are malls of A+ (high end), A (upper class), B+ (middle-upper class),
B (middle class), and C (lower-middle class) types. The other group that I worked for
before, the Spanish Inditex, also uses a similar system of classification and puts the
locations of stores within an identical hierarchy.
90
and men in addition to middle-aged women. In the evenings there are young to middle
age groups as well as families.

Shopping malls do not only consolidate or reproduce given social identities of shoppers,
but they also present opportunities and tools for active identity-construction as well as
helping the formation of new identifications (Miller et al. 1998). They claim to symbolize
the new ‘ideal lifestyle’ and the new ‘exemplary social life’ of contemporary
neoliberalism: Consumption oriented, individualistic but also family centered, not local
but global, planned and controlled, and of course, gendered although it does not seems so
at the first sight. For example, Capacity shopping mall advertises itself and invites people
from the city to come to the suburban Bakirkoy with a list, which documents the reasons
why people should see Capacity, including a) you can feel Nisantasi
47
, the center of life,
in Capacity; b) it receives daylight from the glass ceiling and shopping here is not
suffocating but pleasurable; c) cafés and restaurants in different floors enable you to take
a rest during shopping; d) while there are branches of traditional restaurants that we all
like to eat there are also diners and night clubs to vitalize Bakirkoy’s night life; e)
Capacity targets people not only from Bakirkoy but also from Etiler, Nisantasi and the
Asian Side of the city; f) it is the intersection point of entertainment with its live music
spaces, movie theatres, and video arcades.

47
Nisantasi is close to the city center Taksim Square. It is a very prestigious
neighborhood with luxury apartments and high-end boutiques such as Gucci and Prada. It
is a symbol of ‘old money’ and the genuine Istanbulite refinement, which may be linked
also to the Ottoman Palace life.

91
While the Capacity shopping mall avows to re-animate the spirit of the old and
prestigious city center and multifarious entertainment in the recently developed suburban
Bakirkoy, the upscale Kanyon focuses on who look for ‘what is new and trendy’ to spend
money. In its bilingual pamphlet, Kanyon is presented as the place of “what is different in
the city” (şehirde farklı olan ne varsa) and continues in English, “Must see! Must do!
Everything!” The four floors are separately organized in the brochure. The first is
introduced, as “Would you like to go to the movie theater or to buy and watch a DVD?
Or, are you hungry? Maybe you are into the gym? Dozens of cafés and restaurants…
Whatever you would like to do is at Kanyon.”
48
And then, in English, it reads, “Good
food fast, an atmosphere that makes eating fun and memorable.” The second floor is
presented as, “The most remarkable brands of Turkey and the World as well as the most
pleasurable shopping is at the open-air Kanyon.”
49
And, in English, the text ends,
“Glamour! Fashion for those with a taste for la dolce vita.” The third floor is promoted
as, “Delighting shopping for you, for your home, and for your children. A different
surprise at each second at Kanyon.”
50
Then, again in English, it reads, “Hide’n Seek! A
Surprise around the corner for everyone.” The fourth floor is offered as, “The newest

48
In Turkish, “Sinemaya mı gitmek istersiniz, bir DVD alıp izlemek mi? Yoksa karnınız
mı acıktı? Belki de spor yapmak istiyorsunuz. Onlarca café, restoran… Canınız ne
çekiyorsa Kanyon’da!”

49
In Turkish, “Türkiye’nin ve dünyanın önde gelen markaları alışverişin en keyiflisi, hem
de açık havada. Kanyon’da!”

50
In Turkish, “Hem siz, hem eviniz, hem de çocuklarınız için keyifli alışveriş… Her an
farklı bir sürpriz… Kanyon’da!”

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trends, bold designs, extraordinary products… Whatever different is at Kanyon.”
51
It
concludes in English as, “Fun & Funky: Dynamic Brands that let you mix and match to
create the latest trend.”

The newest and the most opulent shopping mall in Istanbul is Istinye Park (opened in
2008). In the advertisements it uses its novelty, glamour and the high profile and wider
variety of the stores and restaurants (300 stores including the high-end boutiques, 40
cafés and restaurants –some are the branches of the most expensive ones, and 13 theatres
–one 3D) it houses. While paparazzis are waiting outside to take pictures of celebrities
dining or wandering in the prime shopping mall of the city, it is also publicized as a
‘simulated city’
52
because one section within the mall was arranged as a traditional street
bazaar and public square. In the press bulletin in English, Istinye Park and its sections are
announced as, “It’s different to its customers since the opening day with the different
living spaces in its brand new concepts such as The Fashion District, The Boulevard, The
Square and the nostalgic Market Place […] Istinye Park, where the top-quality, the most
distinguished and famous brands of the world and Turkey have opened their first or
biggest stores, meets all the demands of the customers, who wants to spend a pleasant
day [where] modernity and contemporary meets.” Akmerkez, the first top-notch shopping

51
In Turkish, “En yeni trandler, cesur tasarımlar, sıra dışı ürünler… Farklı olan ne varsa
Kanyon’da!”

52
Kanyon was also underlined as a ‘simulated street’ since it is an open-air shopping
mall. After heavy criticism from visitors under Istanbul’s snowy cold winters, the
managers forgot its ‘simulated street’ character and started to promote the unique
atmosphere it has.
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mall opened in 1993, was also presented with the claim to ‘bring Europe and its
modernity’ to the city. Its advertisement at the newspapers was stating, “You do not have
to go to Europe any more,” because Europe was recreated in Akmerkez (Gokariksel
1998). Thus, the discursive equation of shopping malls with Europe, modernity, and
lately, globality is an important construction regarding how people imagine shopping
malls and why they spend so much time in these consumption sites.

Shopping malls occupy a great role in columns of the daily newspapers in Turkey. These
vivid discussions might present a clue on how the grammar of shopping malls in Istanbul
has a serious place in the popular discourses which try to decode and interpret the new
cultural phenomena embedded in the everyday. Here, I want to recount some significant
examples not from the news pieces that were adopted from numbers and other forms of
‘hard data’ of urban economics; but the opinion pieces written by famous columnists.
These pieces can be analyzed in two parts. The first group of contributions is on the
functioning of shopping malls in the urban life in Istanbul. For most of the time, they
were written in a criticizing, complaining fashion. Here is an example from Gungor Uras
(2007) who points that Turkish economy is not strong enough for the level of
consumption that shopping malls symbolize and encourage: “As understood, our people
will buy imported goods at shopping malls that are owned and managed by foreigners.
They will eat foreigners’ meals; they will drink foreigners’ coffees. Thus, our life will be
more colorful (!) Our people have to have an income to shop from shopping malls.
Income comes from production. We have to produce to provide jobs for the unemployed.
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We will sell what we produce and thus gain money. If we do not produce, what will we
sell and how will we gain money? How will we pay for the goods we buy in shopping
malls?” Eyup Can (2007) deals with shopping malls in terms of urban aesthetics and
complains from the architectural unfussiness, “What do you see when you look at them?
Buildings which say ‘we do not have any differences’, or masterpieces of [architectural]
art that you would have pleasure to visit? More concretely, is there any shopping mall in
Turkey that is discussed with its architectural qualities except Kanyon?” After
expounding how Istinye Park became a space of spectacle to be seen in addition to
performances of ‘killing time,’ Nur Cintay (2009) complaints about the condition of
public restrooms in the mall. “I guess the criteria [of cleanness] here is adopted not from
other shopping malls but from remote oil stations. For example, I do not love Akmerkez
but its restrooms were awarded because they were clean. Restrooms in Kanyon are also
always in good condition. Restrooms in Istinye Park are, on the other hand, so weird and
dirty that you would never want to use; they are also very tight that the door touches the
toilet in such a spacious shopping mall. Do we really deserve this?”

On the other spectrum, most of the newspaper pieces about shopping malls are
explanatory and/or reflective contributions written by famous journalists who are also
important figures in popular culture. For example, Hakki Devrim (born in 1929) recounts
his past experiences in famous European department stores such as Printemps and Hôtel
de Ville in Paris, and states that in the past “I do not remember that we were imagining
that one day we would shop from such big shopping places in Istanbul, too. When we
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think of eating out or going to a movie now these places are the first ones that come up in
our minds. How can you find better places than these in which you can find whatever you
look for, you can wander safely, you can take a rest at a corner, you can drink some tea at
another, you can eat something without spending a lot of money” (Devrim 2007). A
professor of communication and writer at a newspaper, Haluk Sahin (2006) reads
shopping malls (particularly Kanyon, the newest, most popular, and most sumptuous one
of the day) as a signifier of the fragmentation of urban life in the metropolises, “Cultural
segregation in Istanbul started with Turgut Özal and proceeded with globalization. It still
goes on. Subcultures have been creating their own spaces and instead of fighting with
others especially since the Islamists came to power in the local government. I call this
process ‘the confederation of Istanbul’ […] While I was strolling in Kanyon, I thought
that it does not matter how we feel about the old [nostalgic, imperial] Istanbul, it is not
possible to avoid this new Istanbul. Now, there are other Istanbuls.” The philosopher-
writer Gokhan Ozgun (2007) articulates the desire to be at the safe ‘center,’ to stay at the
‘apolitical middle’ amongst the Turks regarding the current political discussions on
reaching a ‘social agreement’ between different groups with the limiting, restrictive, un-
creative consumerist ideology of shopping malls: “I thought that if the last day of the
world would come and Turks would make a spaceship to leave the world, they would
design it as a ‘shopping mall’ [used in English]. All neighborhoods [the meaning also
includes political camps] agreed on a spaceship, on shopping mall, on its design, they are
taking off to the infinity. Places like airports, shopping malls, food chains are named as
‘non-places’ [used in English], the no-places. They are everywhere, but it is meaningless
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because they just look like each other. There is no time in them. The space is full but it is
empty in them.”

Shopping malls in the West can be deemed as “the postmodern islands in the modern
sea,” (Bauman 1996: 27) while in the non-west, where the city is not modern (enough?
not yet?), but actually infernal because of overpopulation, pollution, traffic, poverty,
chaos, and violence, they may signify different meanings regarding the desired and
belated modernity. Hence, to ask what does the relation between the city, shopping,
culture and identity in the Western metropolises (theorized by Simmel and Benjamin and
continues today by Bauman and Featherstone among others) mean for the non-western
megapolises can be pertinent (Abaza 2001). In Bauman’s account, ‘life-as-strolling’, or
“carefully walled-off, electronically monitored, and closely guarded” spaces, are
designed in order to complete transformation from the ‘heroic producer’ to the ‘playful
consumer’: “The stroller had all the pleasures of modern life without the torments
attached […] Now the strolling, once the activity practiced by marginal people on the
margins of ‘real life’, came to be life itself, and the question of ‘reality’ need not to be
dealt any more” (1996: 27). However, for the Istanbulite, shopping malls are not only
places for playful consumption or trivial strolling; but they are possibilities of gendered
and classed self-making processes through spatial relations with the yearned (global)
modernity. They are gates from the painfully ‘real’ infernal urban environment to the
fantasyland of ‘real’ long-lusted desires of modernity, wealth, civility, and distinction.

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Mona Abaza states that the new modern shopping malls in urban Cairo triggers social
heterogeneity, multifarious uses of public spaces by different groups, and hybridization in
cultural tastes amongst various segments of Egyptian society. Istanbul was already
socially and culturally fragmented before the neoliberalization process, but the new
economy (and culture) underlined the existing divisions as well as constructed new ones.
“The polarization caused by globalization is all too real: income levels, lifestyles,
consumption patterns, and, increasingly space have become divided. In some
neighborhoods residents wait in line to buy bread that is a few pennies cheaper; in others
all the glitzy displays of wealth can be found. Luxury sedans proliferate, while homeless
children become more visible on the streets. There are sections of the city where a
photographer could frame a crowd scene and pretend it to be from Kabul; others could
stand in for any modern neighborhood from a European city. In a city such as Istanbul,
where in living memory residential space reflected an interpenetration and coexistence of
different levels of status and class, the separation of space and the exclusionary habitation
that has become the pattern are novel and upsetting” (Keyder 1999c: 195). In this context,
shopping malls do not play the same role as Abaza points out for Cairo. I think shopping
malls in Istanbul are highlighting homogeneity against a mixture of social classes and, in
some cases, ethnicities. When a person visits a shopping mall, she can find people of her
class, status, attribute, and lifestyle. This is the reason she goes to that particular shopping
mall, and she would feel excluded, uneasy, or dislocated in most others. Hence, instead of
heterogeneity, hybridity, and dialogical encounters, shopping malls in Istanbul
reproduces or advances cultural sterilization, social and spatial divisions, and markers of
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class boundaries. Probably, that is the major reason why a foreigner visits a number of
shopping malls (i.e. popular and more à la mode ones) can find no radical disparities but
minor differences, while the same shopping malls have distinct meanings for locals.

The neoliberal urban governance in Istanbul (through the policies and practices of the
strengthened Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, central governments’ support to
Istanbul’s autonomy and private sector’ investment and developments) grew in the
context of the gentrification process, mass-housing projects, the displacement of urban
poor and other marginal groups including gypsies, privation of public spaces as in
shopping malls, and emergent urban alterity and social exclusion. Such a map of
contemporary Istanbul and the role of the shopping mall boom can be grasped through
Ma’s (2001) conceptualization of ‘satellite modernities’. In this framework, there is a
nucleus of high- (or, late-) modernity and there are centers of satellite modernities tied to
the center via multiple connections. Modernity may mean the class status (including
refinement in taste and elegance), order (versus the urban chaos), globality (versus insular
locality), cleanness, technological innovation, and safety. There are opulent, high modern
shopping malls and their strollers on the one hand; and there are ostentatious or
rudimentary shopping malls with their passé, timid, or underprivileged target populations
on the other. The former presents a model, an alluring ideal, in terms of spaces,
workplaces, workers, customers, the lifestyle, and the spirit to the latter. The drive to
become finally modern as well as the neoliberal values, such as rampant individualism,
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wild consumerism, and the fearless ambition to get rich, connect these high modern life-
worlds to the satellite, imitated, and variegated modernities in the non-western city.

Shopping malls in Istanbul do not provide channels for cultural hybridity or inter-class
encounters as they were promised in the public discourses during the 1990s. The
customers (shoppers, strollers, flaneurs) differentiate in their uses of shopping malls
according to their classes and lifestyles that they imagine themselves as well as their
relation to the ideals of modernity. On the other hand, the promise of inter-class
encounters was partially kept through the workers’ lives in the shopping malls. The
workers in the stores were connected to shopping malls through their desires for social
mobility, cultural refinement, and becoming middle-class, modern citizens, ‘White
Turks’. The rest of the dissertation will focus on the workers, sales assistants, in the
shopping malls.

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CHAPTER 3: THE STORE / THE WORKPLACE

Employers are always ready to tell
That the best conditions exist;
It remains to others to find the worst.
Annie Marion MacLean

In this chapter, I will shift my focus to the relations of work and workplace in the setting
of apparel stores in Istanbul. Here, I will use the ethnographic data that comes from my
participant observation at the two ZIP stores in two different shopping malls where I
worked as a sales assistant. I will also make use of interviews that I conducted with retail
workers, managers, and the staff of human resources departments of transnational retail
companies.

When a person decides to buy something she goes to a place to shop. In urban Turkey,
and especially within the Istanbul metropolitan area –as it is shown in Chapter 2, people
increasingly opt to purchase consumer goods in shopping malls. In a shopping mall at a
specific location, consumer choices are shaped according to various criteria, for example,
the balance between price and quality, or the public image of the brand name that is
created through advertisements in the mass media. However, the stores themselves –their
spatial organization, visual attractiveness, the orderliness of the exposition of goods, the
lighting and music within the store, and maybe most significantly, the quality of the
service provided to customers, are crucial in selecting one store over another and
constructing the social meaning for the particular purchase. Everything within the walls
of stores –except prices, quality of goods and the brand’s overall public image- is in the
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hands of retail workers regarding the production of service. Therefore, it would not be
wrong to state that the most significant actors of the biggest and fastest-growing
economic sector, the services and sales, in a deindustrializing economy such as Turkey’s
are retail workers.

There is a strong tradition in social sciences –most particularly the sociology and
anthropology of work, to study the manufacturing workers, who have jobs factories,
workshops and other industrial sites, in order to grasp work culture, class struggles,
identity formation, channels of resistance, and actual conditions of living in large
segments of both industrialized and developing societies.
53
On the other hand, there is
also a growing literature in which scholars make participant observation in different
branches of the service sector in order to explore the shifting dynamics of labor and
inequality in the deindustrializing societies, or in major urban areas.
54
These studies allow
readers to delve into the everyday rhythm and worlds of work of millions of workers and
to grasp the intricate constellations of power, domination, inequality, labor, selfhood,
class, and gender in the organization of the fastest growing economic activity of human

53
See for example, Burawoy 1982; Ong 1987; Yelvington 1995; Milkman 1997; Rofel
1999; Kondo 1990; Salzinger 2003; Fine 2009; Freeman 2000; Collins 2003; Bonacich
and Appelbaum 2000.

54
See for example, Williams 2006; Ehrenreich 2001; Talwar 2002; Miller et al. 1998;
Gay 1996; Sherman 2007; Leidner 1993; Hanser 2008; Hochschild 1983; and McDermott
2006 among others. Surveying the most preeminent readers of the Sociology of Work and
the more recent Workplace Studies reveals this major subdivide between industrial and
service jobs alongside more specialized sectors such as health and information
technologies (IT). See, for example, Wharton 2001; Korczynski et al. 2006; Harper and
Lawson 2003; Grint 2000; Pettinger et al. 2005, among many others.
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societies: the services sector. For a more complete comprehension of the changing
characteristics of the deindustrializing, increasingly service sector oriented, and
incontrovertibly globalizing economies; the lives, cultures, and identities of retail workers
as well as their social and labor relations in the stores and in shopping malls might be
examined and analyzed conscientiously. Such a human-centered, situated, and
ethnographic approach would be a better method for deciphering current modes of
deepening social inequality, instead of constructing the service sector workers as
invisible, unarticulated, and ineffective figurants of sales, numbers, budgets, costs and
profits of local and transnational companies, or national and cross-national economic
‘data’.

“It is Diferent Here, Welcome to the Kids’ Store”:
Getting a Job and the Two Workplaces

I have briefly talked about the process in which I looked for a job at a shopping mall as a
disadvantaged (relatively older and overqualified) candidate in Chapter 1. However, I
was lucky enough to finally be able to get a sales assistantship position at the ZIP store in
the Kanyon shopping mall.

Before my first day at work, I was so tense that I could not sleep. The only thing I knew
was that I would work for the whole day, which is called ‘full’ (as in English) in the
culture of retail stores, between a little earlier than 10:00 AM to shortly after 10:00 PM.
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Although Turks are managing the company in Turkey, ZIP uses the American week that
starts with Sunday while in Turkey a week officially starts at Monday. So, my first
workday was Sunday. This was rather unusual regarding the fact that many people would
escape from retail work after (sometimes during) their first day if it were too compelling
for them. A very busy Sunday instead of a slow Monday or a dead Tuesday would
obviously contribute to the possibility of a newcomer’s instant resignation. I thought that
this must have been a tactic to test the new worker from the very first day and to push her
to decide quickly whether she could do this job or not; staying or leaving. This sense of
being tested even before saying hello to anybody in the store increased my stress.
55

Starting a new job, even for research purposes, brought a serious degree of critical
calculation about one’s own abilities and performance as well as lacks and
insufficiencies. I had my own insecurities. First of all, I was thinking again and again
how I would be able to work in a store after more than four years. I was rather unsure if I

55
Later, I came to realize that my coworkers and informants also felt such anxieties when
they were about to start a new job. They constituted a form of public knowledge about it,
“the first day in a store.” The elements of the first day in a store were quite similar
independent from the location or the type of the store: Nobody knows you and vice versa;
you do not know how to work and what to do when and how; you do not recognize the
important customers and the center office workers to show proper behavior before them;
you have no clue where to eat and hang out; and most significantly in the retail sector,
you cannot predict the moods of the manager and act accordingly. My coworker Sanem,
for example, told me that, “this is not your first job in this business; so, you know how it
goes throughout the very first days at work.”
Despite the fact that my coworkers and the store manager treated me very nicely and
nobody did anything to make me sad, I could not help myself crying in my first coffee
break at Starbucks. I wrote in my notebook that I thought I could not make it, I was too
old or have a too big ego to become a sales assistant again, and even if I would persist
they would fire me soon. Crying for a while at Starbucks worked well and I started to feel
better soon. My eyes were still reddish; but I went back to the store to resume work.
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had all the tolerance, flexibility, patience, outwardness, and cheerfulness as well as bodily
and affective discipline –attributes required for service sector. I was also uneasy with my
age. I was 28 years old and this was not a typical starting age for sales assistantship as
most companies already made it clear to me. A person like me, aged 28, college graduate,
fluent in English, having master degrees both from Turkey and the US was probably not
the best fit for a sales assistantship position, a low-wage and low-status job. As I detailed
in Chapter 1, the only way for me to get such a job was to express a desire that I wanted
to start working at the bottom, learn everything about the stores (or, the art of rational
government within stores, the store-logy, mağazacılık), and then become a manager or a
head-office worker in the retail sector for the future. I was quite sure that was the reason
that they hired me at this age. Age was also significant in the sense of bodily strength. In
2008, I felt myself less powerful to fulfill the various tasks of this job such as standing for
long hours without sitting, or folding hundreds of pieces of clothing that would leave my
muscles with perturbing aches.

With these obstructing feelings in my mind, in addition to the awkwardness for not
knowing when I will have a coffee break or what my schedule was for the week, I went
to my new workplace. It was the ZIP store located in the upscale (A+) Kanyon shopping
mall in the Levent business district. With dolmuş (public ‘minibuses, shuttling between
nodes within the city) Kanyon took 15-20 minutes from my apartment in Beşiktaş, near
the Bosphorus. Kanyon is an open-air shopping mall. Although visitors are mostly
protected from getting wet by rain and snow through glass panels that the management
105
assembles in the winter, it was really cold and windy in the corridors. At 9:30 AM on an
extremely cold Sunday morning Kanyon was possibly the most deserted corner of
Istanbul. Since the shopping mall was not open to the public yet, I saw many cleaners,
mostly women, wearing the same uniform of shiny orange outfits and dark blue
headscarves. After a while, still walking to the store in the long curvilinear corridors of
the mall, I wondered how the headscarf was a part of the uniform. But, most women
cleaners were wearing them and they were just the same color and material –it could not
be a coincidence, headscarf was a part of cleaners’ uniform. It seemed like a big
contradiction with the highlighted modernity and secularity of shopping malls that ‘some’
workers have headscarves as a part of their uniform.

Although I worked at a shopping mall before, and thus I was familiar with the appearance
of an empty, dark shopping mall, it was still strange and estranging as if I was in a place
where I should not have been. Then I saw Starbucks on the bottom floor. It was the only
corner that seemed busy with people in, around, and in front of it. I was curious about
who were these people at Starbucks at such an early hour. Were they managers and
workers of the stores? I sneaked into the ZIP Kids store through the half opened door.
There was no one around in the unlit store, so I headed to the back office where I saw
Deniz, the manager, and a young female worker, Habibe. They were having tea and
chatting in the extremely dark and small back office. The packed space was
simultaneously used as an office for the manager, a locker room for workers, and storage
for garments. Deniz looked younger than me but it came out that she was one year older.
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Later that day I wrote in my notebook that she seemed “everything but a store manager
according to retail sector’s standards as I had been familiar with:” She was a short, plump
woman with very big eyes and dark red, curly hair, she was wearing blue jeans and a very
casual sweatshirt, no make-up on her face; she was talking really fast in a friendly and
funny manner. She was totally different than other store managers that I saw, worked for,
or talked to before. She must have understood what I thought about her from my looks,
she cheerily asked, “Are you thinking what sort of a manager is this?” I smiled and said
“you really look younger,” and she continued, “Here is different than other places,
welcome to the kids’ store, and yes, this is the manager.” My first impression about her
was verified through the period I worked under her supervision and even after I quit. She
was a very smart and focused woman with an exceptional awareness about everything
that was happening around her and her store. Although she seemed unbelievingly honest
to me, and to other workers, it was also detectable that she was conscious of the nature of
her relationship with workers and her mind was always full of thoughts not necessarily
about the issue she was talking about.

I immediately met with most of other workers and we all went to the selling floor to start
working. It was very cold inside since there was no heater at the entrance to stop the cold
weather blowing from outside. Actually, this store did not seem to me like a real store. It
was different from what I previously imagined or experienced as a retail store: It was
cold, while a store must normally be overheated; it was not spacious, while other stores
are usually much bigger than this; it was deserted except the workers, while other stores
107
were crowded with customers; it was totally untidy, although stores are in their neatest
condition in the morning, etc. It was like a bad, topsy-turvy copy of what a pristine,
brightly lit apparel store should really look like.

On the selling floor, everybody got a table and started folding clothes they take out from
the piles. I did not receive any sort of training, not even a basic demonstration of how
should I fold or where should I put the apparel I found. Deniz was amongst us; she was
doing koordinasyon
56
. In order to look interested as well as well informed on the subject
of retailing, I asked her if she had a regular worker for koordinasyon who took care of
redesigning according to the guides that come from the central office. She said she did
not have one because “people at the head office think that this store is not big enough for
a regular koordinasyon person. That’s why I am doing it. Actually, it is not my
responsibility, no other manager in other companies deal with this because we have other
things to do. But, who is going to do this if I am not?” I nodded and thought that this was
my first hour and she was complaining from the head office and the challenges they put
her into, so maybe this showed that I had already passed the initiation process and
became ‘one of them’ all of a sudden. Then, Deniz asked, referring to my past work
experience at Citron, “is it possible for any manager at Citron to deal with
koordinasyon?” I replied, “only when or if they want, but it is really rare since they are
too busy with managing.” She laughed and continued, “Well, since there is nothing to
manage here, I should better keep doing this.” Later, she came near to me and said that

56
Also named as ‘merchandising’ (in English), which means visual coordination of
garments and fixtures, and rearranging a section or the whole store.
108
she was also a sales assistant in the past, when she started to work retail, and then, she
became a second manager at Mango, and finally she transferred to ZIP and became a
store manager here. I did not ask her, but I thought that there must have been a reason for
one to leave Mango (which had big stores, many customers, more prestige, more money)
and come here (seemingly, a much humbler job).

After Deniz left, another worker, Sanem came to the table next to mine. She was 22 years
old and she was the only college student and part-time worker of the store. She asked me
if it was true that I graduated from Bogazici University. We chatted about education and
work life a little bit, while Cihan and Habibe approached us to listen. I was not talking
freely; instead, I was just answering their questions and trying to focus on my work,
folding garments. They said it was really easy to be a student; however it was very
difficult to work in the ‘real life.’ They were talking at the same time without really
listening to each other. One of them started a sentence and another one finished. They
talked about how life was completely different than what their teachers taught at the
school; about how nobody learnt anything at school; and about how one should have
worked at every level to genuinely know the tricks of a job or a subject. And then, they
told me that, “of course, your university is different.” They believed, at the university I
graduated from, they were educating future managers and other high-status workers, and
classes were taught in English. So, their criticism was just for other universities. Then,
Deniz came back and against my expectation, she did not warn us to work harder instead
of chatting. On the contrary, she also participated to the conversation and recounted that
109
she had always been demanding a new worker who could speak in English with foreign
customers. When the human resources told her that they were sending me she did not
believe it and made jokes about it like “there is already a manager here, I did not ask for
another manager, what I am going to do with a Bogazici graduate here?” We all laughed.
It was very clear to me that they were implicitly testing me to see if I was downgrading or
disparaging them since I was educated at a more prestigious school and I was not sure if
they all were collage graduates, although they were probably not. I said that a school is
just like another school and they cannot be really different than each other except small
details. I also added that, I was never a brilliant student when I was a student over there,
which was actually true.

Sanem asked me how I was able to finish the college after I was finally able to enter. I
could not decide what to tell and I said that I was not really ambitious; I studied and just
finished it. Seeing me perplexed, she continued explaining that, her sister was also at
Bogazici University, studying management; nevertheless she had failed in her first two
years. Now, she said, her sister developed a fear that she would not be able to finish it
and she would never graduate. Sanem was really sorry for her sister, and she added that
her sister was seeing a psychotherapist. I mentioned her that my sister had also had
troubles finishing college for many years. Then, I told her that my cousin was teaching at
that department; maybe she could help her sister by counseling about how to study.
Sanem became very happy as if her sister’s problem was solved at that moment and she
gave me a hug.
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After chatting about schools, my coworkers were now asking how, why and when I
worked at Citron. More than asking and learning ‘facts’ about Citron and its employees, I
sensed that, they were actually striving to confirm what they imagined or heard of it,
including how it was difficult to work there, that the store was always busy with
customers, how the customers were so capricious there, the workers got dizzy during or
after the long work hours, how one’s experiences at Citron were really remarkable and
incomparable to other stores, etc. I tried to do my best in answering all their questions
briefly. Then, Deniz said, “It is great that you worked at Citron before, if you were
coming here directly from the university, you would not be able to survive this job here at
ZIP, it would be too hard for you. But now, with your experiences, you know how to
work, it will be easy for you after Citron.”

I believe my coworkers did sympathize with my deferential approach about my education
and previous work experiences. They sensed that there was not (at least explicit)
denigration in my attitude regarding them. In addition to be honest towards them, I
thought later that this attitude might have helped to minimize, if not totally alleviate, my
‘difference’ from them, especially from the manager, about our backgrounds.
57
I also told
them that I was trained as a sociologist and I thought that we, students of sociology, did
not learn anything substantial in terms of work and occupations during the years we were

57
Later, when I was talking to my coworkers about the first day I was at the store, they
told me that I could not (indeed, never tried to) hide my difference from them;
nevertheless they thought I was definitely not trivializing them. Cihan also told me later
that he predicted that I could only stand working there for a week, or less.
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too preoccupied with the rather abstract social theory and cultural matters that might be
seen insignificant to many people. So, I agreed with Deniz that when a person worked,
when she wanted to manage people, to deal with people’s problems; one needed to know
and practice everything, every little detail from the very bottom, as a starter. In other
words, I talked in the discourse, which prioritizes (practical) work experience over
(theoretical) education, as verbalized many times by coworkers in different situations,
“we [retail workers] might not have shiny degrees, but we learned to do our jobs perfectly
here at the selling floor.” My discursive endeavor that supports workers’ basic argument
of empowerment instead of the well-educated professionals (of human resources or
administrative departments) graduated from elite schools started to help me get rid of my
preconceived differences and my background as it appears in the ‘did I ask for another
manager’ joke. Later, I thought and actually talked to Deniz that acting this way,
privileging their knowledge, stopped Deniz and others to interpret me as a challenge
towards them. Such a misunderstanding would eventually harm my research process in at
least two ways: a) Deniz would tried to show me the ‘real’ rules of the game in the store,
pushing me harder than she should in order to be able to tell “see, he is from Bogazici
University but he could not survive here,” b) I wanted to establish a pretty ‘normal’ and
‘ordinary’ manager-worker and worker-worker relationships and in order to achieve this
goal I was in need of positioning myself in the store with no, or minimum, socio-
economic and cultural difference with other workers. At that moment, all my
concentration was on doing the job as if I truly needed it, being accepted as a regular
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worker, coworker, and friend, and developing rapport with my coworkers as soon as
possible.

“The Citron Myth”: Retail Workers’ Information on the Retail Sector

At first, I did not fully understand the meaning of the Citron connection, which came out
frequently, because almost everybody in the retail sector might have previous work
experiences in other places, as reflected in the high turnover and transferring rates. Then,
I discovered that particularly Citron and its assumed standards became a legend among
retail workers in Istanbul. How many hours they work, how much they earn, what tasks
they are responsible for, how many breaks they have within between working hours, how
the managers treat workers, and other questions were the very first ones I received
whenever I met with a new person during my tenure in the two ZIP stores. Sometimes
ZIP workers were exaggerating Citron and its advantageous conditions, as if it was a
heaven for workers; but mostly, the answers they got from me made them angry because
the information I shared with them basically exposed that they were working for longer
hours for smaller earnings without the fundamental rights such as deciding (or, at least
discussing) the weekly leave days or having sufficient breaks during work hours. In other
words, although some aspects of the ‘Citron myth’ were not real at all, its environment
and conditions of work set the standard for retail workers in Istanbul at the level of
imagination and most of them yearn for these standards.

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It was totally surprising for me to see how the simplest accurate information about work
conditions in different stores, even within same shopping malls, did not circulate among
workers. Retail workers do not share their experiences with each other and they assume
that everybody else is working under similar conditions as them. So, they think there is
no difference between their workplaces or work experiences and others’; suffering is just
the same everywhere. I thought this surreptitiousness might be about the confidentiality
agreement, which strictly bans one to share information about work; every worker must
sign before starting. However, I came to realize later that social dynamics instead of legal
boundaries play a more important role in this stealthy manner. Retail workers do not
fancy talking about their work with strangers, especially people not from their workplace.
It is boring and not cool for them to talk about the store where most of them do not feel
belonged or attached to. Also, there is no sense of solidarity, shared class or occupational
sensitivity among retail workers. Managers might overreact when they hear that a worker
is searching for work conditions in other stores. If they understand that a worker is
curious about other stores, they either aggressively interrogate the worker if she has any
complaints, or punish her directly. And lastly, workers do not have time (and energy) for
elaborate comparisons between different stores that they and their friends work. They
may hear a piece of information here or there, but they eventually forget it before they
run into the store. Thus, the partial and insignificant bits of information about the sector
come together in workers’ minds and transform to unrealistic myths (i.e. Citron workers
get two times more money than us, or they work for 35 hours instead of our 50) though
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which workers develop their dissatisfaction with, anger at and the desire to mutiny
managers. This reveals itself in the culture of work of retail stores.

My coworkers

While I was still working on my table folding toddlers’ t-shirts, clearly slower than the
others, Sanem told me she was ‘going out to tea’ (çaya çıkıcam) and when she would be
back I could ‘go out to tea’. When I looked at her face stupidly, trying to understand what
did that mean, she said ‘tea’ means a little break for 15 minutes; so I could either stay at
the back office (which was much hotter than the freezing selling floor) or leave to have
breakfast somewhere. I was thinking what I could do in only 15 minutes when Habibe
came to me and asked if it was true that I could speak in English very well. I told her that
I lived abroad for three years and I thought this was an answer. But she repeated her
question and then I said I believed it was probably so. After she confirmed and believed
that I could speak in English very well she told her story. She started taking public
relations courses at the Turkish distant education system. However, she quit it because
she was not able to study alone for the exams, without a teacher, especially for the
English courses. She said she really wanted to learn to speak in English. I asked if she
wanted to stay and get promoted in the retail sector. She hesitated and then told me “it is
not all about business, a human being should know how to speak in English.” While I
was silently thinking why, she added, “I studied English a few times at [high] school and
I know that it is not enough.” We were still folding garments at two tables next to each
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other, and there was not any customer around. So, I asked her which high school she was
graduated from. It was a vocational high school, the department of machinery design –
technical drawing. Then, I told her I also graduated from a vocational high school. I was
happy that we had a similar point in our personal histories, but she did not seem really
interested or excited about it. After a while, she directly asked me, “Can you teach me
some English, help me to learn it?” I said, “For sure, I will do whatever I can.”

Unlike others who acted formally when they were introduced to each other, Cihan
hugged and kissed me on my cheeks as if we were good friends before. I tried not to look
startled and acted naturally. I thought “well, if he sees me as a friend, then we will
become friends.” He said that they were understaffed for more than a month and he was
working 50-60 hours weekly although he was a part-time worker. He said everybody was
so tired of working and he was so happy that the other girl and I finally came. When I
asked who the other girl was, they said she was on leave that day for the first time after 8
days of working non-stop. I asked Cihan “did not the other girl decrease your amount of
work since she was here?” He contemptuously smiled and said, “but she is a girl.” When
I could not help myself to look puzzled, he explained, “guys are better than girls [in this
business], we work harder, and much better than them.” And then, he made a gesture, one
of his eyes closed, one of his hands turned outside, it means: ‘you know what I talk
about; it is so obvious.’ I checked my mind if this is common-sensical knowledge in the
retail sector. Yet, no, I had never heard such a thing before. On the contrary, like other
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service sector jobs, sales assistantship is deemed as ‘feminized’ in public discourse, as I
will articulate in Chapter 6.

In the afternoon, a young guy came to work whom they called a ‘responsible supervisor’
(yetkili yönetici) and introduced himself to me. His name was Mete. He was 25 years old,
very tall and big as a person, and he was wearing earrings. Mete seemed chill, funny, and
slow –the way he acts, talks, walks, and even looks was slow: An exceptional quality for
the service sector worker, especially for a manager who were supposed to be hyperactive.
I could not understand whether he was a ‘second manager’ or a ‘responsible’ – a position
between the manager and workers. He had an obviously different style of speech and
mannerism than others in the store. It was about the class codes. I wrote in my notebook
that he did not seem working class like all other workers; instead he passed as educated,
urban middle classes with his stylish haircut, brand clothes and designer shoes. My
interpretation of his attitude was: “You already know what we do here, if you do not
comprehend it yet, you will get it soon; so do not worry, do not panic, and do not bother
me” (from my field notes). I told myself, I should not have bothered him unless it was
inevitable. Later, I learnt that he was from an upper-middle class family and working
only for his own enjoyment as well as for a legitimate excuse for escaping from his
university education. He was a student of computer engineering at a private college, but
he froze his pupilage because he liked neither computers nor the school.

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Enmeshing in the Store

Earlier in the morning, while Deniz was searching for an empty locker for me, she said
somebody was sharing the same locker with Mete while he also occupied another one to
put his stuff –piles of clothes as I could see. She just got everything from this second
locker of his and threw them somewhere in order to create space for me. She was making
jokes like “how dirty this guy is, I am fed up with his stuff, as if I am here to clean his
mess,” etc. It was really interesting for me to see how the plural-singular ‘you’
difference
58
evaporated in a couple of hours and we winded up in a ‘friendly, playful,
personal’ atmosphere of the workplace, as it is a trademark of ZIP. It was really striking
to compare this warm working milieu with, for example, Citron’s coldness,
impersonality, and the ultimate sense of discipline, which mostly imitates the institution
of the public school in Turkey. If Citron was a school in terms of rules, interpersonal
distance, and discipline; then ZIP might be imagined as a playing field in terms of social
relations. At least, it was the public image that the manager and workers strived to create
and sustain. I also thought about this informality and flexibility instead of a bureaucratic
conventionality when I saw Deniz was deciding when and who would take ‘tea’ and
‘lunch’ breaks for how long according to the needs of the store at that very moment.
Unlike Citron, it was not written anywhere; it was determined spontaneously and of
course by the manager’s decision and supervision.

58
Although she addressed me with the singular you (sen) I always call her and other
managers with plural you (siz) in order to show respect. All other workers follow the
same linguistic pattern.
118

Within a couple of days, I became a part of the working team and entangled in the web of
relations –jokes made, stories told, gossips shared- in this store as if I had been working
there for months. With its emphasis on speed and adaptability, extremely high turnover
rates, and multiple contingencies that it operates though everyday, the retail sector
dictates this rapid form of embroilment. A new worker in a retail store can be a stranger
only for one day, sometimes it is just a matter of hours. Then, she starts to feel herself as
an organic part of her new workplace unless otherwise there would be a major problem,
which eventually makes her quit. However, in most cases, the second time you say hello
to a new(er) worker; you already start sharing an experience at the workplace, becoming
parts of the same aura. The stranger at the workplace, the newcomer, is transformed first
to an acquaintance and then to a friend after you suffer from a similar technical obstacle,
after a furious customer belittles both of you, after you have a fight for the manager’s
sympathy, or after you have lunch together and become the most available person to
listen to the most intimate stories.

My Work Rhythm

I worked at the ZIP store in the Kanyon shopping mall for 10 weeks as a full-time sales
assistant and cashier. I worked there for total 495 hours, excluding ‘tea’ and lunch breaks
and the time I spent on my way from or to work. There is a table below showing my first
month’s working schedule in order to give an idea how retail work can be exhausting for
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a full-time worker. It simply occupies all the time one has except sleeping. After working
overtime
59
for four weeks I received 683 TL (approximately $455) at the end of the first
month.
60
This was a disappointingly low amount in comparison to other companies’
payments especially in the case of such a high overtime.

Table 1: Work Schedule 1.

59
In Turkey, the Labor Law limits maximum weekly working hours with 45, and
monthly it is 180. Accordingly, overtime-working hours should be paid 1.5 times more
than regular hours. A retail worker can work non-stop for maximum 5 hours. If she works
at least 5 hours and 5 minutes, she should have at least one-hour break. If she works for
more than 10 hours, then she should have breaks for 2 hours. For example, a daily
schedule of 12:00-6:00 means 5 hours of work with one hour break, while a 6:00-10:00
timing shows non-stop work for 4 hours. A full day, working from 9:30AM to10:00PM is
calculated as 10.5 hours of work.

60
In Turkey, paychecks are not calculated on an hourly basis. But if it were the case, I
would make 3.25 TL ($2.1) per hour. According to the Turkish Tax law, the relevant tax
amount is cut from payments in advance before we receive them; therefore all the wages
we receive are after-tax.

KANYON CENK'S WORKING SCHEDULE & HOURS
1st Week 2nd Week 3rd Week 4th Week
Sunday FULL FULL 9:30-8:00 FULL
Monday 9:30-6:00 FULL FULL FULL
Tuesday 9:30-6:00 2:00-10:00 10:00 AM-4:30 AM 9:30-6:00
Wednesday FULL OFF 4:00 PM -10:00 9:30-6:00
Thursday OFF 2:00-10:00 9:30-8:00 OFF
Friday FULL 12:00-10:00 OFF 12:00-10:00
Saturday FULL 9:30-6:00 OFF 9:30-6:00
Total
Working
Hours 57 52 49 51 209
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After 10 weeks, the company transferred me to the ZIP store in the Istinye Park shopping
mall as a part-time sales assistant and cashier.
61
There, I worked for 7 weeks on a much
slower rhythm. I completed total 147 hours without breaks and the time on my way.
Istinye Park was established in Maslak, a more recently built business district, which
houses numerous skyscrapers and two huge university campuses. When there was no
traffic congestion it took 30-35 minutes to get there from my apartment via dolmuş, while
during rush hours the time I spent on the way was around 1-1.5 hours. Below, I put a
table, which shows my first month’s working schedule in order to give an idea how retail
work is flexible, irregular and unpredictable for a part-time worker. At the end of my first
month at Istinye Park, I received 325 TL (approximately $215). This was indeed just
pocket money instead of a monthly salary for a part-time job that a worker devotes all her
time to work. It was barely enough even for the food and transportation costs I did on the
workdays during the month.
62

61
I demanded to become a part-time worker since I could not have time to sufficiently
think on what happens in the store and I could not conduct interviews since there was no
time left. In some companies, including the Inditex group, a worker can only start with a
part-time position and after proving herself as a good-enough, trustable worker, she can
become a full-time employee as an award or a promotion. In these companies, if a
worker’s status changes from full-time to part-time, it is considered as a punishment,
while it is not the case for ZIP since most people start here working in full-time positions
and there was no hierarchical relation between full- and part-time workers. They can shift
between the two positions whenever they need as long as the company approves. Also,
while in most retail companies there is a distinction between regular sales assistants and
cashiers; in ZIP one worker has both responsibilities at the same time.

62
I was paying 1.5 TL ($1) to dolmuş for one way between Besiktas and Maslak. Daily,
my transportation cost was 3 TL ($2). The cheapest available food in Istinye Park was at
the fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Burger King in which I paid at least 10 TL
($6.5) for a meal without a coffee or a doughnut. A ‘grande latte’ in Starbucks was for 6
TL ($4) during the term I worked for ZIP.
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ISTINYE
PARK CENK'S WORKING SCHEDULE & HOURS
1st Week 2nd Week 3rd Week 4th Week
Sunday OFF 1:00-7:00 10:00-6:00 12:00-6:00
Monday OFF OFF OFF 6:00-10:00
Tuesday 12:00-6:00 OFF 6:00-10:00 6:00-10:00
Wednesday 12:00-6:00 OFF OFF FULL
Thursday OFF 6:00-10:00 11:00-7:00 OFF
Friday 12:00-8:00 6:00-10:00 6:00-10:00 OFF
Saturday 12:00-6:00 12:00-7:00 OFF OFF
Total
Working
Hours 22 19 22 23 84

Table 2: Work Schedule 2.

My second workplace, The ZIP store in the glamorous (A+) Istinye Park Shopping Mall
was radically different than the ZIP at Kanyon. Their clientele was from more or less the
same profile: upper-middle class parents (more mothers than fathers) and grandparents,
foreigners (especially Americans) who live in the city, and wealthy people who need
presents to their friends’ and relatives’ children. However, the two stores were different
in terms of workplace settings and work conditions. This store was at least two-times
larger in terms of space; having 23 workers against the 7 of the other store; selling at least
four times more; and according to the company more customers (for every 1 customer of
the Kanyon store, 8 people for here) walk in to this store. In simpler terms, the ZIP store
in Istinye Park was much busier and bigger with more workers.

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The Second Store

This quantitative difference means a lot for the social relationships within the store. I will
detail these in the following sections. When I arrived early to work at my first day at
Istinye Park, I entered the store and walked to the counter to ask for the manager. I
waited for a while near the line. There were five women in the queue and the number of
customers never decreased during the time I stood there. Before one customer left another
arrived. Finally, I found a chance and approached to the cashier to ask how I could find
the manager. She looked at me and asked why I was looking for him. I told her that I was
a new worker and that was my first day, she did not seem surprised and said, “Ohh all
right, you can go to the back office at the left corner of the store. Ask somebody if you
cannot find it.” And then she returned to the next customer. She did not know that a new
person was starting and she did not say even welcome to me.

I found the door for the back office in the store, and when I tried to open it, it did not
move. When I tried harder, I heard somebody was hailing me to wait for a second. Later,
the door was opened and I saw there was a stairs behind it when I was pushing it. They
were changing a bulb above the door. I entered to the room, which was used as a back
office, locker room, storage as well as a gate to the emergency door. It was a very chaotic
place. Nobody was looking at me while I was standing at the corner. I did not want to
interrupt anybody’s work. Finally, a man who looked slightly older than me came
towards me and asked if I was the new worker. I said yes and he introduced himself. His
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name was Tolga and he was the store manager. He was talking in a professional, cold,
and bossy manner, but he was simultaneously kind and classy. He told me that he knew I
was coming from the ZIP store at Kanyon and thus I was familiar with the rules and
everyday business at the store. I approved. He then told me, “Well, you may know how to
do things, but never forget that it is something else here. Did you see how many people
are shopping outside? [I nodded] We are really fast here; we have to be so. There is no
time even for this little chat, neither for me nor for you. When you work here you have to
work with everything you have: Your body, your mind, your hands, and your eyes. I
expect full concentration from all my workers. And, when your time is over, you will be
out of the store. No time killing, no hanging out, and no chat-after-work here. Come here
on time, do your job, do not spend your time chatting or daydreaming here, and then
leave when you are done. If you will respect these very basic principles, I will be happy
and of course, in return, you will be happy.” I was listening to this lecture without saying
anything. When he finished, he asked me if this was all right for me and I said of course.
Then he asked if I had a locker and when I told him that I did not, he said, “no problem
[in English], find Burcu and told her that you are the new one and you need a locker.”
Without waiting for me saying ‘okay’ he started to walk and shouted “good luck.”

The seven weeks that I worked at this second ZIP store was essentially different than my
previous work experience at ZIP Kanyon. I was working for fewer hours and spending
less time in the store. More significantly, all the time I worked there I could not do
anything but fulfilling my tasks. While workers in the first store almost always had a
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chance to talk and have fun, here at Istinye Park it was busier in terms of customers and
sales. Managers and responsibles were also more vigilant towards ‘unproductive’ uses of
our time in the store. Thus, it gave a sense of a factory where you enter, you should do
your job without raising your head, the supervisors are watching you, and when you are
done you leave for good. Despite this factory discipline and unbearable flow of customers
and garments, I could keep watching and listening to the interactions between my
coworkers, customers, and managers as far as I could.

In terms of breaks, the two stores I worked in represented two different opportunities,
too. In the first store, ZIP Kanyon, I worked for very long hours within the store in
company of my coworkers in a relaxed and relatively free atmosphere that we could talk
and socialize. But the manager, Deniz, did not allow us to use our breaks as groups since
there were few workers. Therefore, I was talking to my coworkers during long working
hours and taking notes in breaks when I could be alone in Starbucks. On the other hand,
in the second store, ZIP Istinye Park, I was working for much lesser hours and the work
was very condensed. For research purposes, it was limited with observing. However, the
breaks were more fruitful since the manager, Tolga, led us use our free times in groups of
three to five people at the same time. Whenever I have time before or after my work shift,
I spent time in the food court of the shopping mall in order to sit at the tables of my
coworkers even though I was not on break. Almost all opportunities that I could be able
to listen my coworkers from this store came from the conversations on the food court
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tables. Since I was working for fewer hours in this store, I was taking notes when I went
back home in the evenings.

In my first week at ZIP Istinye Park, I was thinking that people were not really friendly
since nobody was willing to talk to me even when there was no customer or managers
around. Then one of coworkers, Burak, told me that I should not have tried to talk with
people in the store during work hours because the manager, Tolga, was watching us from
his office through the surveillance cameras. I was shocked and did not want to believe
him. I thought Tolga, the manager, must have been too busy for watching us. However, it
made sense that people were so taciturn in the store. I became more eagle-eyed and tried
to watch Tolga whenever I had to enter the back office. Finally, I saw him once when he
was looking to the surveillance monitors really close that his nose was actually touching
the black-white screen. He was obviously trying to determine who was clandestinely
chatting in the selling-floor. The experienced workers knew all the cameras and their
angle of views. So, when they wanted to talk they positioned themselves according to
Tolga’s ability to view. But the new workers could not know these and they talked with
confidence unless Tolga shows up suddenly and warned them not to talk in an abrupt
way. During my tenure in this store, I witnessed many times that he was sneaking
between walls and fixtures to catch chatting or laughing workers. Although the
experienced workers carefully hid themselves from the cameras’ view when they wanted
to say something to other workers, or they took the risk of being caught in person; the
newcomers disciplined themselves and stopped talking as if Tolga was watching them
126
through cameras all the time, or as if he was just behind them when they were engaging
in a conversation.

The Politics of Participant Observation

I strove to be very careful not to intervene in verbal comments and orders or how tasks
were distributed or getting done in the stores. I kept my ideas on how to organize the
store more efficiently to myself. Whenever I could, I played the role of invisible observer
or just another worker who got tired from working, got angry to managers, and was
curious to learn what was really going on. I never challenged the manager’s decisions, the
workings of the store, and other workers’ capacities even when there were complaints
about me implying I was a little slower than others. I was consistent on this attitude for
many reasons, starting from my interpretation of research ethic that forbids me to change
my informants’ lives and the inner mechanisms of the organizations I involved. During
the research, I did not have any progressive aim like making stores better places for
workers or managers although I deeply felt the inequality, disempowerment, and
oppression my coworkers (even the managers) experienced before transnational
corporations. Also, I knew that rising up or criticizing managers, especially if it is
frequent enough or in an unacceptably ‘harsh’ way, was a valid reason to be fired
immediately in the retail sector.
63

63
In Chapter 5, I will expound how asking rational questions and defending oneself
against the managers would cause one to be fired.
127
Sometimes, it was really tough to stop myself especially in the first store where workers
have more time to think, to evaluate, and to discuss the organizational preferences and
practices or how managers or customers treated them. Whenever I felt an urge to
intervene in favor of a worker’s benefit, I tried to talk to the manager, Deniz, very
carefully and without creating the impression that I disrespected her talent and experience
as a manager (which I was rather honest that she was the most talented manager I have
ever saw or worked with). Most of the time, she explicated to me why she was doing this
or treating a worker in that way. For example, when I was complaining from being
scheduled for the closing (late) shift every week she told me that she was thinking of me
since she knew that I was studying late every night and got up later in the morning. When
I was asking about why she puts Cihan in the opening shift although he made it clear that
he did want to work in the afternoons, she told me that as a manager she never gave what
exactly workers asked for. To my bewilderment, she said, “nobody should forget that I
am the boss here. One week I give him what he wants and make him happy and grateful
to me. The other week, I will give him a totally different schedule to show him that he
has to do whatever I want from him and that he depends on me, not the reverse. This is
the very root of being a manager.”

“Each Sale is Like a Duel”: The Organization of the Workplace

If there is only one ‘truth’ I unearthed in this research, it is the fact that retail stores are
not the spaces which customers tend to demand, hope, and imagine to shop in; and sales
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assistants are not the people that customers desire, expect, and envision to be served by.
These stores are workplaces of minimum wages and unpaid overtimes; of repetitive,
boring, alienating, and meaningless tasks; of workers who are vulnerable to managers’
and customers’ insult and intimidation. The jobs are insecure, unpredictable, and without
benefits. They usually do not promise any future promotion for most of the workers.
Represented as flexible, the jobs demand full commitment from workers that they cannot
be busy with anything else but the store. The positions in the retail sector are presented as
if they are entry-level jobs and they do not require any skills while people have to learn a
great deal of things and develop certain adroitness to work in these jobs for long years
without any advancement.

Spending most of their awake times in these shopping malls makes retail workers
destabilized bodily. Their sense of time and place are destroyed because of artificial and
too bright lighting and incessantly high volumes of music. Their social skills are
diminished since the emotional and relational labor they use for long hours. The most
frequently used metaphors by workers to describe these workplaces are jail,
imprisonment, and enclosure. What workers want most is being ‘free’ and being in the
open air or being in their private spaces, secluded, dark and without any noise. When they
are free, for example during their days off, they do not want to do anything but to stay at
home, preferably in their beds. When workers are at home, they told me that, they lose
control easily and shout at people without any reason. They are angry with anybody who
does not have to spend hours in shopping malls and who can sleep on Sunday mornings
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while they are on their way to work. And finally, most of retail workers would not stay in
these jobs if they would have any other options.

The spaces for the use of the staff in the stores have reverse qualities than the shining,
clean, spacious and attractive façades, “the selling floor:” Locker rooms of workers share
the same space with managers’ offices and storages. They are too small with pretty bad
ventilation and they do not have even a table to sit and relax. So, workers have to leave
the store, sit somewhere in the shopping mall, and spend money for drinking or eating
something. It is just a little bit better in shopping malls where there is enough space in the
food court to sit and relax for a while for free; however, for the places that do not even
have a food court, like Kanyon, workers have to sit in the restaurants or cafés for having
a breath during their breaks. When I started to work at Kanyon, I did not understand why
my coworkers stayed in the back office where there was no place to sit (they were
perching on the garment boxes) and the manager was also present, listening to what they
talk about. I later figured out that there was not any place in Kanyon that they could go,
sit and relax within their ‘tea’ breaks except fast-food restaurants and Starbucks –options
that cost them too much. Lastly, the discourse, or the fiction, in which retail jobs are
constructed as temporary, deskilled, and unimportant, serves to the benefit of local and
transnational retail companies. They legitimize and naturalize the tragically low amounts
they pay to their workers in front of both the workers (“what else they can do but work”)
and possible (however absent) social pressures for progressive action against this
deunionized order of exploitation.
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In Turkey, large –even gigantic- stores are a relatively recent phenomenon in contrast to
the huge department stores of all kind, from modest bargain outlets to glitzy and
sumptuous ones. The department store sells numerous brands and brings together
solutions to different consumer needs, while the store is specialized in terms of clientele
and garments and it presents only one brand. Spatial organization is critical in retail
stores. Interior architectures and design specialists decide precisely where walls,
furnitures and fixtures are located in the store. A global bourgeoisie taste and propriety is
instituted through a careful selection of colors, materials, lightings, and music in the
extremely clean and neat stores. There are seasonal fluctuations in sales and crowdedness
of stores. Some of the companies (like Citron and Mango) have only two seasonal “grand
sales” within a year, while others have four (like ZIP and Benetton). In addition to these
at least two peak times there are other external occasions when the sales explode like
when the schools start and end, two religious holidays, national bank holidays, the new
year, St. Valentine days, mothers’ day, fathers’ day, teachers’ day, etc. One of the crucial
aspects of retail work is to predict, calculate and prepare the store, garments, and workers
to these extraordinary occurrences.

Hierarchical organization was simple in ZIP stores
64
. While my first research site, ZIP
Kanyon, had only part- and full-time workers, a responsible supervisor, and a manager;

64
Citron, for example, has a rather different organization. There are part- and full-time
workers, seasonal workers, cashiers, a head-cashier [who governs the store when there is
no manager], merchandisers, computer operators [they are regular sales assistants when
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my second location, ZIP Istinye Park, had one storage worker
65
, part- and full-time
workers, a merchandiser
66
, two candidate ‘responsible supervisor’s [more responsibility
without paying more], two ‘responsible supervisor’s, one ‘second manager’ and a store
manager. There is a strict hierarchy from the lowest position, the storage worker, to the
highest, the store manager.
67

they are not busy with computer processes such as uploading the new prices to the
system], ‘responsible’s [a liminal position between workers and managers], department
managers, and a store manager. When I was working at the Citron store in the Metrocity
shopping mall, there were approximately 75 workers in men’s, women’s and children’s
departments.

65
A storage worker (depocu) is a person who works only in the storage, without dealing
with customers, and his only tasks are unloading boxes of garments and arranging the
shelves and hangers in the storage. While smaller stores may have no regular storage
workers, in large stores which big quantities of garments are flowing daily, there might
be three to four storage workers. Storage workers are always male.

66
A merchandiser (görselci or koordinasyoncu) is the person who rearranges the
garments and fixtures within the store in coordination with the head office. Every new
delivery or new collection requires a new configuration in the store in order to have the
most possibly attractive layout. She might be a part-time or a full-time worker. Unlike
regular full-time sales assistants, a merchandiser’s weekly leave is on Sunday, which
makes this position more desirable. If she has nothing to do with visual rearranging in the
store, a merchandiser can serve to customers. Although a merchandiser should be
aesthetically talented and creative in order to find instantaneous solutions to design
problems, she does not receive more money than regular sales assistants. I saw
merchandisers from both genders at ZIP as well as at Citron.

67
Security guards, cleaners, and carriers are not included in the store hierarchy since the
retail companies do not employ them; they work either for the shopping malls or for
subcontracted, or intermediate, companies. Head office workers (human resources
personel, merchandisers, window-dressers, experts of logistics, and administrative
coordinators and directors) are not included in the hierarchy either, they are generally
deemed higher than the store workers.
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The Logistics of the Store

In apparel stores, a sales assistant’s first and foremost task, according the official and
informal, written and unwritten trainings and education programs, is to serve customers,
make them happy and satisfied, and thus increase sales. In this sense retail workers, who
come from the margins of the lower-middle classes, would learn mannerisms of courtesy
and how to act properly in order to imitate middle and upper classes to speak the same
language and persuade them to buy (more), and transform themselves through spending
time at, being a part of, modern spaces, talking to customers, and imitating the managers’
actions. All elements of this discourse underline the service part of the work and its
implications upon sales assistant’s body and personality. Although the selling part of the
job is unquestionably important, my participant observations demonstrated and all my
informants testified that, the backbone of retail stores is about the products–the garments:
Receiving, unpacking, and counting them; putting alarms and price tags on them; folding
or putting them on hangers; carrying them to the storage; taking them back from the
storage and putting them on the right shelves, on the correct hangers, or at the decorous
tables in the store; relocating them when visual coordination changes or when a new
collection arrives; replacing new garments with the sold ones during the day; change the
price tags when there are sales; and most importantly, folding and hanging them again
and again all day. I would call all these endeavors with the garments, an arduous
combination of bodily and mental labor, as ‘the logistics of the store.’ The energy spent
on garments by retail workers is like providing the raw material for the manufacturing
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sector. They are fundamental for the retail stores in the sense that only when (and if)
everything is perfect with garments, stores can start to sell and make money. All the
people I talked to agree that their foremost priority in the store is to take care of garments,
“making everything perfect in the selling floor,” and only after achieving this, they can
deal with customers. For example, Yildiray told me, “there is no free time for a sales
assistant, there is always a section to be folded again, if not, you can always check the
sizes or labels of garments. This is the real job we do.” As another informant, Alev,
states, “customers are the trouble part in this job; it is really difficult to cope with some of
them. Yet, this is not the hardest part of this job. Our essential job is to arrange garments
and the store in general. It is our utmost priority. Only after we become sure that all
garments are available in the store, in the correct locations, and every corner in the store
are perfectly folded and sized, we can start to dealing with customers, smiling them, etc.”

Today, a sales assistant, or all sales assistants in a store as a whole, are not the most
crucial factors in sales. The ambitious and focused shopper, especially if she is from the
middle strata, would purchase the garments she can find in the store even without saying
a single word to a sales assistant. However, an accomplished sales assistant would
inevitably increase the sales through her hard work for indulging customers, especially
the upper classes, who demand special care and contemplation. Deniz says, “If I tell you
that we do not mind customer satisfaction, it would be a lie. Nevertheless, as a manager, I
make clear to my workers that their first responsibility is to unpack the garments on time.
I may receive 20 boxes of garments from delivery in one morning. It makes at least 1000
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garments. I have only two workers in the weekday mornings. So, these two workers will
process 1000 garments, alarms, tags, folding and hanging them as well as they must pick
the store and the storage up. Obviously, there is no time left to take care of customers.
We spend all the day with chores relating with the store and the garments. Only in the
evening, when there is nothing to do with the garments, we can start serving to
customers, the selling job.” The public image of the service sector is stabilized with a
smiling face of the cheerful worker. Most of the customers who visit shopping malls
everyday do not even imagine carrying heavy delivery boxes; folding in too cold, too hot
and too dark storages for long hours; or ironing the garments with extremely hot
industrial steams as indispensable parts of the jobs that they encounter and intercat in the
stores. In other words, affective and relational forms of labor is overemphasized in
managers’ attitudes and official trainings while the physical labor of the service sector
jobs in apparel stores is largely underrepresented.

Managing the Store

Managers attempt to bring order and systematization to the otherwise chaotic and messy
stores. They employ a number of individualized techniques of functional organization of
labor, circumscribing and balancing the power of both workers and customers,
streamlining the selling floor design, and standardizing service through principles of
elegance and flexibility –two key registers of current retail scene. Without exception,
managers do not involve in determining prices, organization of consignments, overall
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appearance of the store, personnel policies and salaries, cost and efficiency calculations,
and other strategical decision-making processes of the company. Their most basic task is
to govern workers. In some companies like Citron managers can hire new sales assistants
and hence have a say on with whom they work with while in most companies, including
ZIP, store managers do not have a say on hiring people and meet with new workers when
they come to the store to start.

In all apparel stores, managers have to deal with customers when there is a problem or
the customer is ‘extraordinary,’ such as famous, wealthy, or a friend of a top manager of
the company. In ZIP, some managers, like Deniz from my first research site, deal with
merchandising, the physical reconfiguration of the store. In ZIP, managers do not order
garments while in Citron it is one of the fundamental responsibilities of managers. They
order garments from a list of available items twice a week. They can order in the amount
of their past week’s sales, but they can increase it by consulting company (brand)
directors. Also, in all segments of retail sector, managers should demonstrate self-
government and embody a successful model, an ideal image for their workers. In some
companies like Citron, Mango and Harvey Nichols, managers not only have to be
exemplary to workers but they also have to draw a picture of incorporated modernity,
consumerism, and glamour. Especially women managers ought to wear bold, high
fashion clothes and high heels with their stylishly cut hair. They have to perform the
modern, ‘emphasized’ femininity of women of the new managerial classes.

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In a store, almost everything is determined from the central office, including what they
will sell when, the prices, how the store and workers should look like, which garments
should be put exactly where, how many garments should be kept in the storage, what
kind of posters, window materials and mannequins will be used, and how many
installments will be made for which credit cards. The store personnel and the managers
cannot give presents or offer discounts to customers. When a customer is treated
extraordinarily rude or an obvious mistake is made to her, the manager can send the
cheapest product like socks as a gift by informing the central office.
68
There is a division
of labor between the central office and store managers. The former decides everything,
informs and assists the managers to reach the standards, and controls if unique qualities
of the particular stores (larger windows, smaller storage, bigger selling floor, etc.) match
with their criteria through frequent visits to the store. In other words, the manager’s basic
task is to reconfigure the store according to the center office’s demands while she is in
charge of workers and problematic customers. If there is a problem between customers
and workers, a manager has to intervene, finish the argument, and try to make sure that
the customer leaves the store happy. Another rule about managers’ tasks is that if an
‘extraordinary,’ a ‘very important’ customer comes in (celebrities, the wealthiest, a
person who buys virtually everything, or a shop owner from the country who wholesale
garments) the manager must stop carrying out her other assignments and serve to this
particular customer until she leaves the store because the manager should always be the
best sales assistant in the store. She knows the garments, fabrics, and qualities, how many

68
The central office probably count it among loses and decrease it from the productivity
of the store.
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products they have at that moment to sell as well as she is the exemplary service worker
that the staff would follow her gestures and learn immensely from her how to deal with a
very important customer. When there is a wholesale, the manager calls the center office
to inform them. Sometimes she is thanked for her great achievement.

Each store has a ‘sales’ and ‘hours budget’. Sales budget is the total amount of sales per
day, week, and month; while hours budget is the total working hours in a store per day,
week, and month.
69
Productivity is calculated when the sales budget is divided to the
hours budget. There is always a high pressure on managers from the center office to reach
higher levels of productivity. It is only possible through higher sales amounts and lesser
working hours. Every year, the center office designates a monthly sales budget for a store
and calculates how many working hours that store can have through standard the
productivity rate. If a manager is able to increase her sales and decrease the work hours
of her personnel, the productivity rate grows and she becomes a more successful
manager, who is promised to be promoted in the future.
70

69
For example, in a store in a specific day, 3 people work for 10 hours, 2 people work for
8 hours, 4 people work for 7 hours, and 5 people work for 5 hours, the hours budget of
this store is 99 for this day.

70
Each store has its own stable expenses including the rent, electricity, and water. These
amounts are not taken into consideration in the productivity rates, but they affect the
benefit calculations. In Citron, for example, the benefit rate was approximately %50, so
when you a buy a skirt for $100, half of it will directly go to the company while the other
half will pay for all the expenses including manifactuing, transportation, the store,
workers’ salaries, and taxes. In ZIP it was not possible to assess a stable benefit rate since
the company was still new and it was not sufficiently institutionalized yet.
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The Deunionized Workplace

No worker or managers in the ZIP stores I worked in and none of my informants were
unionized. People, who have jobs in the retail sector, are not unionized in Turkey because
the Labor Law does not allow them. According to a recent proposal to change the
legislation in the Parliament, new economic sectors are proposed to have the right to be
unionized. These sectors include “health and social services,” and “accommodation and
entertainment business,” but there is no specific mention of retail companies, stores, or
shopping malls.

When I tried to inquiry my coworkers, managers, informants and people from this sector
about possible future unionization, I often got discouraging answers such as Esra’s “there
is not and can not be a union to defend our rights,” or Gul’s “it is futile. The companies
would never allow us [workers and managers] to unionize and defend our rights.” Unlike
the past labor struggles in the manufacturing, there is no pressure to companies for lesser
hours of work or ‘living wages’ in the public imagination, such as discourses in the news
media, mostly because unemployment in Turkey is so high and people who can get a job,
no matter how the terms are good or bad, are considered lucky. So, nobody outside the
store and shopping malls, including the government, seems to care the working
conditions or labor rights of retail workers in Turkey.

139
In the stores, most workers do not know anything about their existing rights granted by
the Turkish Labor Law. Companies and managers never mention that if a worker is fired
she must get an indemnity.
71
The worker can also sue the company by going to the Labor
(Work) Court and can gain a right to go back to her job again unless otherwise there is a
really convincing reason like stealing from the company. Human resources staff and the
law experts that retail companies consult with state that when a worker decides to go to
the Labor Court her possibility to win is about 95 percent because the law almost always
supports workers against companies. Since they know the ultimate result of such a legal
case, companies do everything they can to hide this information from workers and
prevent them to go the court. Whenever I ask questions about suing the firm, managers
got angry and warned me not to affect other workers with my questions. Most workers,
especially the ones who had a position to go to the court in the past, did not want to
believe the idea that they could really sue companies and they could win such cases.
Mudo, for example, fired Tugba, after working five years without paying her any
compensation. When I told her that she could sue them and get an indemnification, she
did not seem believing it. She said she was ‘just a girl’ and the company has all the legal
advisors, advocates, and informal tactics that “it was impossible to beat them at the
court.”

71
The companies call it as the ‘separation pay.’ Although there is a very complicated
method to calculate how much money a worker must receive when she is fired, it roughly
is: (number of years she has worked + 1) x her monthly salary before tax. If she would
sue the company and win the case proving that her dismissal was unfair, then she will
gain extra compensation as the court determines the exact amount.
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In such a milieu of indifference and ignorance without unionization and the companies’
understandably negative standpoint, transformation can only be possible through personal
initiative. I experienced such an incident when I was working at Citron. The closing shift
was ending at 10:00 PM but we had to stay in the store until everything is folded and
hanged correctly and the store is ready for the next morning. We could never be able to
leave the store at 10:00. Sometimes we were leaving at 10:30 and especially weekends at
around 11:00. However, these extra hours of work to pick up the store did not count in
our paychecks. The unpaid overtime was deemed as a sacrifice everybody does for the
store. Then, Hande, the manager of the children’s department rebelled against this policy.
She was demanding her and our lost hours at the closings everyday. With the help of her
sister, who was a manager in the human resources department at the head office, the
‘busy stores’ changed their schedule and put the closing hour at 10:30 PM. Actually the
company did not pay extra to anyone because we were using an extra half an hour break
during the dead hours, but everybody was still happy since our time was back and we
were not making a compulsory sacrifice to the store. When I recounted this story in the
two ZIP stores that I worked, my coworkers were so impressed although it did not point
to a problem they had to face since they left the store at 10:00 PM.
72

72
But this does not mean ZIP workers did not have issues with their working hours. The
most frequent point of opposition was their belief that they did not use their breaks as
long as they have a right to. I never had the required amount of breaks when I was
working, especially in the second store. My coworkers were also complaining that
managers did not fill the weekly schedules for the human resources departments correctly
and although they work overtime they are never overpaid since the head office did not
know about it. If a manager does not inform the central office about the ovetime, his
expenditures within a store seems lower and he is perceived as a more successful
manager.
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Workers’ Power: Versatile but Fragile

My coworkers believed that nobody had information about their real living conditions or
what they experience through their jobs. They were always complaining that customers,
or the emerging neoliberal public in Turkey, including even their own families or lovers,
never understood them. Christine Williams testifies this opinion, “Unless you have
‘worked retail,’ you probably know little about the working conditions of the job.” (2006:
48) I witnessed that most of the customers had no idea how many hours sales assistant
have to work, how many breaks they have, how much they earn, or how the managers
treat them. Customers seem to recognize the existence of workers and their actual human
reactions only if they are not happy with the service they receive; if a garment is not
brought to them although they have been waiting for it for five minutes; if their questions
unanswered, or worse, if they receive a negative respond; if they can not find a helper
when they look around; if they do not receive a smile or a ‘hello’ or a ‘good-bye’
especially if they are keen to make a scene.

‘Making a scene’ is the closest translation to what my informants and coworkers refer to
‘olay çıkarma’ (causing an incident), ‘edepsizlenme’ or ‘rezillik çıkarma’ (immoral,
scandalous or improper behavior), and ‘çemkirme’ or ‘dellenme’ (verbal attack and
insult): These happen when a customer first assaults workers and then gradually loses her
control to the point of a nervous breakdown. On the other hand, there are customers who
approach sales assistants in a kindly, friendly way, even with great compassion; who can
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actually thank and sometimes try to give tips (which are forbidden); who buy presents to
workers and invite them to their houses for a cup of tea. In fact, I think the well-
mannered customers are the majority. People would normally wait in lines and not
complain when there is a technical problem, when a cashier makes something wrong, or
when a sales assistant forgets what they have specifically asked for. However, there is a
very strong opinion among workers that the customers do not acknowledge their
existence and help under normal conditions –when everything is all right, when workers
are invisible- and some of the customers are indeed eager to make a scene –the real
reason they come to the store. Sanem says, “Only when they will insult us, they look at
our faces,” and Yildiray says, “you are an unimportant person, just like a tool as long as
you work smoothly, doing whatever customers want without creating problems. When
you do not, or if there is something wrong, then you become a target of their rage.”

In retail stores, workers are swiftly punished due to bad conduct with the customers,
while their good performances go unrewarded. My informant Ipek says, “Having contact
to customers is like gambling: Each sale is like a duel! (Her satış bir düellodur) It can kill
you or you can become a winner.” Workers develop individual and collective strategies
to avoid the contemptuousness of outraged customers and to show who the real boss in
the stores is. These strategies include, for example, indifference, escaping from the
immediate scene of conflict, verbal derisions, lying (i.e. that garment is sold out; we do
not have any in the storage; I am not allowed to call other stores; I am not allowed to
reserve garments), making customers wait for longer periods of time than usual, directing
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the customer to another sales assistant, and forms of sabotage (i.e. canceling the
reservation; refraining to call the customer although promised; secretly destroying the
garment during taking out the alarm, scan the same garments for twice on the counter and
make them pay more than they should, or taking the wrong size when the legs are
shortened). Workers perform these different types of resistance against the customers
without managers’ information and whenever they engage these sorts of withstanding
behaviour they take the risk to be a target of managers’ assertiveness.

“The Neoliberal Sieve” is at Work
73

As I have demonstrated in Chapter 2, the number of industrial factories grew in the
Istanbul metropolitan region through satellite cities and suburbs, while the central (old)
districts of Istanbul has been systematically deindustrialized in the last thirty years.
74

Neoliberal urban restructuring made the city center a novel space, a “park-city,” that is
reserved and reconfigured for tourism, leisure, arts and shopping. Skyscrapers, office
towers and luxurious residential mega projects were constructed in empty fields or in

73
Ayfer Bartu Candan made me think about the term “the neoliberal sieve” for
explicating the dynamics of reclassifying and repositioning younger generations through
the deregulation and privatization policies.

74
For example, my first workplace, Kanyon shopping mall, was built over a land, which
was one of the first high-technology factories (owned by a parivate pharmaceutical
company) of the city in 1960s. The factory bulding was desolated after it was closed in
1990s. It was demolished before the construction of Kanyon. Another shopping mall in
the area, Profilo, was a refrigerator factory for decades. After the factory moved to
somewhere else in 1990s, the owners transformed the same building into a shopping mall
with minor revisions.
144
bulldozed areas. In this “new Istanbul,” employment in manufacturing declined, while
crucial branches of the new economy including tourism, trade, finance, and logistics
companies provided novel and increasing opportunities to be hired in national and global
firms.

Here, my subject is the young population that lives in the central districts of Istanbul.
They are relatively advantaged than more recent immigrants, who are located in the slum
areas around the Central Istanbul, but somehow they could not be able to fully ‘make it’,
they could not be educated properly, ‘professionalized,’ and upwardly mobile. Most of
the time, they are high school graduates (sometimes less educated) and could not
continue their education towards collage. A mechanism of social differentiation –I would
like the call it as “the ‘neoliberal sieve”- puts these young people into positions within the
services sector such as sales assistantship, cashiers or waiters / waitresses. On the one
hand, the purchasing power of upper-middle class professionals and urban yuppies
increase alongside the presence of foreign tourists; on the other hand, the need for an
army of servants rapidly grows as the new service and sales outlets emerge. Young
people, who could be able to work at the disappearing or migrating factories or smaller
workshops in the past, now fill the labor pool for the legal, contemporary and low-wage
retail jobs.
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The neoliberal sieve directs the young and urban, but uneducated, lower-

75
The same trend of unemployment with the exception of the service sector, as the main
job-provider for masses, is experienced in other metropolitan areas such as Ankara and
Izmir because industry is moving to mid-size cities like Denizli, Bursa and Kayseri,
where labor and land costs are much lower.

145
middle class population into service sector jobs and triggers the formation of a new group
of the ‘working poor’ among Turkish urbanites. The characteristic quality that the class
of the new working poor shares is that one has to live a dependent life in order to survive.
A worker can be dependent on her parents or other family members, spouses or partners,
and, very rarely, roommates. The only available alternatives to these retail jobs for the
majority of this class are illegal, unregistered, and informal possibilities to gain money.
Thus, the discourses on ‘the new working poor’ and their living conditions in Turkey
address directly these service sector workers because except them, there is no data on
how many people work at unregistered jobs in different segments of formal and informal
economy. For example, we cannot know how many young people are ‘just helping’ to the
restaurant in their neighborhood, how much money shop assistants earn by working in the
little shops especially in the peripheral districts.
76

There is a strong discourse that represents sales assistantship as a temporary, part-time,
flexible, seasonal, ‘fun job,’ or what George Ritzer (2002) calls them ‘McJobs.’ On the
contrary to this trivializing discourse, I witnessed that most people who take jobs in the
retail sector see these positions as long-term careers for themselves whether they enjoy

76
The difference between ‘registered’ (sigortalı) and ‘unregistered’ (sigortasız) jobs is
significant for workers. In Turkey, an employer has to notify the state to hire somebody
and register the employee to the state’s social security system. It is not optional. The
alternative is to avoid the state bureaucracy and the benefits of its social welfare
organization including health services and retirement. This path forms the informal
segment of the national economy (around 40 per cent of the gross national income). It is a
priority to find a registered job for my coworkers although they admit that the welfare
system does not function well and they will receive very low salaries when they retire in
the future.
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this idea or not. At least for the Istanbul case, the part-time jobs are not an available
option for the last couple of years since the apparel companies stopped hiring part-time
workers due to the fact that they are more expensive than the full-time workers. There is
still a small group of people who work part-time without any investment or career
planning in this sector and everybody knows that they would leave soon. They are either
university students or people who need money for extraordinary reasons like covering the
costs of a car accident. Nevertheless, retail jobs are the only full-time and secure
alternatives for many; the best option to be employed for the majority of workers. These
workers aim future promotions if they have the required credentials and patience to wait
for long years. At this point, things turn to be complicated since these jobs do not pay
enough for an independent adult, ‘the living wages,’ unless one finally becomes a
manager. That is the reason why most retail workers have to live with their parents or
receive other forms of support. Companies have a tendency to hire people who live with
their families. They explain this as their need to be sure that their workers have
unfluctuating lifestyles and their jobs will be an integral part of these dependent,
consistent lives. However, this dependency works well with the principle of paying low
wages that it is not possible for a full-time worker to live on her own. Family and the
company simultaneously sponsor young workers’ lives together. Workers can keep
working for the very low wages because they are staying with their families and they are
not paying rent or other expenses (although they contribute to the home budget in varying
degrees and almost never spend the whole money they have for themselves).

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Exclusionary Processes

In the retail stores in Istanbul, I never witnessed or heard stories about wage-gaps
according to gender or ethnic differences. However, college students and graduates make
more money from high school graduates while, in some cases, workers who had work
experiences in more prestigious companies may earn slightly higher amounts. ZIP has a
specific payment system in which ‘the less demanded’ workers get a lower standard
salary and the group of ‘more qualified’ workers can earn the higher standard amount.
Normally, I would earn more than my coworkers in ZIP Kanyon store since my previous
job was at Citron (deemed as a better store, as well as better pay) and my educational
credentials were higher than anybody else including the manager. However, I was in the
group that receives a lesser amount of salary because during my interviews I rejected to
demand a minimum wage and underlined that money was not my priority. So, they put
me into the group of cheaper workers. My coworker Tugba, for example, asked for the
amount that she was receiving from her previous position at a Mudo store and made it
clear that if she would not have this amount she would not come and work for ZIP. The
human resources put her into the group of employees who earn more. She was receiving
150 TL ($100) per month more than my regular earning. Therefore, this payroll system
creates its own classed inequalities although it does not intersect with other axes of social
inequality such as age, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and gender.

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Unlike the public image, not everybody can start working retail. As I recounted in
Chapter 1, one has to be between certain ages, specifically 16 and 28. If he or she is
between these ages, the second criterion is weight. Namely, overweight people are not
hired as sales assistants. The third measure is the vaguest one, class. Accordingly, one has
to act, talk, and look ‘right,’ in an appropriate and presentable manner. This eclectic field
includes where one lives, what she wears, how is her hair and makeup, is she clean, how
she speaks, how she walks and sits, does she have a sense of humor, how she smiles, how
she asks questions, etc. The fourth standard is also implicit and reflexive. Retail workers
who work at shopping malls in central Istanbul are exclusively Turkish and secularist.
People of Kurdish origin, who speak Turkish with a regional accent, and political
Islamists, who may defend gender segregation and women’s headscarf, would not apply
for sales assistantship positions. When they decide to apply, and if the managers take
their applications into consideration, they are eliminated though interviews and not being
employed in the retail stores.
77

‘Who can become a sales assistant?’ was one of the crucial elements of the semi-
structured interviews I conducted.
78
An overwhelming majority of my informants did not

77
This has been the situation for Kurds and Islamists in both 2004-2005 and 2008-2009
terms in the shopping malls of the center districts. However, in mid-size shopping malls,
small shops and supermarkets of the peripheral districts, all excluded groups above (older
or overweight people of less education, Kurds, and Islamists) can have a chance to be
employed mostly at unregistered, informal jobs, for lower pay.

78
During the time I work retailed, I was thinking about the alternative groups of workers,
‘other’ job candidates than the usual lower-middle class Istanbulites. I developed a
scenario: A young, alone woman comes to Istanbul from another city and struggles to
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specifically mention the exclusive categories of ethnicity, class, gender or sexuality and
they used ambiguous expressions like “you should be physically well and clean,” or “you
ought to look / act right.” Instead, they often listed qualities related to one’s character like
being hardworking, ambitious, respectful, obedient, cheerful, and relaxed, as if there is no
ethnic, political, class, or bodily standards applied in hiring. When I specified some of
these categories, almost all of them agreed that it is not possible to become a sales
assistant for Islamists, Kurds, the overweight, working class people and migrants without
education and proper mannerisms (residents of slum areas, varoş).

found a new life in the city. She wants to get a job at an apparel store and begin earning
money that would allow her to find a space and buy some furniture. This is a highly
unlikely scenario not only because she cannot establish a new life with the money she
would receive from these jobs, as Ehrenreich (2001) indicates for the United States; but
even more disquieting than this, she probably would not be employed by retail companies
because she does not have a permanent address (and a stabilized ‘lifestyle’) that she lives.
When I talked to managers, former managers and human resources people, they told me
thay such a course of action (by the imagined job candidate) sounds really adventurous
and irresponsible. Thus, getting a job at a retail store is not necessarily a channel to get
rid of family pressures or other kinds of repressive social forces. It is not really an
opportunity for individualization and self-realization as these ‘flexible’ jobs are often
represented in popular discourses. Retail companies work with family and other social
institutions and prefer dependent, cheap, stabilized workers although they often employ
discourses that highlight constructing individual identities through work such as the self-
improvement accounts. Serap, a human resources worker, approved this dependency on
the orthodox, typical worker; yet, she noted that, “the most important criteria we search
for are age, manners, appearance, education and the way of speaking. If these meet with
our standards, we look at what she says. If she says, ‘I need to start a new life and need
this job,’ or ‘I want to build a career in the retail sector,’ then, we hire her. In other
words, she must be smart and aware of what are we trying to do here. If she says, ‘I do
not know what to do; I am bored of my family or my town, I just escaped, etc.’ we cannot
accept her as a worker. So, the point is, the story you tell is extremely rare but not totally
impossible. If such a candidate knows what she must tell us and how to convince us to
hire her, she can start working.”

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A small minority among my informants defended that these principles and exclusionary
standards are certainly wrong for different reasons including the fat people can do
everything this job requires, Islamists can gain money without injecting their religious
beliefs, Kurds have a right to work with Turks, and education does not solve all problems
and it should not be a criteria if the candidate is strong enough. On the other hand, a vast
majority of my informants believe that these groups of people should not be hired in the
stores. They expressed their support to the existing forms of discrimination at work.
They used four discourses in order to legitimize their negative attitude towards Kurds,
Islamists, the overweight, and (migrant) people of working class backgrounds.

The first discourse is about the working bodies. In this framework, a retail worker,
especially women, should look nice, fit, toned, and charming, if not inherently beautiful.
Thus, a stout sales assistant looks unattractive and unsuccessful to most customers. Atiye
says, “When you are fatter than them [the customers], they just do not care what you say
about clothes. Probably they think ‘if you know so much about appearance, apply it to
yourself first.’ If a sales assistant looks fit and she has a body that she can wear all the
garments in the store, the customers look at her with pleasure, they want to look like her,
they are open to her advises as if she is a fashion expert. […] It is like, if you do not have
legs and arms, you cannot be swimmer, right? If you are fat, you cannot do this job.”
Also, in most of the stores, the available sizes of the garments are too small for the
‘average Turkish woman’ to fit in. Companies developed a strategy that if a job candidate
cannot wear their products (even the largest sizes) they do not hire them. This prevents
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them to be seen as discriminatory because they present a physical (legitimate and
incontestable) and technical obstacle, which is beyond opposition. Some of my
informants mentioned that the overweight people might have difficulty in moving within
the store and through narrow corridors, in the trying rooms, and in the storage where
workers had to climb up to the stairs frequently. Ali, for example, underlines the health
issue, “in this job you cannot have a break to take a breath. We run all the time, walking
and moving fast. An obese [sic] person cannot move as fast as we do and this may
endanger her health, she might have a heart attack. […] Another thing I think is fat
people sweat a lot. Yet, we should not be sweaty in the store. It looks terrible and it may
cause unwanted bodily odors. So, I agree with the policies that the overweight people are
not a good match for this kind of job. They should find other jobs where they can sit all
day.” My informant Esra interprets the situation through her own body and narrates her
bodily transformation as a success story, which must inspire others, too: “I lost a lot of
weight last year, almost 20 kg [45 pound]. I was working at a LC store where they do not
mind if you are plumb because they pay the minimum wage and they are always
understaffed. I wanted to work at Mango and I knew that they would not hire me with
these extra pounds on my body. So, I cared for my body, lost weight, I applied, and they
hired me. I think it is quite normal. This is a chic store, selling nice clothes. This is what
high fashion tells us. So, workers should be nice and skinny. If I achieved it, everybody
can do it if they really want this job.”

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The second discourse in which the systematic discrimination at retail stores operates is
anti-Kurdism. For most of informants and human resources experts that I talked to
informally, the basic element of this negative stance is not ‘ethnicity’ or ‘ethnic origin’
but the way one speaks, the pronunciation of words. Some of my informants verbalize the
term ‘Kurds’ and express their direct hostility towards them, while some others just hint
Kurds and use more indistinct euphemisms such as ‘citizens from the east,’ ‘people of the
[southeast Anatolian] region,’ and ‘people who are coming from out of Istanbul.’ Burak,
for example, was very clear on his standpoint against Kurds, “this is a modern place, a
civilized place. When you bring Kurds here, the customer would run away and will not
come back. […] That man [the Kurd] is used to live at the mountains, in the villages, not
in the cities. He would not know how to say ‘hi, how are you?’ he cannot smile; when a
capricious customer comes in he cannot serve to her. It is not in his nature.” Most of my
informants did not speak as clear as Burak, however their negative opinions against
Kurds were also detectable. A typical example was Cigdem. She says, “Our customers
here Turks and [foreign] tourists. They used to talk to us; they come here to buy things
from us. When you put a person who came from the East here, the customer would think
that what kind of the store is this? Personally, I am not against them to be hired here, but
when I consider our customers’ possible reactions I know that it would be a wrong
decision for the company.” Mostly, my informants internalized and appropriate the
offical and seemingly apolitical language of the companies. It highlights the differences
of pronunciation in different regions in Turkey. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, ‘speaking
Turkish in a proper, clear and understandable way without mispronouncing any word’ is
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the founding principle of the training of sales assistants. Stores in Istanbul embrace this
point and they prioritize to evaluate the way one speaks in their interviews
79
. I would
argue that this is a hidden mechanism to exclude specifically Kurds and not other ethnic
minorities even when they are qualified to be sales assistants because while other
regional differences are deemed to be ‘funny’ and entertaining like the Black Sea people,
the Laz; only Kurdish regional diction is politicized and otherized as ‘terrorist’ or
‘separatist.’ For example, Esra says, “Just like how you look, how you speak is one of the
basic components of this job. When you speak like a peasant, (“hagara-huguru”) in an
incomprehensible and ugly way, you cannot represent the company to the customer. The
customer cannot think of what you are presenting her, the garment, but she would be
concerned with how you talk, she will think other things that your speech would bring her
mind. […] People who come here are well educated, the elite class. They would not like
to be served by such a person, who cannot speak in a proper way. However, if you are
born here and speak correctly, then you can be able to work here whoever you are.”

The third ostracizing discourse that my informants employed is against political
fundamentalists. My informants believe that there is a sex difference regarding Islamists.
Islamist fundamentalists advocate in public that women should hide their body and hair
from men’s view and they must wear Islamic headscarves when they are in front of

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I called Citron and ZIP stores in other regions of Turkey in order to ask basic questions
to workers who happen to pick up the phone. Companies have to hire people who are not
talking in the Istanbulite Turkish but in regional vernaculars in Adana, Ankara and
Antalya because it is the ‘normal’ standards for these regions. Although their Turkish is
clearly understandable for most cases, the differences in the way they speak were also
obvious to my ears. So, this insistence on the ‘Istanbulite Turkish’ is for Istanbul only.
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strangers. None of the stores in central districts of Istanbul hire women with headscarves.
While companies declare that their workers should be exemplary models, the living
mannequins, for their clothes and Islamic headscarves prevent them fully represent their
brand image, my informants were much clearer in their political attitude towards working
with Islamist women (and to a lesser extent, men). The key anti-Islamist discourse was
established through the notion of modernity. Accordingly, shopping malls and stores are
modern and global spaces while Islamist women with their headscarves represent
backwardness and insularity. Ezgi says, “There is not such a thing [the headscarf] here.
This is work life; this is the world. When you accept to wear the headscarf you become a
person whose eyes and ears are closed to the world. You accept to stay at home and pray
non-stop. This is not the right place if you select that lifestyle over this one. Am I going
to the mosque with these clothes, my dyed hair, and full make-up on my face? No, why?
Because this appearance is not suitable in a mosque and there are different rules to obey.
It is just the same here: That [Islamic] appearance [with the headscarf] is not suitable in
modern places, too.” Betul addresses the recent division in society between the secularists
and Islamists, “The secular groups come and shop from these stores. They are people just
like us except they have more money than us. So, they want to see us in front of them, not
the Islamists, not the ones with headscarves and beards. It is very Western here; women
with headscarves do not fit into here. Besides they are not supposed to deal with men,
aren’t they? It is another world here.”

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Islamist men used to have full beard and mustache, but they have changed their ideas
about their outlook and some of them started to shave their facial hair in the last decade.
Since beard is forbidden in most stores, it was an automatic elimination for Islamist men
to be hired as shop assistants in the past. Now, there is no apparent obstacle regarding
physical appearance to be hired for men as in the case of Islamic women. On the other
hand, adaptation to modernity and gender equality seem like the symbolic barrier against
Islamic men to work in the stores. Burcu recounts a memory of an Islamist coworker of
her, “His name was Bulent. He started to work here, but he was totally awkward. He was
escaping from us whenever there was a chance to talk. He never spoke to the girls. When
he had to, he did not look at our faces. When we had lunch at the same time, everybody
was sitting together on a table and he was sitting alone. We did not understand what was
wrong with him. Then, one of the guys told us that Bulent might be Islamists because he
was living in Fatih [a very conservative neighborhood]. That explained the awkwardness.
We just avoided him after that. One day, he did not show up, did not even call to resign. I
guess he could not carry on working with us, to talk to the customers and the managers.
He just ran off.”

Last but not least, the most hybrid and contingent discourse is used to mark working class
and migrant people, who lack formal education and do not know how to act properly in
front of the middle classes. My informants simply call them ‘varoş’ although this
category has certain internal differences. As I have argued in Chapter 2, varoş is the
name of squatter settlements at the outskirts of the city. Migrants, who came to Istanbul
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from other cities and the countryside, built these squatters. People who live in the
buildings that they illegally constructed in varoş areas are deemed as less urban, modern,
and refined by ‘the established’: the tax-paying, proper citizens, the Istanbulite. Kurds are
residents of varoş for most of the time and the anti-Kurdist discourses coincide with the
anti-varoş arguments. Otherwise, if there is no obvious ethnic-racial element, anti-varoş
discourses target candidates who lack formal education and fail to act through respectable
mannerisms. Where one lives and which schools one was graduated are the most
significant criteria to be denied access to the jobs in the stores. Most companies stop
hiring people who are not graduated from high schools. However, many such people still
apply for the positions. Gonul, for example, says, “high school graduation is a valid
standard for this job. One does not have to go to the college to become a salesclerk. But,
asking for a high school degree is acceptable for me. […] Of course, I know many people
who work in this job without their high school diplomas and they are excellent workers.”
Class among the workers of the retail sector is determined through education as well as
the neighborhoods one grows up and lives. Yildiray says, “I am living in a varoş
neighborhood, everybody says so. What is wrong with it? I am not carrying it [his
neighborhood] with me over my back. I do not have a sign on my forehead. If I act
properly, if I can speak with the customers and make them happy, where I live is not the
company’s business. What is important is the person, the personality, not where one
lives.” Sule made use of a well-known distinction among my informants while she was
trying to underline the differences between varoş workers and middle classes, “I do not
think they [varoş] are clean enough. I am taking a shower twice a day, when I wake up
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and before going to bed. I am using toothpaste, I make-up, my hair is always clean and
shining. I always wear clean uniforms; they are washed in our washing machine. So, is it
possible for a lower-income person to do these? […] It is not only money, or the comfort
at home; she probably would not be disturbed if she would not take a shower for two
days. This is how they grew up in poverty. When you are not get used to do things as a
child, it follows you all the time.” The last example of this discourse is uttered by Gul, a
store manager. She says, “There are important symbolic gestures in this job. Every store
has a specific atmosphere, some are elite, some are relaxed, and some are fun. Workers
are an indispensable part of it. The way you look, the way you move your body, your
hands, your speech, etc. should be in harmony with the air in the store. It is a whole. It is
very difficult to explain but there is a code among us [managers]. When we see a job
seeker, or when we sit to talk to her, we certainly know that if she is able to do this job or
not. I do not mean physically, just about her manners, her looks, her culture. These are
very important qualities and they never change.”

Conditions at Work

There are very high turnover rates in the stores in Istanbul. I have observed that it was
even higher when I started to work for this sector in 2004. While it was a little slower in
ZIP Kanyon because of the decreasing numbers of workers (three new people came and
four left during the three months around my tenure, including me) it was bemusing at my
second store. Including me, six people came and eight people left during the seven weeks
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I worked there. An eye-opening occasion about how fast people come and go happened
to me when one of my coworkers gave me a hug and she told me, “I cannot believe you
are leaving us, who remains here from the old friends” after she learnt that I had resigned.
I could not believe that I became ‘an old friend’ in such a constant flow of people. My
coworkers at the ZIP Kanyon store where I worked for ten weeks still invite me when
they go out for entertainment. Ten weeks seem like a sufficient time period to stay in the
store and become ‘one of them.’ I could not be able to compare longitudinal data for ZIP
stores in terms of turnover because they were not open for two years when I was there.
On the other hand, the Citron store I worked from September 2004 to May 2005 had
around 75 workers. In May 2009 only 3 of my former coworkers were still working at
that store. The turnout ratio for five years was 96 percent.
80

Full-time workers have to work 45 hours per week and 180 hours per month according to
the Labor Law. If they are scheduled to work under these hours by miscalculation it
would not be their responsibility and the company should pay the full salary plus their
promotion. On the other hand, part-time workers are earning money on the basis of how
many hours they work. Hourly work is more expensive than the standard full-time salary.
If a part-time worker works for 180 hours in a month (the standard of full-time workers)
she will receive a higher amount from a full-time worker who worked for the same time.

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Some of this 70-something people were transferred to other Citron stores, whether or
not being promoted. It was easy to find them since I still have connections with the
company. Another group of workers left Citron, or the Inditex Group, and find other jobs
in the retail sector as sales assistants, merchandisers, managers, coordinators, waiters,
including one who became a cook. However, I could not be able to trace most of my
former coworkers.
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Therefore, companies have a tendency not to put part-time workers to work overtime
unless there is an emergency. During my tenure at ZIP, center office was demanding
from stores that part-time workers should not exceed weekly limit of 20 hours.

Although a full-time worker has to work for 45 hours per week and she should not work
overtime, I always worked overtime in my first research site ZIP Kanyon. The manager,
Deniz, was lightheartedly saying that “here our full-time workers are fuller than other
stores. They are really full with work!” When I was working part-time in my second
store, I never exceeded weekly 25 hours. However, like my coworkers, I had to devote all
my time to the store because I could not know when they wanted me to work. Although a
weekly schedule was posted on Sundays and thus we could know when and for how long
we would work within the week, it was always subject to change according to the store’s
needs and the manager’s calculations. I was complaining to my coworkers that I could
not do anything else except working or waiting for work; they told me it was the better
version. When I asked what the worse scenario was, they told me that the manager,
Tolga, used to schedule people for work twice in the same day, like 12:00-2:00 and 6:00-
8:00. So a worker has to come to the workplace in noon, work for two hours, then leave
for fours hours, and come again for another two hours. It was really boring and tiring to
wait to work for four hours in addition to the costs related with killing time in the food
court. After the workers revolted with the threat of resignation, the center office
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intervened and prevented Tolga to arrange working shifts this way. The principle
81
that a
person should come to work only once a day was set in motion again.

Retail workers do not work at two jobs in Turkey because of the overwhelming working
hours and unpredictability of part-time schedules. The only exception was Onur. He was
a student of ancient history but he was not really into it and he did not go to the school.
He was a cashier at Citron and on Wednesday and Friday nights he was working as a DJ
at a bar in Taksim. Other than Onur, who was actually doing two part time jobs, I never
heard of a sales assistant with double incomes.

The most significant issue of conflict in the stores is time
82
. Time means business and
money in retail sector. Workers struggle for governing their own time while managers try
to intrude and decide how and when workers should act. Workers demand that the
weekly schedule of work should be posted on time and managers should not make the
last-minute changes over it. However, I never saw the managers satisfied this desire of
workers. I witnessed that the manager of the ZIP store at Kanyon, Deniz, was honestly

81
This principle is accepted by seemingly all companies in the retail sector. In Citron, for
example, such an arbitrary practice cannot take place because all weekly schedules are
sent to human resources department first; they control and, if necessary, change the
timetable. While full-time workers are more predictable since their schedule does not
change a lot and they have to work exactly for 45 hours, part-time workers always have
to contest their schedule with the managers in order to have a say in their time.

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Researchers maintain that this is also valid for other workplaces at different corners of
the world. See, for example, the volume on temporalities of labor and the contested
divide between professional versus individual/social senses of time edited by Cynthia
Fuchs Epstein and Arne L. Kalleberg (2006).
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striving to stabilize worker’s weekly shifts but she could not be able to fix them because
of the unplanned changes in deliveries. Normally, all the managers change the weekly
schedule without asking to workers and expect workers to collaborate although according
to the law a worker must know when and for how long she will work in advance before
24 hours. As I will recount in Chapter 4, I witnessed that managers threatened workers in
order to get them work whenever they want. It is very regular in the stores that while you
are preparing to finish your shift and leave the store, the manager comes to you and want
you to stay for another 2 or 3 hours, sometimes until the closing hour because a worker
did not show up, there was still work needed to be done, the store received a larger
quantity from the last delivery, and other similar reasons. If there is no work to do and
there is an unexpectedly low number of customers to deal with, then the managers may
ask part-time workers to leave in order to decrease their hours budget. However, this also
enrages workers since it decreases their working hours and ultimately their paychecks.
One week, instead of our weekly work plans, Deniz posted a note for us, saying “this
week we will receive a new collection as well as the American guests [from central
offices of ZIP]. So, everybody is full all days until a second announcement. Do not make
plans in your private lives. I will let you know if anything changes.” I noted in my
notebook that this triggered the biggest reaction among workers towards her. While
Tugba was complaining “of course we do not have any plans, we are not workers, but
slave Isaura here,” Cihan was relieving himself, saying “I will not come here to work full
time everyday. I just will not come. If she can fire me, let us see how she will do that.”
On the first day of seasonal sales, Tolga, the manager of the ZIP store at Istinye Park,
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scheduled all workers full-time. Nevertheless, two student workers objected and declared
that they had important classes that day. Tolga became infuriated and told them, “you
will come and work here from the morning to the closing. Skip your class if you have to.
You skip classes for yourself whenever you want anyways. This store needs you. Be sure
that if you will not show up, do not bother to come here again.” Workers never trust
managers in the sense that they feel managers can miscalculate their hours or consciously
lessen the hours they work for the company to decrease the hours budget and increase the
productivity rates. Workers keep their records of how many hours they exactly work in
order to raise their voices when they receive a lesser amount than they should.

In busier stores, cashiers are more critical than sales assistants because it is highly
possible for customers to find a garment and decide to buy it without talking to a single
worker. Then, the cashier becomes the only human contact that a customer encounters in
the store. In these cases who the cashier is, how she looks and speaks, and how she treats
the customers becomes especially significant since the cashier embodies and represents
the store before the customer. Companies frequently refer to researches that most of the
time customers remember what the cashier told and did to them. Throughout the
interaction at the counter, the customer questions herself if she is doing a right thing by
purchasing this garment. Even a single and relatively unimportant reason may cause her
think twice and leave the garment because the majority of the customers are not sure
about their purchase when they make a payment. Thus, a cashier has another
responsibility to finish the transaction smoothly and make the customer leave the store
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without any hesitation. Cashiers are especially sensitive, fast and kind towards customers,
who are buying expensive goods, and who do not seem very happy about what they buy.
If the customer does not think twice or question the treatment she receives at that critical
moment, the possibility to finish the sale successfully is higher. In slower stores where a
customer is always taken care of by a sales assistant, there are long conversations
between customers and workers before they finally reach to the counter. When the
cashier processes the interaction most customers are content about what they buy. So, the
human contact was with the sales assistant instead of with the cashier, which decreases
the latter’s role and importance.

Working at the counter is a different kind of experience than working in the selling floor.
Overall, it was easier for me to stay stable in a place and do not have to be walk in the
store. Whenever I had a choice, I opted for working at the counter. I never made a
mistake at the counter regarding money, credit cards, and receipts during my tenure at
ZIP stores and I ‘naturally’ found it easier to deal with money instead of people. On the
other hand, most workers had great difficulty in the process they learn how to use the
counter and its programming language or making quick calculations especially when they
are hungry or tired. Although the counter provides the cashiers with a different kind of
authority over the furious customers it never prevents them to assault workers. One day,
when I was working at the counter there was not any gift packages left. It would come
with the following day’s delivery. A middle-aged woman put the garments she just
bought on the counter and told me that she wanted gift packages for all of them. I told her
164
that we did not have any. She leaned towards me and whispered, “come on, I am sure you
have some extra gift packages there, can you find them for me?” When I told her again
that there was not any gift packages left, she got angry and threw her credit card at my
head, screaming, “You wicked liar!” Another time, I was alone and trying hard to serve
customers who were waiting in the line. When I opened a bag to fill it with garments, it
suddenly fell on the floor and got dirty. I lost five seconds because of the bag and
murmured ‘shit,’ [in English] instinctively. Then, the woman who was waiting for me to
finish her transaction said, “Do you think I do not understand you are swearing at my
face because it is in English?”

Indeed, the counter may sometimes increase the chance of confrontation with customers
since the most problematic transactions including changing and refund take place there.
According to the Turkish laws, a customer should keep her receipt and she should not
wear the garment (it should be in the exact condition as it was sold) if she wants to
change it with another product or demands a full refund. The changing and refunding
processes are the moments where most fights between customers and workers start. For
example, when a customer comes and asks for a change or refund without a receipt, the
cashier cannot precede the transaction and explicate the situation to the customer. If the
customers oppose, do not agree with the cashier (it is not that infrequent) or start arguing,
the manager should be called. Also, sometimes there are technical problems with the
counter which may trigger the customer’s anger burst: A price tag may not be read by the
counter’s scanner, the price may appear different than what is written on the tag, the
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garment may be without a price tag, the counter may freeze; a receipt may be jammed in
the printer, etc. Since she is behind the counter, the cashier should deal with the customer
when one of these technical impediments happens.

Making the Store

In the current terminology of retail sector in Turkey, while some words that were
inherited from department stores and traditional bazaars are seen as obsolete and wrong,
while new words that are translated from English are introduced as the proper, kinder
expressions. In this process, dükkan (shop) is replaced with mağaza (store) and zincir
mağaza (chain store); mal (commodity) is replaced with ürün (product, garment);
tezgahtar (salesclerk) is replaced with satış danışmanı (sales assistant, in some stores
‘fashion consultant’). Although almost all of my informants support this novel
terminological language and claim that the newer words sound much better, more
prestigious; whenever they are alone or engaging in a relaxed conversation they do not
hesitate to use the old versions. For example, Sanem says, “Of course these words that
this sector tries to systematize are good for us. When somebody asks me what I do after
school, I tell her that I am a satış danışmanı and I do not say I am a tezgahtar. But, if
there is noone around, like just you and me, it is okay to say that we are tezgahtar. It is
like an insult only we can pronounce, when somebody else calls me as a tezgahtar I feel
that I have to oppose.” Burak states that the older words refer to a different reality than
they are currently in, “look at the store, it is huge, high fashion. It is not a small dükkan; it
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is a big mağaza. In the past, there were small shops that a guy owned and he employed a
few people for help, such as apprentices. These people were tezgahtar. They were not
working for a company, but for a man. We are not tezgahtar although sometimes we say
that we are. We are satış danışmanı because we work in a big store, for a foreign
company, there are hundreds of products here and there are dozens of workers.
Everything is different now.” Burcu recounts, “in my first day, or second, I was talking to
a customer and somehow I told her ‘today we will receive mal.’ The manager heard this
and she immediately called me to the back office. She was so angry, saying ‘this is not a
butcher, we do not receive mal, what we sell here is ürün.’ I was so frightened. I never
used the word mal again.”

If the alarm at the entrance of the store resonates while a customer is leaving, the nearest
worker has to run to the door and inspect customers’ handbags and receipts in order to
understand if the customer was stealing something or if an alarm is forgotten on a
garment. Alarms should be deactivated and physically taken out at the counter during the
sales transaction. When an alarm is still on the garment at the entrance, it may mean
either the cashier mistakenly left it on the garment or the customer either forgot to pay for
the garment or she intended to steal it. Of course, in almost all cases, it is deemed as a
result of the cashier’s carelessness or speed. No thief can ignore the alarms when she is
trying to purloin something. It is well known in retail sector that some customers cut the
alarms in the trying room and take the clothes out of the store without paying. Thus,
when the workers hear alarm bells at the door, they already know that there was
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something wrong with the last transaction and they need to apologize from the customer.
Some customers accept the apologies smoothly and leave the store after workers check
their bags and receipts, while some others react really harsh towards workers’ demands to
inspect and yell at workers. One day, a busy Saturday, I was working at the counter when
we heard the alarm sounds. My coworker Mert ran to the front door to see who was
causing the ringing. An old customer interpreted this as an accusation as if we caught her
while she was stealing something from the store. She started to scream, threw her
garments on the floor, and cursed us. The manager ran to her to explain the procedure to
her kindly but she did not even listen and told her she was never going to come our store
again. On another day, after the alarm made a sound, the customer whose garment has an
alarm on it asked us to change it with another one because she was thinking that there
was something wrong with that particular garment.

All the products sold in the store were ZIP garments. Although this company had a past
with other retail brands now it just sells clothes with its own brand name. It is advertised
and underlined as an American brand. However, in the stores, there was no garment that
was actually manufactured in the United States. They were all imported from the
subcontracted factories of the global south –China and countries from Southeast Asia and
Africa- to the ZIP operation center in Europe (located in the United Kingdom) and then
they were redistributed to the destinations across Europe, including Turkey. In Turkey,
ZIP and other brands of the Xano Retail Group has a huge ‘center storage’ which is
around 80km (50 miles) far from Istanbul city center. The garments are repackaged and
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delivered to stores daily by a Turkish transportation company. Customers thought they
were buying American products that were made in the United States for most of the time
and when they discovered the skirt they bought for their granddaughter was produced in
Senegal they were really disappointed and sometimes even furious. While some
complaint to us, saying “I thought this was an original American store,” others were
asking if there were items produced in the United States or in Europe instead of the
Chinese products.

Workers’ Lives

It is strictly prohibited for workers to tell their coworkers how much they earn. While the
paycheck issue was quite relaxed in the first store I worked, there was not such an
atmosphere in my second workplace. The money we received was not enough for
survival in the city as I illustrated above. When I asked questions to my coworkers and
informants about if they could save up, they always became so sad and disclosed that
they were always penniless and some of them had serious debts to banks.
83
One day, after
I resigned from ZIP, and while walking towards Akmerkez shopping mall for an
interview, I saw my former coworkers Nihan and Burcu on my way. When I asked what

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The main cause of debts is credit cards. Banks in Turkey easily give credit cards to
people who earn very low amounts of money, and sometimes to people who do not earn
any money at all. Workers purchase consumer goods using their credit cards with the idea
that they can arrange their debts easily through installements and failed to calculate the
surprisingly high interest rates. Since they are not able to pay their main debt, their
cumulative debt increases and paralyzes their economic situation. Most of retail workers
have debts to credit cards from 1000 TL [$ 666] to 10.000 TL [$ 6,666].
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they were doing there, they told me there was a little tobacco shop, which give them cash
in return to the credit in their food cards. They could only be able to buy food with these
cards; however since they did not have any cash they exchanged their cards with this
tobocco guy who took 15 percent share from each card. I asked how they would eat in the
rest of the month. They laughed and said, “Well, we can survive without eating. We have
to survive with tea, coffee and biscuits.” Later, I studied my notes and found out that
Nihan and Burcu were living with their families through compelling economic
conditions. I understood that they gave their salaries to their parents and they found this
temporary solution to their problem of impromptu pennilessness. One of my informants,
Baris, told me that since his father was not able to work any more, he was too old and
sick, his salary was the only income for their household. When I asked, he told me how
much he got without hesitation, “I earn about 1100 TL [$ 733] thanks to Citron. It might
be a little higher in some months. Obviously it is not enough, but we do not have to pay
rent, it is our house. So, we act really carefully and make it sufficient for all three of us.”
Another group of workers, who are coming from middle and lower-middle class families,
spend their money more freely. They can buy garments, music CDs, and cosmetics and
they can go out at night. Sanem, for example, told me, “I do not pay rent or bills since my
family takes care of them. I can spend how much I want because it is my own money. If I
want the Gucci bag from the sales at Harvey Nichols for 1500 TL [$ 1,000] I can save up
a little bit, and then I can buy it. […] If I want I buy things for my parents. I buy them
dinners, or sometimes I make grocery shopping but they never ask me to contribute to our
home budget.”
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I never saw a mother retail worker (including the managers) during my work experiences
both at Citron and ZIP and among my informants. Two people that I know gave birth but
they both quitted their jobs and left retail sector. My coworker Sultan was pregnant when
I started to work at ZIP Kanyon. She was transferred to another store two weeks later
because our store was too cold. Later, I found out that she resigned because the company
started to make her work only for 5 hours a week and this caused a very tiny income.
When I last heard of her she was going to court to sue the company because it is illegal to
fire a worker or to push her to resign when she is pregnant. Among my coworkers and
informants, only Hayri was a father. He worked for Citron for long years and when I was
in the United States he resigned and opened a shop in one of the far corners of Istanbul. I
will talk about him more extensively in Chapter 6 yet it would not be wrong to state that
retail work is too demanding for low-wage job for most young parents. My informants
and coworkers testify the worker typology of dependent young people who live with their
families and earn only enough for their pocket money.

Stealing from the Store

Companies have troubles with theft. Customers may engage a range of shoplifting
practices from stealing a small product such as an earring to cutting the alarms from
garments in trying rooms. Actually customers may steal more than expected when they
have a chance. One day, we received underwear without the usual physical alarms on the
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garments but with a secret alarm stitched within the etiquettes. In the evening, all the
underwear shorts were gone. The customers stole them all. They might have noticed that
there were not any alarm on the garments and they easily tore the etiquettes. I was
perplexed by the fact that how many people actually searched for alarms within a day,
found a solution and finally be able to steal the underwear shorts. As a result of regular
shoplifting, companies have quotas for stolen products for each store. Generally these
quotas (tolerable limits of stolen goods) vary between 0.5 per cent and 0.7 percent and
they can only be calculated through inventory, twice a year.

However, the real problem from the view of companies is “workers’ predilection for
swindle and theft.” It is well known that workers may either steal the garments or hide
them for sales in the stores. Cashiers can also engage into financial fraud on the counter
with customers’ or the company’s money. When I was working at Citron, one of my
coworkers was Sibel. She was an extremely talented cashier with no mistakes or
calculating troubles. As I became a closer friend to her I realized how much money she
spent to her accessories, jewelry, food, cosmetics, and hair. I found it interesting (and
intriguing) that how much she could achieve with a cashier’s salary. Whenever such a
topic is talked in front of other people she was saying, “My parents are working, my
sister is working, I am working and we do not pay rent. So, I have the freedom to spend
all my money for my pleasure.” When I started to work at ZIP in Kanyon I saw Sibel.
She became the manager of an exclusive boutique for the upper class clientele. When she
learnt that I was doing a research she wanted to talk to me. Meanwhile, my manager at
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ZIP, Deniz told me that she saw me talking to Sibel and she said she knew her from the
YKM store they worked together almost ten years ago
84
. She told me, “Sibel was a
brilliant cashier, but as time passed by, everybody started to realize that Sibel was
spending too much. I guess there was an investigation for her transactions. I do not know
what happened next; I left the store. But, shortly after I heard that she quit and started to
work for Citron.” Although Deniz did not want to say it directly I understood that she
was implying that Sibel was forced to resign from YKM because she was swindling.
When I met her to conduct an interview she did not want me to record it. Then, she
started to talk about that during all the time she was a cashier for three different
companies she was defrauding. When I asked how she did that, she explained, “a
customer buys something, you do the transaction on the counter. It does not matter
whatever method she pays, you just select ‘cash,’ and she leaves with her bag. But, she
forgot to get her receipt from me: I did not give it to her; I acted as if I forgot to give it.
Whenever the situation led me to do, I kept the receipt for myself. If they come later and
ask if they forgot their receipts on the counter, I found it and presented it to them. But for
99 percent they never came back and asked for their receipt. Even if they were actually
aware of there was no receipt, they thought that it fell somewhere. So, whenever the
manager had an early leave I preceded the receipt as a full refund. The manager should be
away because she must have seen it otherwise. When she was out of the store, you could
do the transaction or you could ask the department managers on the phone. They never

84
While retail sector seems like endless with its growing number of stores and workers,
old enough full-time workers who have a career in retail may know each other from
different stores or shopping malls. Even I encountered former coworkers from my only
previous workplace when I started to work again.
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came and checked the garment because they were too busy. Then, the counter calculated
more money than it should have at the end of the day. You just got the money out of it. In
the evening, there was no problem. All the transactions seemed perfect and the counter
was fit. You had the money in your pocket.”

I was shocked. Since I was a cashier once I could follow the procedure that she was
telling and it made full sense to me. She continued, “You could steal a very little but
expensive item from the selling floor without seen by anyone. You could pull out the
alarm on the counter and put it in your pocket. Then, write a gift card for that product. Go
to another store and exchange it for a garment you actually needed. It is the easiest way,
but it brings no money. […] There is another tactic I used. You know that advertisers
come and buy a lot of staff to use at their TV commercials. While they are looking to
other stores their bags can wait behind the counter; we know them and they know us.
When they are done after hours they bought goods from your store, they come back and
ask for their bags and you give them. It is a very normal transaction, happens all the time.
I was controlling the schedule and when the manager is not in the store I prepared bags
full with clothes, then one of my friends come in to store, walk directly towards the
counter, and say ‘hi, we have packages here,’ you just give the bags to her. Now, all the
garments belong to you. […] Also, during a slow day, a friend can come to the counter
with garments, you can calculate them and ask for her credit card, but at that moment,
you can cancel the items except one, the cheapest, so, she would pay only for the
cheapest and leave the store with a bag of garments and a receipt only for one item.”
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Sibel claimed that all cashiers know these tactics (I did not) and everybody use them
time-to-time. I asked her if she was still swindling like these, she said, “No, no. I am tired
of it. It looks funny but I cannot tell how stressful it was. You become a person of panic-
attack. All the time you look for if anybody was watching you. If anybody understood
what you did. When somebody says ‘hi’ to you, it makes you tense and nervous.
Whenever they call you from the store, you think that ‘okay, they now understood it.’ In
your dreams at night, you always see managers and customers while you were stealing
money or garments. Yes, it was great to have extra money or expensive garments. Yet,
after a certain time, or after you became older I guess, it was really unbearable. I thought,
with my new job as a manager I would quit swindling. I did. Now, I am just a regular
manager at a nice shoe store.”

What Sibel narrated to me made me rethink about the differences between stores. I never
saw or thought any worker was stealing something or defrauding at ZIP stores because
there was surveillance cameras everywhere. Like my coworkers, I knew that eight
different cameras at ZIP Kanyon constantly watched the counter. I think under
complicated surveillance systems workers and cashiers cannot engage into illicit
transactions. However, there are not cameras in most of the stores (including the Citron
store Sibel and I worked) and this probably encourages workers to initiate different forms
of resistance to financial and legal regulations.

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Discipline and Work Culture in the Store

Instituting discipline in the store and imposing disciplined behaviour to the workers is
one of the most controversial issues in retail sector. Managers’ understanding of
discipline in the workplace seems to be borrowed from the very institution of public high
schools. One day in Istinye Park shopping mall we learnt that Hakki was fired. It was
quite a surprise for us because he, an experienced and diligent worker, was one of the
‘indispensables’ in the store. It came out that when he was changing clothes in the locker
room and talking with his coworkers, he said ‘Tolga, the bastard’ for the manager.
Somehow Tolga was in the locker room (which was also his office) and he was
clandestinely listening to the conversation. When he heard how he was referred by one
his workers he came out from where he was hiding and told Hakki that he was fired
because he “behaved improperly in the store.” I was totally confused because I could not
comprehend what was wrong with his words in the locker room where no customer was
around and he was such a good worker in the selling floor. When we had a chance, I
talked to Tolga about this incident and asked him why he fired Hakki:
Tolga: I think you are right. There was no harm to customers or sales.
However, he acted against our company’s principles. Managers have to have
an authority upon workers. He certainly destroyed my authority with his
words.
Cenk: Why do you need authority over your workers?
Tolga: I do not understand what you mean.
Cenk: Job definitions are exact. We all suppose to know what we should and
should not do in the store. You are not our father, brother, teacher, or any
other form of moral responsible, but you are just our employer and this is a
job that we all do for money. We are not doing it as a favor; nobody is
forcing us to work here. That is why I do not understand why we do or you
need authority here?
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Tolga: It is surprising and disturbing to talk about these issues. Do not
misunderstand me; of course I get your point. But you miss one thing:
Everybody is not as aware and conscious as you are. Here, I am dealing with
18 years old kids without any prior work experience. They are used to ‘play’
at school and they come here to ‘play’ here, too. They continue to imagine
here as another school in which they can play whenever they can. They wait
for me to turn my back and they can start having fun. They skip work,
gossip in the corridors, and escape from customers whenever I am not
around. Only when they fear from me they act more controlled, more
respectful. Fear from me makes them a little bit better workers, and I am
sure you know that, these children actually need these jobs. It is for their
benefit to understand who are they, where they, and what are are they doing.
If their fear from me dies one day they would turn into reckless and
untrustworthy people. I cannot provide order in this store. That is why I need
my authority over them.

Discipline has also a bodily component. Workers are not supposed to sit anywhere, lean
to a wall or a table, cross their arms, put their hands into their pockets, talk to other
workers, carry mobile phones or i-pods, chew gum in the store during their work hours.
In some companies like Citron they have uniforms including shoes and they have to wear
them. In other companies, such as ZIP, there is no standard uniform but there are guides
to follow in terms of dress-code: Shorts and jackets were forbidden, for example, and
women workers can wear ‘normal length’ skirts and not mini skirts. Citron was
demanding make-up from women workers, and their nails should be done, while men
workers should shave cleanly on a daily basis. If men’s hair is long, they should make it
like a ponytail. In ZIP, women should not have to put make-up on their faces but their
hair and clothes should look clean and ironed. Men are relatively freer; nobody says
anything to their clothes, hair, or beard unless it is obviously improper for the retail
standards.

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One of the most compelling tasks of the managers in retail stores is to watch and govern
workers who are looking for any tiny chance to talk and laugh with their coworkers.
Protecting their exuberant sociability and the sense of having fun at the workplace are
most workers’ priority. They take the risk of breaking rules and violating regulations that
the companies impose and the managers enforce in order to spend more jocular time at
work. Sevda notes that it is a part of they work culture, “Of course we talk to each other,
gossiping, telling jokes, being silly about workers. I chew gum, too. It is forbidden, but
everything is forbidden. So, I do not care. As long as the stupid customers do not see that
I am chewing gum, it is nobody’s business. […] These are things we all do in order to kill
time in the store. Otherwise, we would all go to the mental hospital.” Baris says how
unsuccessful managers are in preventing workers from being lackadaisical at work,
“Salesclerks have fun when there is no customer, well, and actually even there are
customers. This is a very boring job and everybody knows this, including the managers.
Even if they do not know these conditions and do not connive workers to talk in the store,
what can they do at all? She needs 40 eyes in order to see and stop workers from having
fun when they work.”

Workers define their workplace, relations to others; tasks and responsibilities, and daily
routine as well define and reshape their freedoms, capacities, limitations, restrictions, and
ideas about what is good work or a superb performance. Susan Porter Benson (1988: 228)
describes the concept of ‘work culture,’ as “the ideology and practice with which workers
stake out a relatively autonomous sphere of action on the job. […] A realm of informal,
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customary values and rules mediates the formal authority structure of the workplace and
distances workers from its impact. Work culture is created as workers confront the
limitations and exploit the possibilities of their jobs; it is transmitted and enforced by oral
tradition and social sanctions within the work group.” Work culture in retail stores in
Istanbul creates a space of negotiation in which workers navigate work conditions and the
flow of people; they acclimate or endure to manager’s commands and customers’
demands; they balance company policies and customs of the retail industry with personal
superiorities and disadvantages.

Work culture among retail workers is collectively formed, yet it is open to personal
interventions and resistance. Workers’ consciousness –in which the processes of
interpretation and meaning-making take place, is constructed through the work culture, as
they become a part of it. Official discourses of company trainings and the process in
which workers receive informal teaching from their coworkers and managers come
together with the performative work culture in workers’ imagination and practices, and
entitle them to configure ideas about how they must do their job, how to stop feeling
suffocated in the store, how to extract meaning from their jobs, how to deal with people
from different social classes, how to convince and satisfy customers, how to disobey
suppressive requirements and how to defend their rights. Current work culture in the
shopping malls in Istanbul surfaces as an answer to the complex structure of
neoliberalism, deindustrialization, incomplete urbanization and other contextual factors in
Turkey such as increasing political Islamism. Thus, the meaning of work, the value of
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retail jobs, the boundaries in which they can tolerate this job, their patience to spend time
in stores, their bodily and affective energy to devote, their career goals and other
elements of work culture of retail workers are constantly reorganized through multiple
social, economic, cultural and political dynamics as well as inner mechanisms of power
in the workplace.

What are the joys of retail work? This was a question I asked to all my informants in the
formal and informal interviews I have conducted. At first, most of them stated that it is
not a pleasurable job at all. When I pushed them, they listed the joys of retail work as: the
variety of people they have to deal with as customers and coworkers and the different
social interactions they witness; the possibility of working part-time; spending time in
luxurious stores and among expensive clothes; meeting new people because of the
employee turnover; the career dreams of being promoted in the future and become store
managers; rapidly changing rhythm of the work; meeting with celebrities when they
come to shop and having a sense of their lives; and finally the chance to exercise personal
initiative and autonomy as long as they are able to construct the rational, decision-maker
subjectivity of retail work. For example, Cihan says, “Overall, it is a civilized (modern)
work. We work in a clean environment, women and men together, we are kind, most of
the customers are kind, and everything is orderly. I mean, we are not working like
animals or slaves. To be honest, we work like slaves sometimes, but still it is a decent
job.” Ayse says, “I developed a game to enjoy my time here. Whenever I sell something
to a customer, I get the money from her, and I imagine this is my money now. As if I own
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this store, these are my garments and the benefit will come to me. It makes me happier
and happier as I sell more and more. Of course, in the evening I go to home without any
money and that makes me sad. But, during the day, I feel better.”

The most difficult part of working retail is the repetitiveness that the work itself consists
of. Doing the same thing, fulfilling same tasks, uttering exactly same words, enacting the
cheerful and positive attitude, dealing with same situations and problems cumulate and
create a meaningless dullness for workers. As Ozlem says, “Everyday the same routine.
Come to the store, check for the missing items, find them in the storage, get them to the
selling floor, fold garments, fold same garments for a hundred time in a day, talk to the
customers, explain them this and that, negotiate with the manager that she does not
change your schedule, etc. Some jobs have difficulty, you cannot do them because it is so
difficult, and you simply cannot. This job, on the other hand, it is not that difficult, the
majority of people can perform this if they want. However, it is so boring and
meaningless. You cannot satisfy yourself with this job.” Nalan defends that this repeating
aspect is good since it allows workers to exercise autonomy over their acts and they do
not have to think about what they do, “I mean when you are a teacher, or you are a cook,
you cant take things for granted, your mind is always busy with the stuff. When you are a
sales assistant, it is so simple, after a day or two you start not to recognize what are you
doing. You turn into a machine. The job becomes automatic for you. You perform it
without thinking and you are free to think whatever you want.”

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Benson (1988: 229) argues that what ‘skill’ cannot be defined objectively. Instead, it is a
contingent category that depends on various social and economic necessities, biases, and
conditions. Williams (2006) and Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) note that there is no unskilled
job and each different position in the service sector requires specific bodily, affective,
relational and social skills, adaptabilities, and capacities. The virtually simplest tasks may
paralyze a new worker such as folding baby dresses or finding the location of a single
jacket –after walking in the store for half an hour and looking every corner to find it one
comes to understand that there is only of these jackets, it is a ‘left-out.’ Hanging garments
on hangers is a relatively easier responsibility, yet folding garments of different sizes for
a neat appearance as if they all are the same size might be really annoying. In addition to
the practical difficulty to fold garments into the exactly same size one over another, speed
is also a crucial problem for a starter. Nobody expects from an inexperienced sales
assistant to finish folding a table in half an hour, but the expectations become more
realistic and ambitions develop very fast. After months of being a sales assistant in
different stores, I can note that folding fast and correctly is a simply talent, a gift; one can
develop her practice of folding but some people are ‘naturally’ luckier. I saw starters who
became masters in folding in even two days. Also, smiling for long hours, sustaining
patience towards sometimes obnoxious and stubborn customers, being subservient to
arrogant managers, tolerating coworkers’ egocentrism and meanness and actually
accomplishing all of these while standing for long hours and being hungry is a great skill:
Maybe it is the skill of being selfless and magnanimous. One can work retail without the
skill of selflessness, but with it, she can clearly be a much better and more successful
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worker. In the public discourse, like other low-wage jobs, sales assistantship is presented
as a job that anybody could do. This image makes this job perceived as deskilled and low
status, while managers and other professionals of the company including the human
resources departments spend most of their time in fostering and harnessing certain skills
over workers.

The best sales assistant is not the one who sells the biggest number of garments at the end
of the day. The sold goods should not come back as demands of full-refund by customers.
When a worker sells something she should be honest about her opinions instead of
misleading the customer because it is a golden rule in the retail sector that ‘a lie can
survive only within the store, the customer will be alone with the reality after she leaves.’
If a worker enchants the customer by telling her that the garments look great at her, when
the customer will be at home she will recognize that what the sales assistant was just
doing her job and telling lies to her in order to sell more. So, she will come and bring
back the product. A good sales assistant should be clear and sincere to the customer. Such
an attitude both decreases the ratio of refunds and make the customer trust to the store.
Most of the stores now work according to the ‘store promotion’ system instead of
‘individual promotion.’ In the store promotion, all the workers in a store share a specific
ratio of total sales at the end of each month. In individual promotion, every individual
worker’s sales are listed electronically and her own percentage is added to her salary at
the end of the month. When the promotion is calculated for the whole store staff
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independent of individual differences, workers do not suffocate and influence customers
to buy more garments.

Manners of a retail worker is the most important single criteria of how she is being
evaluated although it is not the most functional quality in terms of the division of labor in
the store. Deferential service and standards of gentility are increasingly becoming the
elemental qualities of retail work. In addition to manners, workers need to have detailed
knowledge about current trends in fashion and new technological developments in the
textile industry. She is supposed to offer harmonious colors, fabrics, cuts, and models to
customers.

According to Frank Levy, the contingent definition of what is ‘a good job’ has
characteristically related with “good pay, clean work, job security, autonomy.” (1998:78)
In parallel to his ‘good jobs,’ Williams (2006: 86) highlights that most retail jobs are ‘bad
jobs’ since they “pay low wages, offer few benefits, have high turnover, and restrict
workers’ autonomy.” In the Turkish context, I would not be so sure about the advantages
or disadvantages of retail jobs. Finding an officially registered, formal job –which comes
with the membership to the official social security system- at a store, which has relatively
better work conditions and pay more than average, happens to be most desirable
opportunity for high-school graduate, lower-middle class young Istanbulites who are
otherwise disqualified and excluded from the formal economy. Retail sector also supports
women’s (both as workers and as managers) public visibility and increases their chances
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to work within a harassment-free environment. There is no pay gap between genders in
retail sector. However, stores do not hire older or overweight people, Kurds, Islamists,
and the working class and/or migrants, varoş. So, retail sector both contributes to the
existing patterns of social inequality in the society and creates its own dynamics of re-
stratification and social segregation through what I would call ‘the neoliberal sieve.’
Although it is hard for me to conclude whether, for example, sales assistantship is a good
or a bad job (for whom, at which store?) I agree with Williams that these can obviously
be better jobs through unionization, forming consciousness among the neoliberal public
about the ‘facts’ of these jobs, and an organized social struggle by retail employees for
their basic rights, job security, and the ‘living wages.’

“Nobody’s Born to Become a Salesclerk”: Managers, Workers and Customers

The apparel store is an arena in which lackadaisical workers, capricious customers, and
zealous managers constantly interact. Although there are very exceptional customers,
unique workers, or unconventional managers, a common typology, ‘ideal type,’ of these
actors can be elucidated. Then, who are the typical worker, the quintessential manager,
and the archetypal customer in the retail stores within shopping malls in the central
districts of Istanbul?

‘A typical worker’ is Turkish in terms of ethnic origin, she is aged between 18-25 years
old and she is a high school graduate. She lives in one of the decaying central zones of
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the city with her family and spends most of her time in shopping malls. She commutes to
the workplace via public transportation or shuttles provided by the workplace. She has a
few friends from her high school and the neighborhood she lives, but most of her circle of
friends are retail workers, whether her former coworkers or friends of friends. She wants
to go to the fancy restaurants in the shopping mall just like she wants to buy garments she
sees in the windows. She plans to climb the ladders and become a store manager one day.
She may come to the shopping mall even on her off days. She does not like the managers’
personality and criticizes them, but, at the same time, she wants to be like them. She does
not like most of the customers, “degenerated within an unrealistic lifestyle,” but she
wants to spend money like them. In sum, the workplace, the very institution of the
shopping mall, guides her desires, aspirations, and dreams as well her basic identity-
construction (which is increasingly shaped through consumption patterns instead of
production and labor relations in the ‘consumer society’ as Baudrillard [1998] states).

Stores produce a model sales assistant, an ideal worker, who has a background of
unpropitious families and insufficient and irrelevant education. Managers never deal with
ready, already-formed, mature, or ‘responsible’ retail workers. They always train,
discipline, and inspire the burgeoning identities of workers. Deniz, for example, says, “It
is a new world. The store does not resemble anywhere they [the workers] previously
know. They open their eyes to a brand new social environment here.” On the other hand,
the institution of the retail store borrows metaphors and discourses on a frequent basis
from the places that workers “previously know,” including the school and family. In
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other words, managers both use and collaborate with worker’s past and concurrent frame
of references (of control, discipline, and authority) in order to govern them. Leslie
Salzinger (2003) names this process of creating disciplined and industrious workers out
of an ignorant, oblivious, and reluctant population as ‘interpellation.’ Accordingly, as
long as the job candidate has the desired qualities of being a model worker, she is able to
find a job. Through time, she learns how to be good worker, and after certain amount of
repetition and reiteration, the norms and conventions of the job are internalized. The
worker starts to become a genuinely good worker, not imitating others, but a real and
committed one. So, the interpellated subjectivity of the ideal worker is fully realized and
embodied and thus she begins to be the flawless worker.

A quintessential manager is also Turkish, she is aged between 25-35 years old and she is
a college graduate. She is able to speak in at least one foreign language and she has
probably been abroad. She lives either in a upper-middle class neighborhood in central
Istanbul or in one of the recently built, gated suburban developments. She drives her own
car. She is a member of a broad social network including her friends from college as well
as other store managers and people from the center office. She goes out to dinners in
fancy restaurants and cool nightclubs of the city whenever she has a chance from long
work hours. She follows fashion through expensive haute couture boutiques in addition
to some of the high-end shopping mall stores. For the future, she wants to get rid of the
shopping mall either through getting a job at the center office or by finding a position in
an office setting where she will not have to work on Sundays or in the evenings, which is
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her biggest complaint. When she does not have to, she never comes to the shopping mall.
She does not like workers’ blasé attitude but she feels that she is somehow responsible
from them while she must use and exploit their labor. She does not like the customers
either because they are too overindulged and vain but she can understand them. They
speak the same language with slight differences.

The customers are indeed a staggering amalgamation of various social differences. It is
more difficult to group them than classifying workers and managers. They represent a
wide variety of existing social classes and ethnicities in Turkey. An archetypal customer
though is aged more than 30 and she is college graduate –if not, she finished a prestigious
elite high school. Most probably, she is coming from and living in the same upper-middle
class environment with the store managers through a significant difference: She does not
work; at least she does not work in a store even as a manager. When she encounters one,
she can talk to a manager, even though they fight. However, she feels entitled to
disparage workers whenever she can, especially when they dysfunction. She does not like
the physical or social environment in shopping malls and she always complains from its
bad ventilation, crowded corridors, idiocy of sales assistants, and confusing architecture.
Yet, she is addicted to shopping malls. It is a part of her life-world. She does not like the
workers. They need to be shaken up a little bit in order to fulfill the tasks. She likes
managers when they satisfy her demands. That is why whenever there is a problem with
the recalcitrant workers, she immediately asks for a supervisor to talk.

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Investing to Become a Good Worker

When one starts to a new job, there is a two-month trial period before she officially
registered as a worker. There are workers who are fired after their 50
th
days before they
can complete their 60
th
workday and become an official worker. When one is fired within
her first two months, she cannot sue the company for a recompensing payment. This
policy makes workers to be subordinated and obedient to the whimsical and unacceptable
demands by managers. Ongoing economic crisis increases the tension workers feel when
they ‘finally’ find a job because they tend to think that this is the only chance to start
formal work. They tolerate and accept increasingly adverse conditions, such as lower
wages, longer hours, unpaid overtimes, and similar injustices at the workplace in order
not to lose secure jobs during a recession.

Most retail workers, except the part-time student workers, who are attending a university
to have a ‘real’ profession, have plans or dreams to stay in retail sector and become
promoted as store managers, merchandisers, or administrative positions. Most of them
believe that if they labor hard and persevere enough, they will be awarded one day.
However, most companies have strict policies about who is going to be promoted and
advanced amongst workers. Some companies, including the Inditex group and Mango,
hire managers from outside and they only promote workers if they are college graduates
and fluent in English and/or Spanish. Other companies like the Xano Retail Group and
the Al-Shaya Group prefer college graduates and English speakers but exceptionally they
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have managers, like Deniz, who could not speak in English or any other foreign
language. When I asked my informants what they think about being a manager in the
future most of them, especially younger ones, verbalized their hopes and goals
contradicting with corporate policies. Aysin said, “I know they prefer college graduates
but it is not a rule, or it should not be. What if I am a great worker, or a manager but
somehow I could not finish college? What if I could not be able to continue my education
after high school? What is it to do with being a manager? I think if you are strong
enough, good enough, the company will see it and make you a manager, at least a second
manager.” Although many retail workers, like Aysin, think positively and hopefully
about their future promotions, more experienced workers talk about their past,
unsuccessful attempts to become a manager since they are not qualified enough. A typical
example is Oray: “If you go and ask managers or people from the human resources
department, they will tell you that ‘you may have a chance, keep trying, work hard.’ No
one in this business should believe them because they lie. They have to lie; it is their job.
It [the hope for being promoted] is a carrot in front of our noses. They just motivate and
support people to become better sales assistants with the dream of becoming a manager
one day. I accepted this as reality long time ago. They are not employing us to become
managers one day, just for good workers for a time.”

There is also a little minority who experienced exceptional advancements or witnessed
such promotions from their close friends. Nihal is such an example, “I know that miracles
happen. You may know Remziye. She was a high school graduate, she does not speak in
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any foreign languages, and she is even a little chubby. But, she is an excellent sales
assistant. Maybe the best ever! She worked for years and years, she trained numerous
sales assistants, and she even educated managers. She never complained. What
happened? Citron made her a second manager first, and then a store manager against the
strict policy they implement. So, I am following her steps.”

Retail companies and store managers constantly stimulate, encourage, and inspire
workers through morale-boosting techniques to become better sales assistants. These
techniques include kinder treatments, praising in front of other workers, establishing
personal affinity, surprising changes or flexibility in the work schedule for the worker’s
comfort, incentives through wages and promotion, and most remarkably, promising
advancement. Managers and human resources experts always underline that in the retail
sector it is really easy to climb the ladders and become a store manager in a couple of
years. There are cliché stories that they frequently narrate about the miraculous successes
of some workers, who started working as a cashier or a sales assistant, work diligently
and being raised to higher positions, eventually to the store manager, such as the story
Nihal recounted above. Although I personally witnessed that these kind of extraordinary
success stories can happen, the rate of such miracles is indeed very low and there are
certain structural obstacles that apply to many regular workers, preventing them being
promoted. Therefore, it is not realistic, if not deceiving, to claim that desiring, focusing
and working assiduously are enough to be promoted.

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When I talked to my coworkers and informants, it became clear that this illusional
meritocracy did not allure them at all. For example, Alev recounts, “Our manager told
three full time workers, including me, that we are great sales assistants and he could see
we would become excellent managers in the future. We were flattered. Can you imagine?
It was my biggest dream. Then, he offered us an “informal” trial period. He said he
would share some of his responsibilities with us in order to see if he could propose one or
two of us to the center office as possible supervisors. After becoming a successful
supervisor, you can be a manager when the company needs. So it was the first step for us.
[…] Months passed. He shared his all responsibilities with us. The three of us were
working like slaves because we simply could not say no to him, it would mean saying no
to the possibility of becoming a manager. We did not get any increase in our payment.
There were weeks I worked for 60-65 hours. This process simply consumed us bodily
and spiritually; I was not living in the full sense of the term. I was just working and
sleeping. Finally one of us could not take this any more and she resigned. After she
resigned and started at another company she told us that our manager was cheating us. He
did not even inform the center office that we were trainees for being a supervisor. So, the
human resources department did not know that we were doing his tasks as a manager and
we had unpaid overtimes. […] After this incident, I quit believing their tales of
‘becoming a manager is possible if you work hard.’ It is not true, they are just using
young people’s naiveté liked they abused mine.”
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Standardizing the Interactions
85

Sales assistants, and to a certain extent managers, have to treat customers in a
standardized fashion (Leidner 1993). Sometimes the company imposes certain structures
of wording to utter and behaviors to exhibit; nevertheless, workers themselves develop
and routinize their own standardized ways to deal with the customer for most of the time.
In other words, there is no full ‘robotization’ for sales assistants as it happens in other
spaces of the services sector, for example, in Starbucks. On the contrary, ZIP was
officially against this sort of standardization in workers’ behavior. Deniz, for example,
was always warning us for being creative when we deal with customers, because she
maintained, only then the customer would feel herself special and the interaction between
us would be deemed genuine. Although we were supposed to follow a script about how
we salute the customers when they walk in the store, how we look at them when they
approach us to ask something, what we tell them when they pay for garments, and how
we greet and invite them for another visit to the store when they leave; we were also
supposed to be inventive, honest and personal with every single customer.

85
As Harper and Lawson (2003:3) elucidate, “All work is fundamentally rooted in social
interaction. Work involves not only the organized interaction among individuals but also
the unorganized, fleeting interactions between people, some who may be patients,
students, customers, or clients of others. […] Much of the work of modern society
involves serving each other, communicating with each other, and convincing each other
to do something.” This social interaction aspect is even stronger in the apparel stores
where the conditions and consequences of the production of service are directly linked to
the dynamics of success.
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Workers around the world should pay obeisance by using words like ‘good morning,’
‘welcome to our store,’ ‘good-bye,’ ‘we would like to see you here again;’ and there is
nothing to be creative about these standard patterns of speech. Of course, there are local
differences. For example, in Turkey, a retail worker cannot ask ‘how are you today?’ or
any other form of such a question, unlike United States. This would be improper and the
customer would either be disturbed by this question or take it seriously and try to answer
it. My coworker Habibe was frequently using the word efendim (literally my master,
means sir or madam) to express her respect to the customers. One day, a worker at human
resources department was visiting the store and she heard Habibe’s regular use of
efendim. At the end of the day, she told us that we should not have used that word
frequently because, “the image of this company is a friendly and funny atmosphere. You,
as workers, should be relaxed but being respectful to the customers. These words, like
efendim, position you too much below customers as if you are their servants or slaves.
You aren’t. So, please get rid of humiliating and self-degrading words from your speech.”

Against sounding mechanical through the standardization of service, eye contact between
the worker and the customer is highlighted proposed by the companies in the retail sector
since it is assumed that when a customer is looked into her eyes, she would believe that
the treatment is special and personal for her and the dialogue is authentic and not
simulated. Actually, a complete robotization is not possible in human interactions
because human behaviour is unpredictable and open to multifarious subversions even on
the most basic issues such as buying a t-shirt. So, even the most standardized, most
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scripted interaction with customers requires social techniques of maneavour, creative
persuasion skills, fast decision-making and articulateness for retail workers.

Personnel trainings are significant parts of the endeavor to standardize the service in the
stores. Retail workers do not like the content of these specialized training programs they
receive from human resources departments of the transnational apparel companies. Their
first reason to be averse to this sort of training is their opinion that retail work is learnt in
the selling floor, through work experience, not in the insipid meeting rooms of corporate
buildings. For example, Sevda says, “Oh please, I beg them not to call me to these idiot
trainings. How dare a person from human resources can teach me how to sell or take care
of customers? I am in this job for almost ten years with my blood, my heart, and my
sweat. I learnt everything from excellent managers like an apprentice during numerous
interactions with every type of customers. I became an expert of dealing with people and
solving their problems. I am able to understand what a customer wants from her eyes
without saying anything. After all these, a human resources worker who was graduated
from college three months ago comes and tells me what to do in the store. Come on! This
job is learnt here in the selling flore, not anywhere else.” Hasibe was calmer in her
reaction towards these professional trainings, but she maintains that practice is the best
way to learn, “The trainings at the center office are boring. It is fine for me, if they want
to educate us, they can. I am open to learn new things. However, I do not know how
many times I attended these meetings in my life and I did not hear anything exciting, or
something that actually helps us in the store. Not a single time. Last time it was a
195
psychologist. She was telling us how to treat customers, how can we understand them
through empathy. Well, I do not need to be a psychologist to know what they feel. I
understand when I look at them. At the end of the meeting, they asked us what we
thought and if we had any suggestions. I told her to go to a store and work as a sales
assistant for a while to deeply understand what is going on there. That would be a much
better education for her [laughs].”

Dealing with the Customers

Despite all the energy devoted to standardize and polish up the contacts between
customers and sales assistants by the apparel companies, there are certain times when the
interfacing parts cannot communicate through the learnt scripts and an unforeseeable
element of virtually ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ human sociability must be enacted. For
example, an elderly woman came to me when I was working at ZIP Kanyon and asked
for our special collections. When I did not understand what she was trying to say, she
said, “I want to see and buy garments from your special collection, which is not open to
public but exclusive for privileged customers.” I told her that there was not such a
collection in our store but she insisted. Then, I hesitated because maybe there was one
and I was not aware of its existence. The customer seemed like she knew exactly what
she was saying. She maintained, “come on sweetie, do not lie to me, please walk me to
the special collection. Where do you hide it anyways?” While I was still procrastinating,
she became very angry with me, “Do not you think that I deserve that collection? How
196
you dare? Do you think I cannot afford? I am giving you a guarantee that I will buy
garments from that collection and it does not matter how much they are.” I called the
store manager Deniz for help, she explicated once again that neither we nor any other ZIP
store had such a collection. This time she was harsh on Deniz. She threatened her and
claimed that Deniz will pay for this. Deniz also raised her voice and told her that she did
not know a way to show something that did not exist and the customer could make a
complaint to wherever she wanted. The customer calmed down and she told us the story.
They were in a birthday party. She liked clothes of a friend’s grandchild and asked where
did they buy these. Her friend told our customer that these were ‘ZIP exclusive’ clothes
that were available only for selected customers. Deniz told her that she had been working
for ZIP for more than a year and it was the first time that she heard such a thing. I told her
that ZIP was not a designer boutique; it was a store of mass-produced garments for
middle classes: A special collection is against its operative logic. She agreed and left the
store without being dismal. Then Deniz told me that we should not have disgraced ZIP in
front of our customers. When I told her that it was the truth, ZIP was not Prada obviously,
she laughed.

There is a group of customers, who come and ask retail workers how much money they
earn or how long hours they work in the store. Even though most of them ask these
questions with clear benevolence, compassion, or social conscience, they make the
workers feel humiliated, commodified, dehumanized, and vulnerable. Such an
interchange generally occurs between older women customers and younger women sales
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assistants. I haven’t witnessed such a conversation between other gender and age groups.
When men talk about these issues, for example if a male customer asks for specific
information about working conditions to a male worker, this chat often has an air of
camaraderie instead of tenderness as in women’s talk. This tone does not bother men.
Women workers, on the other hand, habitually complain of such questions. Zeliha says,
“I really do not understand it. Can she go to a bank and ask the clerk how much she
makes. Or, to a dentist and how many hours she works. It is incredibly disrespectful to
our identity. We are not here to satisfy their simple curiousness about us. Am I entitled to
ask her what does she do? No. Then she cannot ask me either.” On a similar line, Burcu
says, “When a woman asks such questions to be informed about our lives, about our
private lives, I do not read it as threatening. It is just curiosity, sometimes even jealousy.
It is not nice; I hate it. But I do not mind. However, when a man comes and asks you how
much you make or when you leave, it has another meaning. It happened to me only once.
I could not figure it out instantly. Later, I rethought about it and became mad. But this
happens really rare. Nobody wants trouble. So, only women ask us these questions in
order to satisfy themselves. Probably they want to feel how lucky they are.”

There are retail workers who are extremely sympathetic and can establish strong ties with
most of the customers as if they know each other for years. However, such an
instantaneous and warm engagement with the customer always bears the risk of being
perceived as artificial and inauthentic. If a customer thinks that the retail worker strives to
look closer to her or pretends to be lovely, she becomes irritated and their communication
198
fails. Most of my informants explained this genuineness as a natural talent, an
unchangeable aspect of personality. Ozlem says, “I am always a cold and [self-]
protective person. I am not really open to people, it is not in my nature. I know that I am
a good cashier, I never make mistakes with money, and I am extremely kind towards
customers, I never displease them. But, I am never able to establish intimate relations
with them either. I know that my coworkers here can start talking to a customer and they
know about even their families just two minutes later. They become happy when a
customer finds something she has been looking for, or they become sad when they cannot
help a customer as if she was their friend. I cannot be like that.” Levent says, “My closest
friend Erdinc loves this job and he has an obvious talent to talk to people. When he sees
someone, a customer, he says ‘hello’ and his eyes are smiling. It is so real with him.
Customers understand and reciprocate the good energy they receive from him. He
becomes crazy to help people. He talks to them about his own life, his family, his
girlfriend, and about garments he buys himself as if he talks with a close friend. When he
is walking with his customer to the door, he shows a real joy. It is difficult to gain this
flair later. I do not have such a talent. I do just what I am told to do.”

Such fully engaged, extremely friendly workers can develop closer relationships with the
customers. One day, my coworker Yildiray received an expensive suit from one of his
faithful customers as a New Year gift. Alev was invited to have a cup of tea by a
customer to the luxuries residences of the Akmerkez shopping center, where millionaires
and celebrities live. She said, “When I was working at Citron she was my customer. This
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was like five years ago. Then, I transferred to ZIP Kids and she had a grandchild, so she
started to come here. I have been serving her for years. Sometimes she invites me her
home for a cup of tea or coffee. She really likes me, she advises me about issues in my
life. When my brother died last year, she came to his funeral. She always tells me that it
was so unfortunate that I did not go to the college. She says I could be a high level
worker instead of being a salesclerk.”

For an excellent, experienced sales assistant an address book, which includes the contact
information of good, loyal customers including celebrities and wealthy people, is a must.
They collected great customers in these notebooks over years and as they transfer from
one store to another they bring their loyal customers with them. Serkan says, “As you can
see I am wearing this watch. It is Italian and worth three months of my income. The
owner of the Bosphorus Hotel has bought this to me as a gift. She is an excellent
customer. I remember that one day she purchased garments cost for 100.000 TL ($
66,000) and I assisted her for three hours. It affected my income and I received 3000 TL
($ 2,000) as salary in the following month. So, I have almost 100 very special customers
like her in my notebook. They are the strongest arms I have. I resigned from Citron and
started to work here at Beymen, which is a superior store in all senses, because of my
notebook. I showed it to them in the interview, and they hired me at that moment because
they knew what it means.”

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On the other hand, some workers do not like others being so warm and nice to the
customers. They do not interpret it as being natural and authentic; but instead as being
ingratiating and shameful. Tugba, for example, was criticizing another worker, “She is so
stupid. Whenever a customer talks to her she starts being like a puppy, tries to be taken
by a master! There is nothing to do; it is about her instincts. She believes she should
always suck up the customers (müşterileri yalamak zorunda).” Pervin was also typical in
her reaction, “I am doing my job and its limits are definite. If a person has self-respect
she would not do these things. I do not have to be ‘too nice,’ or friendly with customers.
It is not a personal relation, I sell something and they buy it. […] I never think myself of
within this group of salesclerks who are trying to be liked by customers (yaranmak) and
approved by them (gözlerine girmek).” While I was working at different stores, I was
never able to connect with customers in intimate ways as some of my coworkers did. So,
I guess I was one of the ‘cold type’ of retail workers. However, after observing them for
weeks, I came to a conclusion that most customers specifically like some of the workers
although they do nothing else than their jobs. So, I guess it might be listed as one of the
hidden skills of this supposedly unskilled job.

Agitating Encounters Between Workers and Managers

Most workers I talked to mentioned how they fantasize about taking revenge from the
cruel managers. They make imaginary plans in which they kill their managers, beat them
up, destroy their houses or cars, complain about them to the center office, write
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anonymous letters to reveal their intimate secrets, and cause them to be fired by creating
a scandal involving them. In most cases, they never realize these scenarios and leave the
managers without harming them. Yildiray, for example, narrated his relation with his
former manager Serhan in the army. “When I saw him one day, he told me that he was
going to Sivas to perform his [compulsory military] service. I said I know a high-ranked
army officer there. He begged me to call him and ask a favor for him in order to be more
comfortable in the barracks. I called my relative and told him that this guy, Serhan, was
my manager and he helped me a lot when I started to work. Of course, it was a lie and I
hated Serhan during the time I worked for him. I do not know what happened to me. All
my rage to him was gone and he was like an old friend for me. So, the general said he
would do whatever he could. Months later, I saw Serhan again; he was back from the
army. I asked how was it and he told me everything was perfect. They made him an
office-worker in the military base so he did not even leave the office for the fields. His
military service was extremely easy. I was happy, but then he said it was good that I did
not call my relative, he did not even need it. I was surprised that he did not even think of
my contribution behind this extra-easy military service. I did not say anything to him. I
remember that he was always the same guy, a son of a bitch, whether you were a worker
for him or an old friend who made a favor to him.”

Sultan was pregnant when I started to work at ZIP and she was transferred to another
store after two weeks so that I barely saw her. She resigned because the company did not
make her work for more than five hours. When she resigned she sent an email to all the
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center office workers of the company as well as all the store managers. She probably
stole the list of e-mail addresses from the manager’s computer. In her email, she was
describing how she had been treated badly in this company, how her managers did not
support her when she had problems with customers, how the managers were unjust
against workers, and how her desire to become a manager was ridiculed by the human
resources department. I read the email, Deniz showed it to us, but I could not obtain the
text to directly quote from it here. She was also recounting how the managers she worked
with used tricks to fool the center office people, how they cheated workers by decreaing
their working hours, and how easily they lied when they needed with specific examples
and real names and dates. It was a scandalous email that seriously ruined the involving
managers’ prestige and respectability as well as, most probably, their future
advancement. Although nobody liked what they read in the email as far as I observed,
and probably put it in a closet to read again one day when needed, the company did not
take it officially and take action to interrogate about the managers. Hence, Sultan harmed
the managers and the personnel symbolically in the long run.

There is also a risky aspect of dealing with so many young workers, warning them when
they make mistakes, and sometimes hiring them when they are not improving or
becoming dysfunctional in the store, because they can interpret the professional relations
in a personal frame and they might develop an urge to give personalized, even violent,
responses to people with corporate power. Workers or former workers can threaten
managers or the center office workers regarding their unwanted situations such as being
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fired. When I started to work at ZIP Istinye Park, one of the first stories my coworkers
keenly told me was about how the manager Tolga was beaten up in the fire exit (where
there was not any surveillance cameras) by a former worker and friends of current
workers. My coworkers told me that his eyes were purple and he could not come to work
for a week after the incident. Meltem was my manager when I was working at Citron.
She might be really harsh on workers sometimes. During such a tense moment, she yelled
at a male worker Hasan and told him to “fuck off.” He resigned without creating a
problem. I knew that she regretted later because she was so angry at that moment and she
did not mean to fire him, who happened to be a good worker. Then, she told us that she
started to see him in front of the subway exit near her home around midnight while she
was going home from work. He did not say anything to her but just looked at her eyes
and left. She was so scared and told us, “What can I do if he hits me? I am an alone
woman. I live alone. At that hour streets are almost empty. I cannot defend myself.” She
started to take a taxi for a while after she left the store and Hasan never appeared again
around her house. On another day at ZIP, a human resources worker followed a worker,
Can, while he was smoking a cigarette in the fire exit during his working hours. They
fired him immediately. Can looked at the human resources worker and said, “I know your
car” while he was leaving the store. The woman from the human resources deparment
was really intimidated and thinking if she must have complained to the police. Although
she did not go to the police, a male worker walked with her to her car that day to ensure
that she was all right.

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Sometimes I was also too angry to my managers. However, I knew that everybody could
not be happy at the same time and there was a clear conflict of interest between workers
and managers. I forgot what happened after I quit working and started to talk to managers
as friends. Most workers do the same thing. Deniz told me there were people who had
great fights with her while they were working together and now they visited her regularly
to chat and even brought gifts to her. Saniye says, “It is just like the teacher-student
relationship. When you are a student, you hate your teachers. The only thing you can see
is how they are harsh on you or how they graded you unfairly. After you graduate you
start to forget these little fights and remember the better aspects of your relation with
them. I worked at so many stores and I still see some of my former managers even though
we were arguing a lot when we were working together.”

Agitating Encounters Between Workers and Customers

Such a tension is not limited to worker and managers. Customers can also participate or
trigger fights, which may end up verbal or physical violence in the store. I witnessed
numerous cases of quarrels in which both sides raised their voices and even used
improper words to each other. Kaan recounts such an instance; “I was dealing with this
couple in the men’s department. They were trying to find a suit for the guy who was
extremely rude towards me. He never thanked to me and he threw the garments to the
floor after he tried them. I did not say anything and I even thought that they might be the
secret agents that the company sent to test our patience. I was serving them for more than
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half an hour and I started to be tired and bored with them. When I brought ties as he
asked, he picked one of them and threw it to my face, saying ‘are you an idiot? Did I say
pink? Take these and serve me better
86
.’ I lost myself at that moment. I remember that I
was yelling at him, ‘who do you think you are, you son of a bitch, fuck off from the
store.’ And then, we started to hit each other before other people stopped our fight and
separated us. […] I knew that they would fire me because swearing to a customer, and of
course hitting them, was unforgivable. But, I was not conscious at all. I could not stop
myself.” On another incident, Onur remembers that after a long and increasingly intense
argument with the second manager about changing a garment with another one without a
receipt, the customer hit her. “They were shouting and I sensed that they could not
control themselves at that moment. When he started to walk towards her I understood that
this would end in an absolutely unwanted way. Suddenly, he slapped her face. All the
workers and the security run and caught him and our second manager pressed charges.
But then, the company forced her to drop her case and reminded her that she should not
be in a fervent argument either, she should have left before such a thing happened in the
store. That day, I understood that the customers were as crazy as we were. So, we all
should be more careful if we do not want to deal with the police at the end in addition to
getting fired because of this.”

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In Turkish he says “serve me like a man.” (Bana adam gibi hizmet et) ‘Like a man’ is a
linguistic structure to signify a better, more proper, more accurate quality. It has an
implicitly gendered meaning, if not specifically. The reverse word Kari gibi (doing things
like a woman) has a more explicitly gendered meaning in additon to the implication of
disqualified and wrong action.
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Customers do not have to engage in verbal violence or physical fights with workers to
express their sense of superiority and exercise domination over sales assistants. There are
other, miniscule, more symbolic ways that they perform and underline their higher
positions. For example, my coworker Tugba says, “Be careful how most of them [the
customers] put the garments on the counter. They never care if there is something else on
the counter, if you are folding clothes or arranging the receipts. They hit the garments to
the counter and do not even look what they cause like destroying folded clothes or falling
receipts. I believe it is a way to assert their priority and power, like saying, ‘look at me
you little bug, I am standing right here, stop doing other things and take care of me’.”
Tugal also mentions another symbolic action that takes place between customers and
him, “I am working on a table or on the shelves like folding, or checking tags, etc. I am
clearly working at that moment. A customer comes and says ‘move,’ or ‘one minute,’ to
me to look at the garments. She does not feel like she has to wait for me to finish what I
am doing there. My business is insignificant and she can interrupt it. She acts like this
just to show she is more powerful than me.” Gulcan also refers to what disturbs her most
about the customers, “There are ‘sections’ in our store, and a section consists of three
walls with shelves and hangers and a table. It is the U shape. In the closings, everybody
gets a section to fold and put clothes on hangers. It takes almost an hour to fold
everything and make the section look tidy. We normally start doing this at around 8:45
PM to finish before we are closed. Let’s say, around 9:45, right before we close, a woman
comes into my section and starts to unfold garments that I have been folding for an hour.
She is ‘just looking,’ and she does not have a real purpose to buy. She is just having fun
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with destroying my labor. When you confront, she says ‘is not this a store? How can I
understand without looking garments?’ It may be true but she never considers or does not
care what I am going to do with an unfolded section at 10:00 PM?”

Sales assistants learn to treat different customers in differentiated and specialized ways.
Ozlem says, “If the customer is a posh and old lady, you should follow her very close,
make her be sure that you are ready to help her. They never get bored of such attention. If
they are middle-class, you can sense that they try to be close to you; as if you are friends
or you share something with them. They do not like to be followed in their every step.
You should just help them when they ask. They can easily turn a formal conversation into
an informal, personal one, and start asking questions that you are not allowed answering
like when the great sales start. If the customer is young, she is probably a spoiled person
and came to the store to have fun. You should be distant and cold towards her. Then, she
will think that you have an authority here, and she will not demand outrages things from
you, or she will not untidy all the garments because of your presence. If the customer is
covered [she wears an Islamic headscarf] you should not look at her directly, especially
to her scarf. If you do so, she would think that you are being rude towards her, as if she is
different, lower-status person than you and she would leave the store without buying
anything.” Hakan gives another very typical example of the art of navigating customers,
“If an old lady asks something to you and you give her a negative answer, such as ‘no’ or
‘we do not have that item here,’ she gets really angry and understand this situation as if
you challenges her superiority. So, when such a thing happens, you should never finish
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your words with negative comments, you should always add solutions in order to show
her that you respect her and you actually work for her, like ‘we do not have that skirt
here, but I will call other stores and check them for you,’ or ‘there is not any jacket left
now, but we will receive more on Tuesday, do you want me to reserve one for you?’
Then, they would be happy. Their expectations of servitude and respect increase, as they
get richer and older. […] For example, I had a customer last week, he was from the East,
and he was looking at jeans. I showed him two different but similar models and added
that one of them was really more economical than the other. I told him these with all my
good intentions because the jeans were almost the same. However, he interpreted it as if I
was implying that he was not able to buy the more expensive one because he was
Kurdish. So, he bought seven pairs of the more expensive one. Although the manager
thanked me for such a good sales, I felt sorry that I hurt his feelings. […] When there is a
couple with a covered woman, you can easily notice how she looks nowhere, especially
not at you, and how the guy looks insecurely, as if he is trying to understand if you are
judgmental. They are always very uneasy although we do not do anything discriminatory
towards them. […] Male customers, generally they just pay and not shop, they ask many
questions about how they will pay it, how many installments we make for which credit
card, how can change it if there would be a problem with the garment, what are the
conditions of a refund, how many stores we have, where is the closest one to his home
and workplace, etc. I think they are establishing their authority by asking these questions
because otherwise they are so useless in the store. They just stand there, watch their
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wives and us and then they have to pay. In order to take action they involve with asking
too many senseless questions. Therefore, they underline that they are the boss.”

Arguments and even fights between customers and workers are usual elements of daily
life in retail stores. Such contestations mostly start from issues of changing garments and
having full refunds. In most cases customers demand something from the workers that
they are not able do fulfill because of legal boundaries or company policies. Although
they ask for impossible requests to be realized, the customers feel entitled to demand,
insist on and make a scene. Sometimes, workers make mistakes. For example, they call
customers and invite them to the store to pick a garment that the customer demanded.
When the customer comes in they cannot find the item because it was already sold. Or, a
worker can reserve a garment for a customer for 24 hours, but sometimes another worker
can sell this reserved item within the 24 hours and when the customer comes and asks for
the product she reserved she notices that her garment is gone. Most of the time,
customers do not raise their voices for such mistakes. If they are really angry, they will
not come to the store again. At this point, the workers do not mind whether the customer
is distressed or if they say they would not be coming to this store again. They say, it is the
company’s or the manager’s problem. For example, Eda says, “The customer thinks that
if she will disappear from my life, this would hurt me. No, it will not! If the store loses a
good customer, it is the store’s problem, not mine. As long as I work here, they pay me; I
do not give a shit about who is going to buy garments. The customer should not worry, if
she does not buy, someone else come and buy from us.” Resit says, “The customers think
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that they are sacred gifts in our lives. I am sorry, but I have to say that they are not
[laughs]. When a customer starts shouting she thinks that the workers and the manager in
the store would run to her and pay attention to her. It is the way she receives some care,
like a crying baby. Or, she says she will not come to our store again. Why does she think
that anybody cares about where she goes? If I was the general director of this company,
maybe I would care; but hey, this is not my store, it is nobody’s store. Nobody cares.”

My coworkers and informants stated that they believed some of the customers come to
the store in order to have a fight with them, to make a scene, and to unwind before going
home. For instance, Sinem says, “I think some of our customers are seriously crazy, they
have psychological problems and this is a way to solve them, to recharge their energy.
Some cannot find men to have sex, they are unsatisfied, or if they are married, their
husbands cheat on them. They cannot do anything to change this. So, they save all the
negative energy to expose it here. That’s why I do not take them seriously. I know that
they have another problem than their conflict with us in the store.” Yalcin is more
exemplary of how male workers explain female customers’ aggressive attitude towards
workers, “When they do not have a toy boy [tokmakci
87
] they are moody and mad. I can
tell when a woman starts to yell at me whether she has one or not [laughs].”

87
Tokmakci is an informal slang and it means a male person, who has sexual intercourse
with another person.

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One day, I was talking to Derya during a lunch break, and she said, “I believe that if a
person is self-conscious (kendini bilen) and smart it is not possible for her to go to a store
and make a scene out of nothing.” I tried to explicate that maybe they defined their status
through being served and respected, and when they did not sense this deference they read
it as a challenge towards their self-image. Then, Derya asked me if I had ever gone to a
store and made a scene because, for example, the workers could not find the model I
asked for, or because I waited too long for a garment from the storage. I said no. Then,
she continued, “You never go to a store and deal with the workers like ‘bring this item
from this store for me,’ ‘change this shirt with another one,’ etc. because you are a self-
conscious, decent person. However, this is the whole world of these women [customers].
In the morning, they wake up and before saying bismillah
88
they are here. At 10:00 AM
in the morning, we just open the door and a woman is in front of me, asking where the
sweater she ordered last week was. This is crazy. When did you wake up, did you have a
breakfast, why are you here so early, is your sweater running somewhere? So, my answer
is ‘I will let you shout. You will be relaxed in the end.’ I just shrug off [laughs].”

My coworkers in the second ZIP store were making fun of the belligerent customers
through playing with a famous advertisement motto. A national bank’s slogan is “there is
no limit in service,” (hizmette sınır yoktur). They reconstructed it as; “there is no limit in
impertinence,” (edepsizlikte sınır yoktur). Saying this, I always felt that the extremely
demanding, complaining, and antagonistic customers are a slight but overrepresented

88
Religious Muslims say bismillah before they do or say something in order to have
God’s protection.
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minority against kind, smooth, cooperative ones. As Beril points this out, “the trick of
this job is to focus on the proper customers who come and buy without creating
problems, who act normal and treat you kindly. One should not focus on the crazy
customers. They are just a few. They may become easily mad at you because the counter
is slow or there is a problem with the credit card machine, or they just would not want to
wait in line. If one wants to continue this job, she should not concentrate on such troubled
examples but on the smooth ones. The crazy customers are like a casualty. They are
exceptional.” However, the ‘smooth’ customers are unmarked and disremembered. When
I ask questions about their relations with customers, my informants were always talking
about the problematic encounters and fights with the customers.

One day in the ZIP Kanyon store, I had an illuminating example of customers’
entitlement in the store, through their interactions with sales assistants, and over workers’
actions and even thoughts.
89
There was not any customer in the store and I was the only
worker on the selling floor. An old woman came in and started to look at the garments.
Because she did not say anything to me, not even looked at me, I stopped following her
and went back to the counter because it was hotter there unlike the rest of the store.

89
Amy Hanser theorizes the notion of entitlement in a structured way through the
communication of service sector workers and customers: “The term ‘structure of
entitlement’ refers to the often unconscious cultural and social sensibilities that make
certain groups of people feel entitled to greater social goods. This sense of entitlement
extends from seemingly mundane aspects of everyday interactions all the way to more
obviously consequential and overt claims to formal power and material resources. At the
level of everyday life, this structure of entitlement finds expression in the realms of work,
leisure, and daily social interaction. It is a practical expression of one’s place in society
and a fundamental part of the cultural scaffolding that supports larger systems of
inequality” (Hanser 2008: 3).
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Suddenly, she asked where Mete, our responsible, was. I told her he was having dinner.
She did not reply. Ten minutes later, Mete came in to the store, went to the woman, and
respectfully saluted her by referring her name. They started to chat as well as examining
garments. Maybe half an hour later, they arrived to the counter with a lot of garments and
Mete left in order to search for a skirt the customer wanted to buy and we did not have in
the selling floor. He told me I could start the transaction. While I was scanning the
garments to the counter, she asked me if we had another hanger for the jacket she just
bought. However, we were not allowed to give hangers to customers, they were meant for
store use only. Before I could say anything she became patronizing and told me, “will
you say we do not let you take the hangers? Do not, because I am not any customer. Do
you know who I am?” This last question means a clear and condescending challenge in
Turkey, as if she was a strong and important person (and obviously, I was not). Without
any intention to make her angry I said no. She became furious and said, “well, are you
new here? You look so. Now, learn: My name is Selma and I am a very close friend of
Figen. You know her, right?” Figen was the general director of ZIP Turkey. I could not
believe how she was trying to assert such a personal relationship on such a trivial matter
with such a disempowered actor –a sales assistant- like me. Just to destroy her game, I
said, “I guess she works for this company.” Her eyes became larger and she made some
voices of displeasure. When Mete came back she told him, “I guess this boy is new. He
does not know anything. Teach him Mete; he needs a lesson. Good-bye and give my best
wishes to Figen if you talk to her.” After she left, Mete came near to me and laughed. He
said, “When Figen was a manager at the first Marks & Spencer store in Turkey this
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woman was her best customer. Now, she thinks herself as a friend as well as a voluntary
agent of her. She can call Figen and complain from you, the store, or me. I do not think
they will fire us because this woman complains but why should I receive extra attention
from Figen or from the center office because of this old, crazy woman. If she asks for a
hanger, I give it to her without any problems. I do not care. Instead of trouble, this
company can buy new hangers.” I wrote in my notebook that although I witnessed many
arguments with customers in all the stores I have ever worked, I had never seen such a
woman who claimed authority and a right on the store and workers before. She was
acting as if she was in her own store.

In smaller stores, as in my first research site, sales assistants have to pick customers and
deal extensively with them until they leave. In larger and busier stores, like my second
site, retail workers tend to avoid customers as long as they can. Especially during the
busiest hours, if a customer is finally able to catch a sales assistant for help, she receives
answers like the worker is busy at that moment, she says she needed to go to the storage
and she would never come back, or she was not working. This is the implicit type of
worker resistance against the overwhelming crowd in the store. Most customers know
that during such peak hours, trying to get help from sales assistants is a futile endeavor.
Some of them complain a little bit about how the store is messy and there is nobody to
assist them finding the garments without making a scene. One day, it was a crazy
Saturday afternoon; I was working without raising my head when I heard a man was
shouting in an incredibly high voice. He was asking, ‘is not there anybody to help me?’
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When I approached to him, a woman customer also came by and angrily asked him why
he was shouting. I understood that she was his wife and she was busy with their child’s
clothes. He was standing there and maybe wanted to ask something about a garment.
When he could not see anybody available he chose to scream. When he saw me looking
at him curiously, he thought I was also an unattended customer and he said, “When you
do not scream, they do not pay attention to you, do they? It is the only language they can
speak.” Maybe because of my age, or I forgot to put my nametag, he did not understand
that I worked there. When I told him that I was working and I could help him if he
needed anything, he was ashamed and said, “Actually, I was just looking at garments,
nothing to answer, thank you so much.”

Some customers talk to the workers in a funny way, like the woman who was joking with
Sanem one day, “how sweet that you can get along with children. Come to our house and
deal with ours. I will pay you twice more than you get here.” Sanem laughed and the old
woman left. Later that day, when I asked about these encounter, how did she feel about
what that customer told, Sanem said, “Normally, I do not get angry to these kind of jokes.
Of course, they are all women. If a man says these things, I will complain him to Deniz.
But, some of them cross the line, especially when there is talk about money. I am not a
buyable slave at all. You may lament about your children or your private life, but
transferring me as if you are a company is not nice. Even when you joke.” Yeliz says, “I
am folding garments. A woman comes and says ‘oh, how good you are at folding clothes.
I wish you can come and fold my clothes, too. I would pay you daily.’ It is so shameful.
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Am I hungry? Am I homeless? Am I a domestic cleaner? Why would I come to your
home? It is so outrageous.” Sometimes, other customers, especially old women, make
jokes that walk on the thin line between humor and harassment. Eda says, “Yesterday,
and old woman came to the counter. During the transaction, she kept looking at me, half-
smiling. I reciprocated her. Then she told me, ‘how beautiful you are. I wish my son will
marry somebody like you.’ […] There was this woman once; she was a fan of our cashier
Yunus. Yunus is really charming and she adored him. She was coming every week to see
him and proposed him to marry her daughter. We always laughed although Yunus got
bored this after a while. And then, one day she came with the daughter! Of course, the
daughter was ugly, but the family was so rich. So, a causal joke turned into something
more serious although nobody said anything, neither Yunus nor them. But the thing is,
they came, bought something and looked at Yunus. He looked back at them. […] He did
not need money. He was working for fun. He did not take this offer seriously. But, if he
was poor, who knows, maybe he would marry her.”

Reflexivity and Inequality in the Retail Sector

Social inequality at shopping malls or any other setting of consumption can be mapped
through customers and their subjectivity, such as consumption patterns, ‘place making,’
and identity formation (Miller et al. 1998). However, in this dissertation, my focus is on
the workers –both sales assistants and managers- and how their subjectivities are
reconstructed in the selling floor though inter-group and intra-group social interactions as
217
well as their reflections on consumerism and public displays of class. My coworkers, for
example, often muttered about how customers were stupid because they buy garments
from ZIP and are paying so much money. They believed that exactly the same clothes, or
quite similar items, could be found elsewhere in the city (in the passages) for much lower
prices. So, insisting to buy garments from ZIP denotes customers’ need to show their
difference, marking their class positions, as they are able to pay more for the same or
similar products. They want to underscore that they do not care to pay more because they
are rich. In this sense, workers have a linear logic, which equalizes prices and garments,
and they do not take other factors of consumer choice in consideration including time,
location, and service quality. They compare themselves with customers and what they
buy with what customers buy. When we were chatting on how ‘the customers were
stupid,’ I said that maybe our customers did not have time to go and search in the gloomy
passages for cheaper products, my coworkers did not seem to envision such a situation.
When I maintained that customers might not be fool because they shop in our store,
maybe they made another sort of calculation and it was for their best interest to come
here and buy garments instead of going somewhere else, and they might not be enchanted
by the power of the brand-name, but they decide to shop through a rational reckoning.
Most of them disagreed with me and told me that customers do not think that way and
they are actually afraid of ‘being like us.’ Thus, although the customers know that they
can find the same clothes for much cheaper prices in somewhere else, they come and
shop here in order to make themselves different than us; in order to underline their
difference.
218

As time passed, I began to worry about if asking my coworkers why were they doing this
job could be interpreted as rudeness. It was a critical question because in order to know
whether asking such a question would be harmful (or, disrespectful) or not, I needed to
know the story behind. I figured out that the answer mostly depends on who my
interlocutor was. Among my informants and coworkers those who were relatively older,
who were aware of the advantages and disadvantages of this job, who were feeling that
they were entrapped in the stores and they could not escape had a tendency to interpret
this question as offensive and insulting. Cihan was a typical example of this attitude, he
answered my question, after thinking for a while, “this is a good question. Maybe I
should have asked this question to myself long before. Why am I a salesclerk? Because I
need money and I cannot work at another, better job. I have been trying to have a position
as a driver at the company my uncle works. They stopped hiring right now because of the
economic crisis. I am still waiting for them. When I can save myself, I definitely will. A
lifetime cannot be spent here.” Saniye also became despondent and took this question as
a chance to reflect on her own past, “Because nobody asked me what I wanted to do or if
I had any talent for anything else than selling. I found this job and it found me. Since
then, I have been stuck here. Nobody’s born to be a salesclerk. I mean this is not like
being a lawyer, or a doctor, or a teacher. It does not have any social meaning. There is no
love or sacrifice we make for this job. If I could be able to use my mind when I was
younger, when I was still a student, today I would not be here. Now, there is nothing I
can do about it. It is my life.”
219

On the other hand, when I ask the same question of why they do this job, the younger
sales assistants verbalized their engagement, hope and ambition towards the retail sector
and their desire to construct their futures in this job. For example, Ipek says, “Look
around us. There are so many shopping malls in Istanbul and they are still building new
ones, bigger and bigger. They all need new managers to administer these newer, bigger
stores. These new managers will not fall from a tree; we will become the new,
experienced managers who know well how to do this job. We know all the tricks and
secrets of being an excellent manager. We learn it by watching our managers for years.
That is why I am doing this job and not trying to be a secretary or and office clerk. Only
this job has a future now.” Ayse clarifies the process of initial attachment and later
disappointing in this job, “When I started to work as a salesclerk, I believed what was
told to me. This is a great job, energetic, dynamic, full of interesting people, having fun,
etc. [These are] all the lies that companies present this job as if it is worth trying. After a
while, I started to understand that this job is dull, without any joy, low-status, and
promises no future. […] I accepted it as it is, and stopped daydreaming about it. This is
my job, it is a really bad job; but I need it, so I have to do it and get my money. It is so
simple.”

Nurhayat was 34 years old when I talked to her. She was my oldest informant. She started
working at retail stores from less-qualified jobs at peripheral locations and moved to
more prestigious stores and she worked at different places as sales assistant and cashier
220
for more than 13 years. The last position she worked was ‘floor responsible’ at the ritzy
Beymen store. She resigned because they did not promote her although she deserved it
and they placed an inexperienced woman above her. She sued the company and won the
case. Beymen was sentenced to pay her an indemnification, which was equal to her
annual salary. She left the retail industry and started a dot-com company with an old
coworker. She points out the changing mise en scène in the retail employment, “It was
really difficult to start working at Vakko or Beymen in the past. They were hiring middle
class people from good and clean families. They asked for serious references and
demanded experience. Because they were so selective they paid a lot, almost double that
you could get from other stores. In the last ten years, it changed. Now, any person who is
coming from Citron or Mango can find a job there. They do not even ask why this person
was fired from her previous job. The idea of being a salesclerk also changed in people’s
minds. None of the children of good families wants to do this job even in the best stores
such as Vakko and Beymen. It is not a job for the middle-class any more. The market
grows fast and it destabilizes the pool of workers. For example, Harvey Nichols came to
Turkey and offered double salaries to numerous workers from Vakko, Beymen, and
Citron. They all left their companies and transferred to Harvey Nichols and these
companies had to hire many disqualified, inexperienced people all of a sudden. Then,
Harvey Nichols became unsuccessful; it had a lot of financial problems. It first decreased
the salaries and then fired many people. So, there was a balance in the past: middle-class
youngsters would start to work at upscale stores and others, while varoş people started
working at cheaper stores. But now this balance is lost. Now, the luxurious stores also
221
employ varoş youth because they pay lower salaries. They do not care if their workers are
serving well or not.”

One of the themes I observed many times and my informants frequently reiterated is that
customers are not aware of the fact that most retail workers do not know anything about
the products they try to sell. Burcu says, “A sales assistant should work at least for six
months, she should see different seasons and collections, and she should be familiar with
materials and models of the garments in order to provide information to customers and
answer their particular questions. This process never ends because the textile industry
rapidly develops and fashion changes constantly. But six months is a minimum period for
a sales assistant to be able to start talking about garments.” Most of the workers, just like
me, have no prior knowledge about fabrics, cuts, and models, let alone being experts on
fashion and characteristics of current trends. This ignorance comes together with the
extraordinarily high turnover rates in the stores. Customers normally do not know about
these backgrounds and they feel free to ask detailed questions about specific garments
and how they look together with others. Managers advise workers not to disclose this
ignorance to customers and act like as if they know and –when they can- go and find
somebody who knows better. One day, while I was folding garments, a woman customer
came to me and asked if the polyester shirts can be ironed. I did not know what to say and
I certainly did not want to say something wrong to her. I said, “I am so sorry, I honestly
do not know about this, let me find somebody who is more knowledgeable about fabrics.”
On another time, a customer was shocked by my answer that I confessed I did not know.
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She asked me for how long I was working there. When I told her for about two weeks,
she agreed with me and said, “You are right, too. One cannot learn everything in two
weeks.” When my manager heard about this dialogue as a result of store gossip, she
expressed her disapproval to me. She reminded me that customers did not like the idea of
being served by apprentices or inexperienced workers. They desired the best service. So,
when I was in such a situation I should not have explained much and I must have found
another person, or her, to help the customer as fast as possible.

There are always troublesome and controversial customers in addition to the ones I
detailed above: They try to enter to the store before it is open to the public. They do not
want to leave the store and make the workers wait although it is closed after 10:00 PM.
They ask for a restroom in the store and when they hear there is not any they do not
believe it. They want to use the store’s telephone to make calls. They demand water,
coffee or tea while they are shopping. They look for a place to sit and when they cannot
find (ZIP, like Citron, does not have any place to sit) they sit on folded garments by
pushing them. They want to take the hangers with garments. They want to use the store’s
computer to show the pictures of the garment they are looking for. They give a shop list
to a sales assistant and want her to complete and bring the products to them. They do not
want to move within the store and they ask a worker to exhibit everything to them. They
request workers to wear the garments for modeling. They ask workers to carry their bags
to their cars. They want workers to call or go to a restaurant and reserve a table for them
while they are shopping. If workers cannot answer to these, and sometimes more
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atrocious appeals, some of the customers react belligerently and make a scene as my
informants refer.

My informants mentioned about concepts such as ‘shopping culture,’ ‘the store
mannerism,’ and ‘the conventions of retail stores’ in order to underline customers –
especially the ones that I portrayed above, have not improved themselves yet. This is a
modernist discourse that constructs customers as subjects of self-development through
the process they learn how to act properly. Accordingly, shopping malls and retail stores
are still new components of urban life in the globalizing Turkey. Turks did not have a
habit, a set of common rules of public culture that govern social life in shopping malls,
and thus they do not know how to behave in a store or how to relate with retail workers.
So, shopping malls are the schools in which customers are tamed, and workers and store
manages are the teachers of such an urban, modern formality and conduct. There is
always a bright future in this discourse: In the future, all urban Turks will modernize
(enough) and learn how to act properly in the stores, what can be asked to workers, and
the conditions of changing garments and refund. Deniz says, “ten years ago, it was much
worse. There was a pure chaos in the stores. People were running, smoking, sipping,
eating, disturbing others, shouting to workers and managers, bargaining for the prices and
asking for discounts, rejected to wait in lines, asking irrelevant questions to the staff, etc.
I believe it is a social issue that teachers should pay attention. As the new stores open,
more and more people start to go to the new shopping malls and stores. They start to see
how other people act in these spaces. Younger people are more observant. So, they
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educate their families about what can and cannot be done in shopping malls. They say,
for example, ‘do not shout, do not run, and do not eat in the store.’ Another changing
theme is, in the past, many customers made faces or weird sounds when they saw the
[high] price tags. It is so vulgar to do that. It decreased by time. Now, if a customer acts
improperly in the store we know that she is either from the rural regions, from the East of
Turkey, or she is an Arab tourist.”

Relating with customers—indulging, satisfying, manipulating, persuading, educating, and
disciplining them- is the mainstay of contemporary transnational retail sector while the
complicated relations and social interactions between the three social actors (workers,
managers, and customers) are rudimentary parts of everyday life in retail stores.
Nevertheless, as the overall socio-economic organization, or the macro social structure, in
Turkey is transformed from an import-substitution, manufacturing-oriented order to a
neoliberalized, consumption-centered formation –from the industrial period to the
deindustrialized, or from Fordism to Post-Fordism- the ‘workplace’ as a problematical
power-laden space emerged with novel questions of management, control, authority, and,
more importantly, ‘government’ of workers through their bodies and subjectivities. In the
next chapter, I will concentrate on how constituting a ‘desiring,’ ‘proper,’ and ‘malleable’
population, developing an expert form of rational knowledge (the ‘retail-logy’),
explicating specific problems and direct solutions in the workplace, regulating workers’
bodily energies and mental-psychological moods, exploring their emotional states,
intervening into their ‘intimate’ lives, and most importantly, constructing new discourses
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in which stories are narrated and new subject-positions are rendered visible, are questions
of governmentality—a distinct articulation of power and knowledge.

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CHAPTER 4: GOVERNING WORKERS

Sales Assistant: A responsible and scrupulous person,
who organizes work, prepares garments before selling,
talks to the customers for completing selling,
entails procedures after selling, prepares the store
and garments for the following day, and who
toils for her professional improvement.
From the Hiring Techniques textbook

Instances from a ‘Full’ Day

In Turkish, there are two linked expressions: ‘yönetmek’, means to manage, and ‘idare
etmek’, means to administer. To govern (hükûmet etmek), on the other hand, is only used
with the subject of the country or a territory, i.e. governing Turkey. When one talks in
Turkish about relations of authority, rule, and control in workplaces of any sort, only the
terms managing, management and manager are used. Management and administration –
the terms which were employed to refer to the State bureaucracy, formalized private
sectors like banking, and Fordist factory production- are not enough to explain the
multileveled, multifaceted and intricate webs of power in which governmentality
constitutes the worker’s body, subjectivity, and life as a single field of superintendence,
regulation, and intervention in the large-scale, multinational, ubiquitous chains of the
retail sector. In this chapter, I will use and problematize ‘government’ instead of
‘management’ or ‘administration’ in order to explicate ‘governing everything,’ or
‘governing lives,’ of the retail workers.

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I had been thinking about government at the workplace, the store –how specifically the
workers were invited and persuaded to become and act as good workers, how exactly
they were ruled and controlled in the name of efficiency and order, and how creatively
they were manipulated and reformed individually and collectively. However, one day that
I was working ‘full’ (from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM) at the ZIP Istinye-Park store, the
second site of my ethnographic participant observation, I noticed that ‘the government’ at
the workplace is highly composite, multi-dimensional, and relational in character. Here
are the four instances that I witnessed during that particular day:
1. The store manager Tolga, an elegant but really ambitious and goal-oriented guy
around mid-thirties, organized a meeting right before the store’s opening hour (10:00
AM). He positioned himself in front of the counter and workers right across him (so
we had to see him only and he could see all of us) and emphasized that since a
religious holiday is coming soon, they expected a lot of customers that day (Friday),
so the store would have a very busy day. He said everybody should have a nourishing
breakfast (within thirty minutes) in order to prevent sudden tiredness and low blood-
sugar crisis during working hours. He then added that since we were lacking
personnel we would not use our second break until 5:00 PM, which means after
breakfast we would be working non-stop. Looking at the shocked, angry, nonchalant
but absolutely silent faces, he sadly said that he could not take care of all of us even if
he wants to, so we need to take care of ourselves, to think about our bodily
functioning and health, and to plan and use our energies smartly in order to maximize
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our performance during the day. Murmuring a little bit but not openly confronting
with him, the workers were scattered to start working.

2. Around 1:30 PM Fatma (a 21 years old girl, high school graduate) was folding
clothes on the table next to mine. She said she needed to go to the restroom
immediately. She went to Tolga and asked for his permission while he was wandering
in the store during this first rush hour of the day. He told her that there was another
person who left for the restroom at that moment; when s/he will come back Tolga
would let Fatma go to the restroom which was located 5 minutes walking distance
across the food court. She came back and continued folding. I totally forgot this
conversation while I was busy with folding. After 15 minutes, Tolga appeared in our
section again and Fatma asked his permission to go to the restroom, adding she could
not wait any more. Suddenly, Tolga’s face changed and he started to yell at her,
saying “You are incredibly childish. Cannot you hold it in; cannot you control
yourself? You should learn to act like an adult. What would you do if you had a
customer right now?” Fatma did not say anything and waited silently without looking
at his face. After finishing his angry monologue, Tolga looked at her for 10 seconds
in silence and then, in a clearly embarrassing manner, said ‘be quick’. She ran off.

3. I was working and Tolga appeared abruptly to catch Sevil after her customers left (an
18 years old, inexperienced girl, did not finish high school she says) from the corner
where he was clandestinely watching our conduct with the customers. He said that
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she never smiled to the customers when she was talking to them and reminded her
that she ought to smile all the time and call them with ‘siz’ (the plural ‘you’). She was
surprised. She said she would be more careful. Then, Tolga asked her to practice (or,
rehearse) smiling with him as if he was a customer. She tried to smile but she could
not perform the task well. Tolga got angry and raised his voice and commanded her to
smile “professionally”
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. She tried again but the result was not better enough for him.
He made a face and gave up. After taking a step, he turned back to her and asked
what her weight was. Her face turned red and she said she was approximately 65
kilograms (143 pounds). He looked worried and told her “you know, in this business
you need to care what you eat and how you look, right?” and left without waiting for
an answer.

4. There were three people whose working shift will end at 4:00 PM since they started
work that day at 8:30 AM. We all knew that they would leave early, which was kind
of a big luck since it was Friday and they could go out at night after taking some rest
at home. I was working at the counter around 3:30 PM, after the noon rush hour when
the store was disappointingly empty. Tolga came and told the three that they could
not leave at 4:00 PM since the store was understaffed and they think it would be
really busy during the evening rush hour (roughly between 6:00 to 8:30 PM). The
three workers said that it was not possible for them to stay and they wanted to leave
on their scheduled time. Tolga suddenly shifted from his authoritarian manner and

90
Hochschild (1983: 4) mentions “the professional smile as an asset” that she
encountered in the training sessions for flight attendants in the United States.
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managerial voice to a concerned expression and friendly tone –as if he was looking
for a solution to the problem- and asked them if they had any plans for the Friday
night. I was impressed but also intrigued by his rapid change. They apologetically
confessed that they had plans for the night. He nodded and started talking in a really
cool, unemotional way, as if he wants to scream but just whispers, stopping and
controlling himself, saying “what about your promise to work here? What about your
responsibilities here at this store? This is a workplace not a theme park; whether you
work here or you do not work here; if you do not what to work here then go out now,
do not work and go out, have fun”. Intimidated, one of the workers said she could
stay instead of going out. The other two (a girl and a boy) resisted and fearlessly said
that if they [Tolga or ZIP] could fire them because of this, they should have fired
them at that moment. They left at 4:00 PM as their schedule showed. Around 6:00
PM Tolga was getting ready to leave and he told the third worker, who stayed, that
she could leave since the store was not as busy as they expected. They did not fire the
two either.

I was dead tired after this long Friday that I worked ‘full’. However, I could not sleep and
thought about how ‘governing’ workers at the store is a product of highly complex ways
of thinking, seeing, knowing, calculating, formulating, and applying. Governing here
means regulating workers’ bodies, energies, manners, time, and relations with other
people as well as other routine aspects of management that includes watching the sales,
comparing results with past years and other stores, communicating with the head office
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and other stores, dealing with customers and the shopping mall officers among other
countless mundane tasks.

Governing is indeed a performance within the walls of the workplace, but it never ends
there. Everything one does, says, and thinks as well as things and ideas that are not in the
immediate setting are subject of the endless governing plans and practices. So,
government at the store concerns with everything imaginable, thinkable, knowable,
sayable and doable through workers’ subjectivities and bodies, it is about workers’ whole
lives. Exemplified by Tolga here, government at the workplace accumulates plans, ideas,
rationalities, information, and projections as well as the entire field of action i.e.
disciplining, observing, standardizing, intervening, educating, and ameliorating.

A Foucauldian term, ‘governmentality’ is the combination of thought and practice, or
rationale and art, of administration, coordination, and conduct. There are many possible
ways to examine the governmentality techniques entailed on workers’ bodies and spirits.
Here, I will examine the store as an institutional space of governmentality with focusing
on the textbooks, which are used at vocational trade high schools, to see how the State
participates in the constitution of the new field of knowledge and specialty called the
‘science of the store,’ or ‘retail-logy,’ and professionalization of the retail workers; on
managers’ everyday tactics and strategies for governing workers effectively; and lastly,
on ‘emotional governmentality’ through which worker’s affective states and emotional
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labors are stabilized and a field of knowledge is constituted that managers are supposed
to be informed about and ready to intervene when necessary.

In this chapter, I will deal with relatively less examined and articulated notion of
‘governmentality at the workplace’. Although there is a growing literature on the
intersection of organizations, workplaces, and the notion of governmentality within the
management studies (i.e. Clegg et al. 2002) sociological and anthropological wings of
Governmentality Studies tend to focus on other disciplinary institutions such as schools
and prisons (i.e. Hunter 1996; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007). When considered in
relation to governmentality, workplace is generally thought as the factory and not the
retail centers, shopping malls, department stores, or other spaces of the service sector (i.e.
Ong 1987; Salzinger 2003).

What is Governmentality?

A Foucauldian notion of government is “an activity that could concern the relations
between self and self, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or
guidance, relations within social institutions and communities, and finally, relations
concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty” (Gordon 1991:2, emphasis mine). In
this framework, governmentality or ‘the art of government’ means a working
constellation of “thinking about the nature of the practice of government, capable of
making some form of that activity thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and
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to those upon whom it was practiced.” (Gordon 1991: 3, emphasis mine) One crucial
dynamic that governmentality involves is the tendency to simultaneously particularize
and communalize governing practices: A detailed concern for and direct intervention to a
single body is juxtaposed to large(r) scale (even global) administrating practices that may
affect the whole group, or the population in its entirety. Therefore, managing one person
and administering groups, or ‘society,’ are paralleled and implemented simultaneously in
the rationality of government, ‘governmentality’.
91

Since Michel Foucault’s seminal lecture (1991[1978]), social scientists have focused on
and elaborated the term governmentality. Today, scholars name ‘governmentality studies’
as a sub-discipline, or as a trans-disciplinary field, of inquiry and analysis (see Dean
1999; Dean 2007; Larner and Walters 2004; Bratich et al. 2003; and Li 2007 among
others). Governmentality Studies prioritizes the specifically empirical, present-centered,
spatially focused, ethnographic approaches to illustrate how we (are) govern(ed), the
particular operations of government, and the miniscule details of the myriad governing
practices that are constellated in the everyday lives. It does not have a single paradigm to

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Matthew Kohrman (2008: 12) summarizes these dynamics at two levels of
governmentality as follows; “The first [level of analysis] involves excavating long-term
relationships suturing multilayered modes of authority-making to techniques for
managing people and objects. In contrast to studying sovereignty’s more formal concern
with sustaining itself by controlling terriroty and its inhabitants, analysis of
governmentality focus on how State and non-state political entities buttress themselves
by managing ‘men and things’ (Foucault 1991: 93-94). The second level entails
analyzing how the suturing of authority-making, people, and objects is contingent on
conduct’s problematization, the ways it gets subjected to study, critique, regulation,
redirection and/or prohibition by institutions, discourses, norms, and practices of self
formation.”
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problematize or expand; instead, each distinct context of governing practices and each
unique setting of the relations of authority necessitates its own meticulous research in
order to catch the exact workings of governmentality (Dean 1999).

Government is the simplest equivalence of ‘the State’ –the organization and operation of
legitimate power, authority, freedom and violence through mediation of ideology in a
restricted territory. However to govern also means to regulate diverse relations, or
‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1991; Barry et al. 1996). The sociologist Mitchell Dean
(1999: 11) expands this definition: “Government is any more or less calculated and
rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a
variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working
through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and
with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes.” In this
sense, to govern is to regulate, shape, direct, and control human action, or conduct, within
the terms of rationality. Following classical social thought, particularly Weber and
Foucault, one can acknowledge the co-existence of different types of rationalities, ways
of systematic thinking, calculating, defining, and organizing knowledge. Therefore, to
govern is also about to set the specific rationality behind certain governing practices,
techniques and subjects as well as to elaborating it.

As employing rationalities, the constitution of what is good, appropriate and responsible;
in other words ethics, or morality, is also inherent in definitions of governing. The
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question of ethics brings in the issue of reflexivity and ‘self-government’: To create
autonomous, responsible, trustworthy, self-regulating individuals to be governed. So,
personhood is but another significant constitutive element of government: “Government
concerns not only practices of government but also practices of the self… Practices that
try to shape, sculpt, mobilize and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs,
wants, and lifestyles of individual and groups… that seeks to connect questions of
government, politics, and administration to the space of bodies, lives, selves, and
persons” (Dean 1999: 12). Here, the assumption that a person who can make a decision
about what to do and who can take responsibility is crucial. Only living subjects who can
choose within a space of freedom can be governed. Thus, government does not comprise
conduct when the subject is dead, when the subject is not able to choose and therefore
she/he cannot affect others’ actions. To govern is to form a space of possible action, a
space of possibilities and freedom, which must contain ‘to think and to act otherwise’
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.
Then, government is the conduct of capacities that autonomous subjects are presupposed
to have and use.

Governmentality, on the other hand, refers to a process of collective thinking, the
formation of mentalities about government. It proceeds through reflexive questions like
for or about what we intend to take action for (the subject matter, substance); how we
govern (the rationales, methods); what are the modes of subjectification (who we become

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Kristin Carls (2007: 48) observes the logic of governmentality is at work through labor
processes in the large-scale retail stores: “[Labor control], where effective control cannot
be established simply but coersion but, like any other form of power, requires employees’
consent and therefore has to involve their subjectivity.”
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through governing), and what is the object of governmental practices (the aim of
conduct). Understanding and decoding governmentality concerns thoughts and ideas as
they are situated and delimited in specific locations, programs, institutions and
applications for leading and shaping conduct. Such a capillary analysis that focuses on
located and practical techniques is called ‘an analytics of government’ (Dean 1999, 2007;
Ciccarelli 2008). Comprehending governmentality is thus an instantaneous endeavor of
capturing and spelling out ideas and programs of governing in place and in time.
However, analytics does not mean a singular empiricism of the act of governing; instead,
scholars concern with ‘the art of’ government which “requires craft, imagination, shrewd
fashioning, the use of tacit skills and practical know-how, the employment of intuition
and so on” (Dean 1999: 18). Different truth claims and mechanisms of knowledge
production guide different practices or ‘regimes’ of government including producing
selves and identities, and forming and reshaping mentalities.

In his lecture ‘Governmentality’ at Collège de France in 1978, Michel Foucault (1991)
specified the meaning of the term as a new form of imagining and exercising power in
early modern European societies in relation to the emergence of two interdependent fields
of knowledge: The economy and the population. Distinct bodies of social knowledge and
their fields of analysis and expertise, in other words ‘social’ and ‘human’ sciences,
including economics, sociology, statistics, demography, psychology, criminology, law,
pedagogy, political science among others, and their relations with the State’s need for
detailed knowledge were at the heart of the transition to governmentality from preceding
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modes of power. In this sense, every individual and ‘society’ as a whole as well as their
health, welfare, security, contentment, efficiency was within the focus and attention of
the governing activity.

For Foucault, there had been other forms of power before the emergence of
governmentality. These were, very basically, sovereignty and discipline. Foucault thinks
that governmentality did not fully erase them; instead, it maintained certain techniques
and ways of thinking of these two regimes of power. Subjects, living individual members
of the governed population, were started to be seen as sources to be watched, cared,
optimized, and reproduced. Social, economic, political and demographic processes were
intruded and re-arranged to control, defend, sustain, and secure national populations and
their individual members. Not immediately, but throughout a process, the State was
‘governmentalized’: Different State apparatuses defined and absorbed into virtually all
areas of life in order to establish the rules and technologies of governmentality.

A governmentality studies perspective does not search for ‘ideal types’, generalizations,
comparisons, or abstractions from the lived reality; instead, an analytics of government
concentrates on lived contingencies. It looks at specific “conditions under which regimes
of practices come into being, are maintained, and are transformed” (Dean 1999: 21). An
analytics of government at a specific locale then seeks to formulate how this regime of
practices operate and it considers “how this regime has a technical or technological
dimension and analyses the characteristic techniques, instrumentalities, and mechanisms
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through which such bodies operate, by which they attempt to realize their goals, and
through which they have a range of effects” (Dean 1999: 21). Regimes of practices are
indeed ‘programmes’: Coherent, dense, organized, institutionalized, routinized, and
ritualized ways of doing things such as caring, administrating, manipulating, counseling,
curing, punishing, and educating. Thus, here I seek to illuminate the contours of the
‘programme,’ which produces and governs life at retail stores in Istanbul.

This is a qualitative study. My researcher identity coincides with my own past in the
retail sector and my friends working retail –mostly at higher levels during my research.
So, my work experiences, what I listened in the interviews from my informants, and the
data and documents I obtained and used are not ‘correct,’ or objective, representations of
a larger picture of the retail sector in Turkey, or even the retail sector in Istanbul. A
Governmentality Studies perspective matches my ethnographic approach with its
particular emphasis on “thick description” (Geertz 2000[1973]) and on specifity, the
institutional setting, and sense of locality.

Now, I want to outline briefly how the central questions and issues of an ‘analytics of
government’ fit my concerns in this chapter:
1. Problematization: Naming, identifying, locating, and questioning certain governing
activities take place in a date, place and within institutional or organizational borders.
I problematize the practices of governing in the stores in shopping malls in Istanbul.
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2. Asking ‘How’ Questions: Questions regarding the constitution of identities, the re-
shaping of our own and others’ conduct, and particular techniques, languages, and
forms of expertise. As Dean points out (1999: 28) this emphasis on ‘how’ questions
requires a very detailed analysis of virtually everything that might affect the
conditions of government.
Here, I focus on how the ‘sales assistant’ is produced to be governed in the store; how
the State intervenes and reforms conduct while it is seemingly absent or ‘shrunken’ in
the neoliberal processes; how the sales assistant is trained formally and informally;
how the store manager becomes the governor of sales assistants’ lives; and how a
sales assistant is expected to reform her/his life and learn how to govern it.
3. Assemblages: Government is the assemblage of heterogeneous, dynamic, and flexible
techniques, practices, and rationalities.
My aggregated concern starts from the government of invisible, almost
undecipherable class codes, mannerisms, styles, motivations, and future expectations
of workers and arrives to the material organization of the store, the level of everyday
discipline, education of workers, and multiple levels of surveillance at the workplace.
4. Visibility & Visualizing: Forms of visibility, transparency and the endeavor to
visualize all kinds of information to be governed including the architecture, clothes,
surveillance technologies and nets of witnessing.
How the store is simultaneously organized to exhibit products to customers and to
allow managers to watch workers and their interactions? Who else is doing the
watching job, how one is feeling to be watched all the time? What else is visualized?
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5. Technologies of Government: Governing is a technical manner. By what means,
procedures, tactics, and technologies government is achieved?
Here, I ponder not only about technologies such as digital cameras in the store or
computerized counters that register every single action; but also, ways of
manipulating, leading, motivating, and reforming workers by managers and people
from the head office.
6. Knowledge of Government: Governing always involves certain sorts and pieces of
knowledge and how knowledge is contingently organized, calculated, used, and
reproduced.
For my case, what is known in the store? What kind of data and information is
available to whom and for what purposes? Who knows more? How different bodies
of knowledge are used? How the know-how, experience, and expertise are created
and shared?
7. Identity Production: Regimes of governing contain certain types of individuals and
collective identities. They support, attribute and ban certain capacities, orientations,
and actions.
Questions like, what does it mean to be a sales assistant here, who can become one
and who cannot, what kind of statutes, opportunities, future-plans, and responsibilities
are available and articulated to bodies, and what are the possible points of resistance,
destabilization, and retreat, guide my inquiry about sales assistants.

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Creating a ‘Serious Profession’ from ‘Just a Trivial Job’

The Ministry of Education added a new program called ‘Knowledge of Sales
Assistantship’ into the curriculum of the vocational Trade High Schools’ (Ticaret Lisesi)
in the year 2002. It was the first step taken by the State in comprehending and acting
accordingly to the needs of the new economy and of the rising service sector. With this
addition, the program of vocational high schools in Turkey started to include a formal
education for sales assistants just like other formally recognized and educated fields of
service and finance sectors like tourism, real estate, insurance, cookery and accounting.
After the change in trade high schools’ curriculum to include sales assistantship programs
countrywide, Kara Elmas University in Zonguldak started a new vocational degree
program in sales assistantship in 2008 with the approval of YOK –the State’s high
council that directs and controls universities. Through inserting sales assistantship into its
vocational high school education and allowing a university opening a new program, the
State started to officially recognize this new element of the emergent service economy
and to maneuver on the target population –millions of unemployed Turkish youth. Under
the acknowledgement, supervision, and direction by the State, sales assistantship thus
now turns to “a more serious profession out of just a trivial job that students volunteer to
take temporarily,” says the CEO of Multi-Turkmall, a company that manages 15 malls in
Turkey (Aksam 05.14.2009).

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For this section, I examined more than 3200 pages of high school books from the sales
assistantship program’s official curriculum. Here, my aim is not to present a
comprehensive content analysis of the material taught in the vocational high schools.
Instead, I want to illustrate some of the ideological workings of the State and to
demonstrate how sales assistants are produced as a population to be governed through
texts of this education. There are other scholars who studied traces of ideological state
intrusions into the educational system in Turkey for various subjects including
nationalism (Kaplan 2006), militarism (Altinay 2004), gender (Yenal 2007; Gok 2007),
and religion (Akpinar 2007). Throughout my close examination of the official
educational material, basically three interrelated points emerged. These are, a) how
neoliberalism is implanted and promoted, b) how a new neoliberal citizen is imagined
and addressed, and c) how the workers’ life in its entirety as subject of governmentality is
established and legitimated.

With these texts, the State produces (or, contributes to the production of) a distinct field
of knowledge and expertise. The State calls this as the ‘knowledge of sales assistantship’,
while workers and managers in the retail sector name this sort of knowledge as ‘the
science of the store’ (“mağazacılık bilimi”) or ‘retail-logy’ (“perakandecilik”). Four
interrelated conceptual developments happen when the State takes place in this process.
The first is that a specialized field of knowledge and expertise is defined in official state
discourses. Secondly, the population (Turkish youngsters without serious education) is
specified as a target for the development of expertise and implementation of policy. As a
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third point, the State accepts its decrease role in shaping people’s lives and starts to share
the field of governance with corporate global capital. And finally, the institutional power
(the store and the multinational company) is established in order to entail the
‘programmes’ on the target population to keep reforming them through the educational,
prescriptive, governmentalized discourses.

These classes at vocational schools and the neoliberal discourses that these classes
employ in the textbooks are also significant in day-to-day lives of the workers. None of
my informants or coworkers took these classes and graduated from these programs.
However, the professional discourses on how to become a good retail worker and the
popular imagination about how this business should be handled are deeply affected by
this state intervention. In other words, the State takes part in the creation of an expert,
specialized space for ‘retail-logy’ and it promotes this in cooperation with the private
capital, for example, through pushing (or, forcing) shopping malls to hire personnel who
were graduates of these high-school programs. In the stores, I saw many items posted on
boards in workers’ locker rooms that were copied (or simplified) from the material I
strive to analyze here. Also, there are many points exactly same with the material in these
course books in human resources training sessions and managers’ speeches. In this sense,
what is told in the textbooks is significant, effective and in circulation in workers’
workplace experiences whether they are from vocational high schools, or mostly, not.

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A ‘programmatic’ rationality of the curriculum becomes apparent in the texts below. Two
questions emerge regarding this designated form of ‘retail rationality’: How does it view
the world, and which categories and classifications are created? First and foremost, it can
be stated that there is a dichotomy between the two distinct social groups, ‘customers’
and ‘workers’. Everybody is included in one group. Managers are not a category because
of the careerist discourse (i.e. you will be managers one day if you take your education
seriously and if you do not forget to focus on self-improvement). The aim of this
dichotomy is to school workers (as good, undemanding workers and modern, proper
citizens) and to empower them in front of customers who are named even as “the king” in
these texts as I will demonstrate below. Hence, the intended effects of this discourse are:

a) Transforming workers’ subjectivities and animating stronger self-government,
b) Imagining a ruled, ordered, and objectively defined space of work which is
independent from power, class, and domination,
c) Naturalizing and mainstreaming some aspects of neoliberalism like competition and
globality, while hiding others like flexibility and insecurity.

Governmentality is also about the relation, or mediation, between culture and power
(Bratich et al. 2003; Inda 2005). Certain managerial and ‘retail-logical’ techniques for
governing the conducts of workers emerge at the intersection of the production of a set of
truth (retail-logy), the process of ‘subjectivation’ (the worker), and the institutional
governmentality regime (the store). This, in accordance with the changing definition of
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ideology from a governmentality framework as Miller and Rose observed (2008: 3),
“consisted of apparatuses that were complex assemblages with their own conditions of
possibility and their own regularities. Their operation was inextricably bound up with a
particular vocabulary or language that circumscribed what could be said and what could
be done in ways that were meaningful. And the apparatuses were populated with human
beings whose individuality or subjectivity was itself shaped to fit the expectations and
demands of others. In that setting, the new task of critical analysis becomes to understand
the formation and functioning of ideological apparatuses, and those who were constituted
in and through them.” And, within this ideological configuration, it is crucial that the
State takes active part in the production of good, professional, and future-oriented retail
workers. It also demonstrates that the State does not leave the cultural field at all, but
instead, it realigns itself next to the privatized, corporate, global capital in the constitution
of this new ‘field’ concerning the rising retail sector that is embedded in the neoliberal
agenda, which is symbolized by shopping malls at every corner in the Istanbul
metropolitan region.

High school education takes four years in Turkey. In the trade high schools, the first two
years are filled with area courses for all students. Students of the program for sales
assistantship can take specialized elective classes in their third and fourth years. After
excluding the conventional high school curriculum (classes of basic sciences like
mathematics and geography) there are 50 classes offered as an elective pool. Offered
classes are listed in Table 3.
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Table 3: Special Vocational Courses Offered at Sales Assistantship Programs
1. Organizing Goods and Services
2. Body Language
3. Pronunciation and Diction 1 & 2
4. Professionalization
5. Preparation for Selling
6. Packaging
7. Storage and Logistics
8. Diet
9. Effective Communication
10. Following Advertisements
11. Following Public Opinions and Fashion
12. Working at the Counter
13. Public Relations within Institutions
14. Fashion
15. Crisis Management
16. Types of Retail Work
17. Details of Retail Work
18. Hiring Techniques
19. Protocol and Manners
20. Healthy Food
21. Working at the Counter
22. Techniques of Selling
23. Effective Speaking
24. Public Relations and Organizations
25. Techniques of Communication
26. Interpersonal Communication
27. Communication in Social Life
28. Working in Fairs and Congresses
29. Organizing Fairs
30. Logistics of Fairs
31. Campaign in Public Relations
32. Designing Spaces of Work
33. Customer Relations 1 & 2
34. Customer Satisfaction
35. Customer Types
36. Recording Customers
37. Project Development
38. Processing Pictures in Computer
39. Personal Preparation
40. Work Life 1 & 2 & 3

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Table 3: Continued

41. Professional Improvement
42. Personnel Improvement
43. Quality Management
44. Stock Control
45. Wholesale and Retail
46. Standardization
47. Consumer Rights

Table 3: Courses.

Neoliberal Principles Instilled

The logic and language of neoliberalism surface in the narratives, explanations,
illustrations, and suggestions provided throughout the course material that I scrutinized.
A new world is presented to the student for adapting herself to the chief socio-economic
processes, namely ‘the new economy’ and ‘globalization’. She is responsible for her own
and other main constitutive social institutions such as the State, family, and religion will
leave her alone with the forces and relations of the market in the neoliberal space and
time of open competition, endless ambition, and ultimate efficiency. A new ethical
system –in which the society is not just, the stronger always wins, one needs to use her
mind and calculate every step, speed and flexibility are celebrated, and there is no room
for nostalgic or melancholic yearning– is developed.

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An excerpt
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from the Selling Techniques class demonstrates how the State’s vernacular
introduces and extols principles of neoliberalism:
Dear Student,
Today, the shopping activity is customer-oriented in the world.
This means that the customer is the king. The increasing
competition and multiplication of shopping spaces make the
customers difficult to find. Thus, the store have to please the
customer, focus on each single customer, take her desires into
consideration, and behave nicely to her in order to constantly
have her, to ‘gain’ a loyal customer. In such a strategy, the sales
assistant who interacts with the customer face-to-face becomes
crucial. The sales assistant is responsible for the store’s overall
selling performance. The customer will decide to visit that store
again according to the treatment she receives from workers. She
will never back to a store where she is mistreated. A worker who
understands the type of her customer and what she wants
immediately will be an important factor in raising sales and
increasing the number of visitors to her store. First of all, you
need to learn well how to sell and how to impress a customer if
you want to be successful in this job. You can turn someone a
loyal customer to your store with your behaviors and your
mastery in selling. Your managers will eventually recognize your
success, and at the end, you will be benefited in terms of your
future career in retail. (My emphasis)

Another excerpt through which the neoliberal logic is instilled, from the Packaging class
reads, “Becoming a global brand is a vital marketing strategy in the process of adapting
to the highly competitive, globalizing world… As all workers of our company, we need
to position our brand at the right place and to develop a language of communication in

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A note on translation: Unless otherwise cited, I translated all texts. I always tried to
stay faithful to the terms and their particular usages as far as I can although sometimes
they may have peculiar usages and meanings in Turkish and/or in English. Since the
Turkish language does not have grammatical genders such as the distinction of she and
he, I translated the third person as “he” for managers; “she” for the customers and
workers despite the fact that there are numerous female managers and male customers
and workers.
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order to be successful in the current competitive order of the world.” (My emphasis)
Another quote from the Governing Crisis class reminds students that, “There is only one
boss [in this business] and she is the customer. She can fire everybody by just spending
her money at somewhere else.” Instead of proselytizing the ethnic unity of the Turkish
nation-state like high-school curricula normally do, for example, the Project
Development class remembers the value of ‘multiplicity’ and cites “different ethnic
groups in a society that speaks different accents and languages should be addressed and
considered when one works retail.”

While in these examples, certain significant rationales of neoliberalism are highlighted
such as the significance of the selling act and sacred position of the customer, increasing
competition, multiplicity, the globalized world, and the functions of mediation and
communication, there are also counter-neoliberal expressions that reflects the Turkish
State’s incomplete transformation from an industrial, developmentalist, import-
substitution based, Fordist society to a post-industrial and liberalized one which now
claims to educate retail workers for global companies. For example, in the Professional
Agenda class, the family is presented as the consumption unit instead of the much-praised
neoliberal individual:
Families or households do not spend all of their incomes.
When you will subtract the necessities from the total
income you will find the discretionary amount. Luxury
spending is made from this budget. But, it is an evasive
concept because it is hard to determine what a necessity
for one family and for another is. Colored TV is a
necessity for upper classes while it is discretionary for the
lower class families.
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The Details of Retail course book lists five factors in understanding how people consume.
These are age, occupation, economic status, lifestyle (claimed to be more than social
class), and personality. Very roughly, gender, sexuality, location, religion, and ethnic
differences are not referred in this list of factors that affect consumption patterns.
Hedonism is given as an example of lifestyles, which are seen as classifiable and unitary
groups, for example, “hedonists consume a lot without a valid reason, a need, just to
please themselves.” Accordingly, personality is seen as cohesion formed in one’s acts and
decisions, which can also be grouped and analyzed. In this framework, no social power,
inequality, violence or conflict appears in the endeavour to understand the world we live
in (‘competitive’, ‘globalized’, and ‘rapidly changing’). Both personalities and social
groups are distinguished peacefully and they continue to consume just ‘differently’ than
one another. The only thing one needs to do is to identify the characteristics of these
harmoniously juxtaposed groups and to learn to speak to their differences in order to
convince them to consume more (for the company one works for).

Careerism is always evident through the texts of the classes. Middle class conventions
like careerism and future-oriented thinking contradicts with the dominating neoliberal
metanarratives of contingency, flexibility, adaptability, and unstableness. The illusion of
meritocracy is obvious in for example, the Hiring Techniques class, where the student is
advised: “Dear student, after graduating your school, you will find a job in a sector you
are educated for. You ought to express yourself brilliantly and to fulfill all the tasks
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correctly when you apply to a job. You will climb the steps at work and you will be
promoted to become a manager after years of hard work”.

While the neoliberal post-Fordism is highlighted, the mastery in the art of self-
presentation and excellence in communication and expression skills became much more
central. Speech act is yet another point that the hegemonic culture of the declining nation-
state persists against the rising values of the neoliberal state. In the Diction 2 class, the
students are warned, “Dear students, people who can speak impressively in both their
personal and professional lives are admired by everyone around them. One of the tasks,
as Turkish youth, you have to undertake is to be able to talk our beautiful Turkish in a
correct way. When you speak in your language beautifully you will see that many issues
in your life will be solved and everything will be different for you. Why would not you
become one of the people who direct everybody by their words?” After similar lines,
there is a joke for the students. In the joke, a person from a politically neutral (not critical
to the hegemonic versions of Turkish nationalism) rural area comes to Istanbul and
speaks in his region’s accent. Of course, nobody understands what he tries to say, and
when Istanbulites get what he means they make fun of him. So, we, the students of the
sales assistantship education should not be like this guy and we have to speak correctly in
the state-sponsored Istanbulite fashion although multiplicity and diversity is celebrated
for the customers.

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As I have argued in Chapter 3, one of the issues around becoming a sales assistant in
Istanbul is that almost everybody employed in this sector are of Turkish ethnic origin and
Kurds are systematically excluded from opportunities of working retail. Interestingly, the
State’s approach in the textbooks consolidates this exclusion instead of fighting it. In the
Diction 1 class, the obsession with ‘proper accent’ is singled out without considering who
is structurally left out through this insistence, “diction is a part of social life as well as
being an inseparable part of work life. Can you imagine a bank clerk who does not know
how to speak on the phone, or a manager’s assistant who cannot form and list proper
sentences, or a real estate agent that nobody understands what he says? Of course, no! So,
you have to speak in a correct and beautiful fashion in order to become a preferred retail
worker.”

The final issue regarding the institution of neoliberalism is about the class positions of
subjects. I have elucidated the inter-class relationships within the store in Chapter 3.
Here, I will summarize how the official discourse portrays social classes for the students,
and then, I will briefly reflect on how my informants answered my questions about their
class background. The Professional Agenda class demonstrates the six ‘social classes’ of
Turkey in a table. Students should know and locate people according to this structure of
social classes, i.e. customers, coworkers and managers, in order to better relate to them.
In the table, the first class is the ‘upper classes. The members of this class are called
‘elite’ and ‘old money’; they inherited big wealth; they have access to prestigious and
exclusive clubs; their children are sent to private, expensive colleges and/or abroad; and
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they can easily deviate from ‘social norms’. They spend money as if they do not care
[how much they spend]; they do not like to emphasize it; they choose clothes of
conservative and ‘aristocratic’ styles; they are particularly chic among their circles; and
they like the arts and other expensive hobbies.

The second group is the ‘upper-middle classes. These people have greater social mobility,
they are graduates of prestigious universities, and they are very active in their search for
respect and status. They consume to show-off, in order to be seen by other people.
Instead of traditional quality, they always look for what is the latest trend in their choices.
The third group is named as the ‘upper-middle classes. The members are graduates of
universities of secondary rank and importance. They focus on their careers with ambition.
Their children’s education has a great meaning in their endeavor for their desired upward
mobility. When they go shopping, they want to buy products that balance high quality
and fashion. The neighborhood they live in and the conditions of their apartment are the
most important sign of their position vis-à-vis other people.

The fourth group is ‘the lower-middle classes. They desperately search for status and
prestige. They try to play the game with the rules. They are hardworking, clean and
cordial. They like soccer games and consume a lot of alcohol and cigarettes. Their most
significant belonging is their home. Their home is their temple. They spend great time
and energy to decorate and clean it. When they buy things, they meticulously compare
and calculate prices. If possible, they would go for the cheaper alternative.
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The fifth class is the ‘lower-upper’ one. Accordingly, members of this group look for
safety first, and then respectability. It is a male-dominated group in which women do not
work outside home. They do not like the idea of change. They do not spend time outside
their home. The only social activity they may engage is visiting relatives. They do not
have hope for the future. Their taste is insular and not refined. They live in small and
uncomfortable houses in squatter settlements outside of urban centers or zones of
disintegration within urban cores. They cannot think when they see a new product; they
just buy it. They are loyal to brands and they prefer to consume Turkish products.

The last group is ‘the lower classes. Being at the bottom, the members are characterized
with ‘apathy’ [used in French], fatalism, momentary and superficial satisfaction, no
education, unemployment, and lives under standard human conditions in the lowest
quality houses in squatter settlements. They buy ‘instinctively’, they are not able to
calculate and choose the best available option to them, they cannot assess quality or value
of things, they do not look for information, and they watch television for very long hours.

In interviews with sales assistants, I asked them which social class, level or ‘stratum’
(tabaka) they are in ‘now’ (upper, middle, lower and between any two of these) and
which social class their parents are coming from. Most of them said that they currently
are and coming from middle classes with minor variations. When I interrogated their
answers, they underlined, in very basic terms that most of the customers and managers
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are members of upper classes while lower classes are abjected because they do not have
information or access to visit shopping malls and to enter the stores they work in. Gulcan,
for example, elaborates, “My father is a soldier and my mother is a teacher. They both
have higher education of some sort. We have our own apartment in Fulya [a lower-
middle class neighborhood very close to more upper-middle districts] so, we are not that
rich, but we are not poor either. We are doing enough. I guess we are ‘pretty normal’,
middle class people.” Gonul also elucidates what they have in order to prove their middle
class position, “I believe that we are from the middle classes. My parents worked hard to
have their own apartment. You know how it is difficult in Istanbul. I mean the apartment
is really humble, but we own it. Also, we are three siblings and my parents are always
very supportive for our education. They want their children educated.”

Gulcan and Gonul are rather typical in the sense that they identify themselves as middle
class. However there are other informants claiming different class belongings. Sule for
example states, “We were upper class. I mean before my father’s bankruptcy. We then
had to migrate to Istanbul and started a new life. So, my life is indeed two-sided. But, if
you ask now, I would say, we are hardly middle class. We do not make much money; we
do not spend much money. Just normal…” Kaan, on the other hand, says it is difficult to
locate his family because “it depends where you look at. If you look at my parents here in
Istanbul, they are not middle; they are lower class people… The places we live, our
apartment, everything we have are indeed lower class. However, if you go to our
hometown, we are normal there; my parents are middle class there. They are coming
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from a well-known family that has fields for agriculture. The fields they have do not
make much money but still it is respected to have land there. If you look at me as an
individual in my family, as a part of my family, clearly, I am a lower class person;
however, if you do not know my family and just look at me, I am definitely middle class.
I am 22 years old; I work at Citron and spend almost a thousand TL for myself every
month. Things I like, things I buy, and things I am able to buy make me middle-class.”

Work & Workplace

How can a person be a sales assistant in a multinational, ‘modern’, ‘scientifically
managed’ retail company? This is the single most important question repeated many
times in the textbook of the Hiring Techniques class. Then, the book provides many
answers for the students who are going to look for such positions after they will graduate
from high school. Here, I will take the section called “Job Interviews” in order to
demonstrate how a retail worker, a sales assistant, is projected and presented according to
the needs, expectations, and the ideology such companies are supposed to have.
According to the text, the most important factors that one should be aware of and careful
for are her overall appearance; her attitude and behaviors; her structure of thinking; her
educational level and success at school; reasons why she quit her previous job; her
position and level of success at her previous job; her way of speaking; how much she
wants this job; her personal qualities; her health conditions; her expectations from the
company; and what she demands from this job in terms of working hours and salary.
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We learn from the course book that if one, as a candidate sales assistant, can pass ‘the
first impression’ test regarding the very basics of mutual agreement between the
employer and the employee; then she might be asked several questions for a deeper and
more serious understanding of her personality and suitableness for the position. These
may include, what is her first priority if she will get this job; how many people does she
think she can work with; for the assigned tasks what kind of means and sources she
would need; what are the components of her work ethic; what does she know about the
company and how is she a good match for the company; what might be the biggest
difficulty that she will face in this job; what are her goals for the first six months, or a
year, after she will be hired; and what is her broader career plan for the future.

The book also involves the negative scenario: What if one cannot get the job she was
interviewed for. The possible reasons that she must be alerted for are listed as her lack in
the basic qualities that this job requires; she might not fit with the conditions of this job in
terms of hours or salary; her test results might be lower than other candidates; for any
reason there was a better candidate than her; her references may not work well with the
expectations; her physical qualities might not fit this job’s requirements; and a
mispronounced or misunderstood word during the job interview.

The Work Life 3 course book defines a ‘technique’ called ‘analysis of work’ which
gathers information on and examines scientifically the quality, particularities,
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requirements, consequences, and conditions of each job or task in the workplace in order
to evaluate everything correctly, effectively, and in rich detail. It is not very complicated:
A manager should be able to ask and response to the questions of what, how, why, when,
where a specific worker does her job; and then, the manager should ask a final question
‘how much the worker should be talented for this job and is she so?’ In other words,
asking and finding responses for these questions for each worker, enables the manager for
a scientific analysis of the performance of his workers.

Throughout the documents of the courses taught in the sales assistantship program, there
is an enterprise of founding and stabilizing retail work as a rational, planned, organized,
serious profession with certain rules, principles, bureaucracy, and strategies. The texts
frequently cite what I would translate as the basics of ‘retail-logy’ (perakandecilik)
through its increasing importance in the new economy and warn students to take their
education seriously and learn how they can better execute retail work ‘scientifically’. In
these texts, retail work is produced as a field of modern, scientific knowledge at the
intersection of the disciplines such as marketing, management, economics, organizational
sociology and psychology, and public relations without any reference to lived experience
or the process of learning through working. This way, the textbooks I studied
monumentalize what is officially taught as professional knowledge and position students
as passive receivers of what is told them. Hence, the retail sector arises as a new and
legitimate possibility of government regarding the tactics and methods that are used by
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the companies.

Words and concepts frequently used in the textbooks like research, management,
planning, organization, coordination, work-plan, classification, functionality, strategy,
observation, efficiency, and sustainability strive to create an illusion that retail work can
be fully calculable, measurable and governable. However my experiences in the apparel
stores inform me that the most significant aspect of retail work is its human dimension:
Adaptability, contingency, flexibility, emotions, performance, subjectivity, resistance,
obedience and enjoyment are mostly excluded from the ‘scientific’ and rational
discourses implemented in the course books. Even the subject of ‘work ethic’ is discussed
by incontestable terms such as truth, legality, sufficiency, trustworthiness, ethic
management, and commitment to the profession. The notion of management is
formulated by militaristic terms of order-command chain and expressions such as “an
order should be complete, clear, and not open-ended” which is fundamentally opposite to
the dynamics of retail work regarding the fact that the constitutive subject of retail
government, human action, is unpredictable and ambiguous. Finally, in the Professional
Development class, there is a chapter called ‘Modern Management and Organization’ and
its elements are quality management system, strategical management, processual
management, project management, management of individual actions, and lastly,
democratic management! When one studies all the textbooks for the program, she would
easily think that these instructions are written for factory work that the production
processes, or the assembly line, which is planned and organized rationally and supposed
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to work flawlessly, and definitely not for the retail work whose basic component is
interpersonal interaction and social communication as I have discussed in Chapter 3.

Prescription is a crucial matter within the texts of governmental ‘programmes’. The
textbooks I examined also guide students to learn how they arrange their working hours,
what will happen when they work over-time or during official holidays, how they will
use their breaks and leaves, and other rights and responsibilities to use their time. Again,
the writers of the textbooks should really be unaware of the actual dynamics working life
in the retail sector that workers never determine when or for how long they work, how
much extra money they earn (if any) when they overwork or work during holidays, or to
know their rights about their breaks normally means trouble for their future working
lives.

Lastly, workplace, or the apparel store in my case, is imagined as a space in which
principles of modern management prevail and fully rational managers exist. The Retail
Work class explicates what are the fundamental characteristics of a modern manager:
1. He is an engineer of change and he is always open to novelties,
2. He founds the mission and vision of the store. He can
anticipate the future,
3. He is able to comprehend and interpret information and
knowledge in the organization. He continuously tries to gain
new forms of knowledge and information,
4. He must be a struggler and a hard worker. He must have the
strength for action. He guides the organization towards success,
5. He encourages improvement in the workplace,
6. His communicative skills are highly developed,
7. He is interrogative and intellectual. He always learns
something new from his mistakes;
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8. He is an example to his workers in terms of being clear and
coherent. There is no gap between what he says and what he
does,
9. He knows the strong and weak aspects of a worker,
10. He is able to follow and analyze the trends and predilections in
the market and among consumers,
11. He is flexible and adaptive to changing conditions of work,
12. He believes in teamwork. He believes the success belongs to
all workers.

So, the manager is projected as a person who knows the dynamics, changing rules, and
conditions of the retail sector while he never fails in governing his workers regarding the
needs and purposes of the company. Through the key words like change, novelty, vision,
mission, success, improvement, trends, flexibility and adaptability, he appears as the
model neoliberal subject embedded in the new economy. It is important to note the
differences between how the ideal worker is portrayed and how the rational manager is
imagined in terms of qualities, capabilities, and skills that they both are supposed to have.

Consumers & Customers

According to the texts I studied, Turkish society is divided between two impenetrable
groups: We (retail workers) and they (customers of any sort) with the abject ‘lower
classes,’ the socially excluded, who do not have cultural and economic capital to come to
the shopping malls or enter to the stores. The art and science of governing workers, or
‘retail-logy’, is established on the interaction between these two groups at stake. As I
have shown in Chapter 3, one of the central disputes among workers and the customers
emerges when customers want to give the product back and demand full refund.
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Although they ought to follow the procedure defined by law, the companies are generally
involuntary for refunds. Thus, an unofficial but rather effective policy that they
implement is to discourage workers to initiate the procedure, create problems, and resist
the customers for their refund demands. The Working at the Counter textbook, for
example, instructs workers on how to deal with customers in detail.

First of all, it suggests that the customers must be trusted.
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The text reads, “You have to
believe 100 per cent that the customer is saying the truth. If you will give the impression
that you think the customer is lying and you do not believe her, this will be very wrong
regarding the customer satisfaction principle. If you act in a more compromising way, a
solution can be found much easily. Do not forget that, today most customers decide to
buy while thinking they can change the products or they can ask for a full refund in the
future. Acting in a way to disprove their basic consumer right to do so will be
catastrophic for your store’s overall selling performance.” Also, in the text the worker is
warned to be coherent before customers. She should do the action of changing or
refunding straightaway if it must be done because her hesitation will make the customer
doubt about the treatment she receives. So, the sales assistant should not forget that
“when you lose a customer it will be really difficult to re-gain her.” In addition to
believing the customer and being coherent towards her, a sales assistant has to relieve the
customer because “the customers who come to the store for changing a product or for a

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While I was working in the apparel stores as a retail worker, I observed that sales
assistants almost never trust or believe the customers. On the contrary, they consistently
think that most of the customers are totally dishonest and insidious.
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full refund are very tense and irritable. You have to enact effective listening,
communication skills, and appropriate body language techniques in order to alleviate
your customers’ anxiety and stress.”

One of the two constituents of retail work is customers, or consumers, and the other is
workers and managers, or “the selling team” in the store. Throughout the textbooks I
scanned, customers are frequently defined, classified, characterized, and grouped as a
knowable, predictable, stable dimension of work. In a succinct example from the
Packaging class, the customers are categorized into four:
1. Customers who look for the possible cheapest item: They
buy only because the product is cheap,
2. Customers who look for quality: They buy only because the
product has high quality and it looks so,
3. Customers who care for the environment and social
responsibility. They buy only because the product is
environment-friendly or it is produced through fair-trade
principles,
4. Customers who buy things just for their pleasure. You
cannot know what or when they buy; it is a big question
mark. Nice and interesting products may attract them.

On the other hand, the Communications with the Customer class presents another
classification:
1. Beneficial customers: They are both loyal to the store and
they bring other customers. They shop a lot. If a sales
assistant use all the techniques she learns correctly, she
wouldn’t lose this type of customer,
2. Improvable customers: Although they are a little bit clumsy
or fastidious, they can be guided with the help of scientific
selling principles and an active sales assistantship,
3. Fragile customers: They can easily be offended and they
can leave the store immediately. A sales assistant have to
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deal with her at every second she is in the store without
disturbing her. Each detail of communication techniques
should be applied to this type of customers,
4. Problematic customers: They do not like or buy easily and
they are tough to communicate with. However, if the
worker really wants she can eventually find a way. If she
follows communication techniques with tolerance and
perseverance she can be successful with this kind of
customers, too.

In the Customer Relations class the workers are taught how to determine who the
customer is. Accordingly, a worker should evaluate the customer regarding her gender,
age, origin (in terms of geographical regions), and income level. The worker should then
know who buys most, who are the special customers, and who buys in cash or in
installments. In the Selling class, thirteen steps are instructed in order to facilitate the
selling moment. These are:
1. To present the garments in the store to the customer in the best
possible way,
2. To establish a physical contact with the customer, i.e. eye-
contact,
3. To represent the store correctly in front of the customer,
4. To direct customer’s attention to purchasing,
5. To ease customer’s decision to buy,
6. To respect customer’s taste,
7. To understand what the customer really looks for and help her
finding it fast,
8. To present alternatives without saying ‘no’ or ‘we do not have’
to the customer,
9. To show and recommend second and third garments after she
decided to buy the first option,
10. To convince the customer about the harmony and
complimentary relation between different products,
11. To make the customer trust you,
12. Not to finish selling without the customer’s full satisfaction,
13. To try to ‘gain’ customers to the store for the future.

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In the Working at the Counter class, the workers are trained to keep good relations with
the customers:
Working personnel has a great significance in customer relations.
Especially in chain stores that employ many workers, only a few
people, i.e. a sales assistant and a cashier, can have a contact with a
customer. At that point, these few, sometimes single, people
represent the grand brand names and global companies to the
customers. An educated, cheerful and exuberant worker treats
customers differently [in a positive sense] and this helps having loyal
customers. A customer’s opinion about a store is determined by the
quality of the products and prices as well as how she is treated in that
store. Big transnational companies devote great time and money to
train and re-train their workers in order to have more perfect results
in treating and communicating with customers. To have a new
customer costs seven times more than keeping a customer loyal to
the store. Therefore, to have a perfect relation with the customers is
crucial in a store’s success and benefits.
A customer who comes to the counter with a product is the owner
of that product. A worker should know this and act tactfully.
Customers are impatient at the counter. They do not have time to
wait. A good retail worker should pay attention to the customer’s
body language. When you have a customer approaching to the
counter, you have to smile and say ‘welcome’ and when she is
leaving, you have to smile and say ‘good bye’ ebulliently. A worker
should always be customer-oriented: She should understand the
needs and expectations of customers, act accordingly, and increase
the customers’ satisfaction from the store.

On the other hand, the Customer Relations textbook informs the students about being
honest with the customers:
Honesty is the cornerstone of all behavior. You can fully express
your beliefs, values and emotions when you are honest. If you
believe you are a clear, honest, and trustable person you have to
treat all customers in a clear, honest, and trustable way.
Customers generally like to talk about themselves and they like
workers, who listen to and understand them. You need to expand
your field of interests and hobbies into music, sports, politics,
travel and real estate market in order to develop sound relations
with customers. Never mislead and misinform your customers
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about the products you sell. Always be open and sincere and
always be the first smiling part.

According to the textbooks, another vital issue in customer relations in the retail sector is
the problematic customers who cause disorder and trouble in the store. The Crisis
Management class defines a group of ‘difficult people’ and instructs students about how
to deal with them:
1. Do not take their actions personally. It might be a characteristic
of difficult people’s normal behavior. So, they might be
behaving this way everyone around them, not only you.
2. Do not escape from dealing with difficult people and try to
solve their problems because unresolved problems will
eventually gather and create bigger problems for you or for the
store. Also, escaping makes you weaker, and weaker workers
will receive undeserved consequences in the workplace.
3. Do not complain all the time about difficult people. It is a part
of retail work. Otherwise, your managers will think you cannot
handle your own work and you are not acting professionally.
4. Do not try to hit them with their guns! You are an amateur while
they live all their lives in this way and become masters of such
rude behavior. You cannot be successful through imitated
attitudes. Try to be yourself.
5. Do not back off. Difficult people will ask more and you have to
say to no anyways.
6. Do not try to change them, you cannot. You can only shift your
actions regarding their reaction to find peace in the workplace.

Finally, in order to have a ‘healthy’ relation with the customers, the Communication with
the Customers class book advises students to follow this path:
1. Do not interrupt customers when they talk to you and wait until
they finish what they are saying,
2. Do not pay attention to anything else when a customer is talking
to you,
3. Make the customer feel that you are genuinely listening to her,
4. Keep eye-contact with the customer without annoying her,
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5. Do not make a comment without fully understanding what the
customer wants or asks exactly,
6. Do not tell them that they could not have expressed what they
have tried to mean when you do not understand what they
want. Instead, always say, “I am sorry; I guess I could not
understand what you mean”.

Re-Shaping Selves and Bodies

One of the central focuses of the course books of the sales assistantship trade high school
program is the multiple answers to the question ‘how should the sales assistants be like?’
The answers –numerous prescriptions, recommendations, and orders to students, include
very detailed governing practices concern their bodies, capacities, physical appearances
and bodily discipline, aesthetic senses, personality traits, manners and gestures,
communicative skills, and personal relations with the customers. This part is the
backbone of the whole pedagogical enterprise of producing professional, rational and
modern sales assistants out of lower-middle class, under-educated, inexperienced
teenagers.

The first step in the production of modern sales assistants is to make them be aware of
themselves. Interests, opinions and views, education, work life, income, personality,
physical qualities and the body language are listed as ‘the ways to know yourself’ in both
the Customer Relations and the Effective Communication classes. After the workers’
process of ‘knowing themselves’ is completed successfully, a detailed and very long list
of necessary attributes of a sales assistant appears in most of the textbooks I worked on.
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Items of these prescriptive lists are repeated many times in different texts in different
contexts. Some of the most frequently cited ones of these lists that describe an excellent
modern sales assistant are listed in the Table 4.

Table 4: Attributes of a Retail Worker

• Having well-developed aesthetic senses and designing abilities,
• Being creative,
• Being patient and tolerant,
• Being disciplined and perseverant,
• Being dynamic and able to work in flexible hours,
• Thinking analytically,
• Focusing on arranging and exhibiting garments,
• Being able to organize and direct flows of people and products,
• Being careful and scrupulous,
• Being cheerful and ebullient,
• Being independent but responsible,
• Being objective and honest,
• Keeping customer’s secrets,
• Having a consciousness of the institution, or an institutional consciousness,
• Speaking fluently and using the grammar correctly,
• Speaking in a convincing way,
• Pronouncing words without regional accents,
• Using body language effectively,
• Using empathy,
• Being able to listen and to make a decision immediately,
• Being adaptable to the physical and social environment,
• Being respectful to the customers and co-workers,
• Respecting human rights and being democratic,
• Being curious,
• Being clean and well-kept,
• Being able to work collaboratively,
• Following the written and unwritten rules of modern human relations,
• Being sympathetic,
• Obeying the rules of appearance and uniforms,
• Working systematically,
• Being open to new developments and trends,
• Being able to make fast decisions,
• Knowing basics of human psychology,

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Table 4: Continued

• Being focused on completing tasks and solving problems,
• Being full with a desire to win,
• Not escaping from competition,
• Being confident with her own selling skills,
• Having detailed information on garments,
• Being stabilized and coherent,
• Being self-confident,
• Being practical,
• Being able to find and to name problems fast,
• Being able to observe and imitate others,
• Being able to put things in a calendar in her own mind,
• Being able to taking initiative,
• Following mass media including newspapers, TV news and the internet,
• Thinking multi-dimensional,
• Developing a habit of ‘serious listening’ without thinking anything else,
• Developing a habit of providing feedback,
• Having full concentration during work hours,
• Breathing correctly,
• Acting in a plain way without exaggeration,
• Having excellent knowledge on rules of manners, protocol, and proper behaviour and
being able to distinguish between traditional Turkish rules of manner and
contemporary modern rules of manner,
• Respecting rules of hygiene and watching your own body’s cleanness,
• Keeping clean and healthy teeth and hair,
• Shaving and having make-up according to the rules of the organization,
• Staying in bodily form and keeping the shape of your body (do not gain or lose
weight if you look in shape, calculate your ‘ideal weight’, exercise and having a diet
if necessary),
• Do not skip breakfast and other meals during the day, do not eat at night, eat in small
portions and take a walk after each meal, do not eat fried food, try to decrease the
amount of butter you use, eat raw vegetables, do not eat deserts, do not drink coke
and drink 2 liters of water every day,
• Cleaning facial skin to get rid of facial scars and acnes,
• Using perfumes and nice fragrances,
• Learning healthy nutrition principles and applying them according to your own
bodily and physical conditions.

Table 4: Attributes of a Retail Worker
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Another set of principles is listed in the Sales Techniques textbook. It reads “If a worker,
or a job candidate, wants to be a good, educated, and modern sales assistant, who climbs
the steps in the retail sector fast, she should never underestimate the significance of these
points below:”

1. Nobody born as a sales assistant. Instead, you can become a
sales assistant through continuous training, self-
improvement and hard working in time,
2. You have to create and sustain a style in serving people,
3. You have to be dynamic, active and fast,
4. You have to be cheerful, humorous, and far from stress,
5. You have to learn speaking fluently without any
mispronunciation, listening effectively, and using body
language correctly,
6. You have to be attentive to how you look,
7. You have to be natural and to avoid exaggeration,
8. You have to be scrupulous and diligent at work,
9. You have to be self-confident, to be open to novelties, and
to improve yourself,
10. You have to push for presenting service to the customer
beyond her expectations,
11. You have to accept that each single customer is unique and
you need to develop another tactic for each customer,
12. You have to be creative and ambitious but also patient and
respectful,
13. While serving a customer, you have to focus on the selling
act,
14. You have to develop social skills necessary for teamwork,
15. You have to make the customer think that she has the
control while you are directing her to purchase,
16. You should not forget that your relationship with a
customer is a long-term investment.

Lastly, the Personnel Improvement class instructs students to transform themselves into
successful sales assistants in terms of their bodies as well as spirits as a whole through a
list of necessary elements, or ‘raw materials’ as the textbook names them. It reads:
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1. Positive Thinking: There is no other profession in which
the possibility of being rejected is so high. So, positive
thinking is vital in retail sector. A sales assistant should not
demoralize herself.
2. Decisiveness: Between a sales assistant at the bottom line
and a person who is wealthy there is only one similarity
and it is the decisiveness to success.
3. Strong Imagination: If you can produce excitement in your
imagination, it would be easier for you to turn potential
customers into real buyers. You have to develop your
imagination.
4. Being proud of your job: Retail workers are mostly
misrepresented and humiliated by other people. We always
face rude jokes and impolite behaviour. Do not forget that
without us, all the economy would stop because all the
goods have to meet with consumers through our labor.
Without us there would not be need for lawyers,
accountants, tax inspectors, or truck drivers.
5. Self-confidence: In retail work you survive or lose with
your own values. Your colleagues compete all the time to
climb the ladder. You are the only person that you can
count on.
6. Self-motivation: If you will gain a mediocre amount of
money, you will receive a mediocre amount of support
from your coworkers. Your managers make more money
but probably the support they receive is lesser that yours.
You can trust other people to motivate and encourage you
to become better in your job. You should know your
personality, what you want and how you can get it by
yourself.
7. Skills to fast and easy communication: This is absolutely
vital. Customers would only want to deal with workers that
they like.
8. A clear mind: If you want success, you have to be ready to
do anything that would help you to be ahead of your
competitors. A horse can win a race only with her nose,
which is ahead of the follower for half an inch; but it is
totally different to become the first and the second at the
end.
9. Self-love: You should trust yourself that you can and will
be the best. Learn who is the best seller in your store, how
much she sells and then make yourself believe that you can
exceed this number with greater service. Everybody would
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want to deal with you to buy products if you can establish
this sense of self-love and trust.
10. Fearlessness: Fear can stop talented workers. You can
simplify all the work you do in a store during the day like
predicting sales, presenting products, servicing customers,
recording actions, and closing the store. Even if one or
more items from this list can make you worry or hesitate,
you should not let them fear you.
11. Smiling: It is a magical word. Even in most compelling
situations you must find a chance to smile. It is a key to
open all locks. When you smile the customer would be
relaxed and feel comfortable with you. A Chinese saying is
“a person who cannot smile should not open a store.”
12. Information: A good retail worker should know everything
about the product she is selling in order to persuade the
customer. Never hesitate during the act of selling; even a
moment of uncertainty would lead the customer leave the
product without buying it.

Strategies of Control and Intervention through Bodies and Labor

Starting from the very first moment of contact with the company (the job interview) there
are numerous ways to influence, interfere, manipulate, and adjust worker’s ideas and
actions. In other words, these are the ‘how’ questions of controlling and reshaping
conduct of the workers in the store. In this section, I will briefly recount managers’
different strategies and techniques to govern and improve workers’ performance and
lives. In addition to my observations in the two stores I worked, during interviews with
my informants I asked the sales assistants, ‘how do they manage you,’ and to the
managers ‘how do you manage/direct/control workers’.

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Talking alone with a worker in a remote corner of the store, or in the back office, is an
important method because in the retail sector there is no private conversation as an
integral part of work routine. Whatever a manager might tell a worker, s/he can do it in
public. So, when a manager wants to talk to a worker in seclusion, independent of the
content of the conversation, it denotes the importance of the act of conversation. It may
take different forms or characteristics such as caring the worker’s life and problems,
showing that she is important for the store, demonstrating camaraderie, or acting distant
and professionally –especially for a last admonishing before firing the worker. Generally,
this method used in a sequence in time by the managers. It is stabilized by repetition; it
turns into a ‘professional friendship’, which triggers a mutual confidentiality and
attachment.

For example, Zeliha illustrates this clearly when she says “I was working one day and she
[the manager] came to me and invited me to the back office. It was not the ‘performance
time’ of the year. [The annual, official meeting in which the worker’s performance is
evaluated and recorded] So, at that moment I understood that there was something
serious. Otherwise, why she would call me to the back office to talk.” Cihan was also
talking about one of his former managers, underlying how he used the therapeutic sense
of routine private conversations with the workers, “every week or so, he called each
worker separately to the back office alone ‘to chat a little bit’ with his terms. He was
really interested in what was going on in our lives, knowing everything about our lives
one by one, and implicitly gossiping about other workers in order to have more
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information. He always talked about his own life as well. We all memorized how he
started to work as a part-time student worker, how he worked really hard and became a
manager, where he lives, his family, his girlfriend, how he thinks professionally etc. So,
he spent a lot of time like a psychologist to talk to us on a regular basis, he never failed to
have some time to know everything about us.” Sevda was emphasizing how her former
manager Nukhet’s openness to talk to her made her to think that Nukhet was like a good
teacher who cares for her students’ well-being as a whole and not only grades that they
receive, “I had a history teacher at high school who always chatted with me about my
family, things at home, and everything else in my life. She was not concerned only with
my exams, but with me as Sevda, as a person, not only a student. She took me seriously.
So, Nukhet was the same: with her, I never felt myself as a worker, as one of the others;
instead, I always felt that she was closer to me, I must not disappoint her since we were
very close. Now, when I look at it, I can see that it was a tactic to make me work harder,
maybe I was not that special to her. I mean she had 50 workers like me. However, I still
think it was a good tactic. I was working harder to make her happier and also I was
feeling better.”

In addition to the privacy of individual talks, managers frequently address workers of the
store as group, as ‘we’. While some companies, including Citron, requires managers to
have this kind of public meetings twice in a day, others, including ZIP, recommends
meetings only when necessary. Such group talks that address all the workers at the same
time create a discursive cohesiveness, solidarity, and sense of unity; they hide
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interpersonal differences and conflicts; and they produce various ‘consolidating others’ to
relate with in diverse ways, like ‘customers’, the head office personnel such as human
resources department, other brands in the same shopping mall, and other stores of the
same company at different locations: ‘We’ are working in the store as a group against
these other groups through competition, disaffection, hostility, envy, and even sabotage.
It is not hard to imagine that, the discursive creation of the ‘we’ works better through
irregularities either in cases of surprising successes such as a record-breaking amount of
daily sales or special thanks from a significant person for an excellent performance, or in
unexpected failures such as dissatisfaction of the head office or constant decline in sales.

Deniz, the manager of my first ethnographic site for this project, ZIP Kanyon, was
always looking for the sales of the other ZIP stores in Turkey from a special web page,
which is updated in every five minutes. When she saw a critical threshold like a chance to
become the third best-selling ZIP store of the day or reaching the sales amount of 10.000
TL ($6660) before finishing that day she came in among the workers and motivated them
to work harder and accomplish her goals. On the other hand, the manager of my second
ethnographic site for this project ZIP Istinye Park, Tolga never used this instantaneity
tactic probably because he and his workers were far busier for such comparisons during
the day. However, he addressed us as ‘we’ when he talked to all the workers in the store
in order to prompt us moving faster, selling better, or smiling greater. He always
underlined that “we are the best ZIP store in this country in terms of service and sales,
and we have to protect this title by working really hard.”
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My informant Pervin sardonically stated how her manager emphasizes the notion of
‘teamwork’ in her speeches, “Somehow she learnt this teamwork thing from somewhere,
maybe from a human resources training. Everyday she mentions the benefits of feeling
like team, how our job is only doable through teamwork, let’s say having a fight among
workers is highly oppositional to the teamwork principles; we need to cooperate because
we are a team. I believe nobody at that store will want to hear the word teamwork after
leaving there. I simply do not want to be a part of any team after this.” On the contrary,
Hakan says his manager’s insistence on ‘we’ works for him, “When I first started to work
here at Citron I never felt any kind of belonging to the store or the company. It was just
simple work I do for money. But after watching Emine [the manager] for a while I was
really impressed from her professionalism and perseverance. She never says I; instead,
she always reiterates that we make this store work. When we are the best-selling store of
the day, she always mentions that it is a result of our collaboration. She says ‘without
you, my team, I would not be able to manage this way and make this store number
one…’ So, now, after working for more than a year here, I feel happy when we become
the best store or when the Spanish say that we are doing great, I am a part of this success.
Emine made me love my job.”

Since 2004, I have worked in four stores (two were for this research, two were not) with
four managers and more than a hundred coworkers. As it is crystal clear in Hakan’s
appraisal of Emine (a strong and brilliant woman of late thirties who is now promoted to
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a brand manager position) the manager is the most crucial figure of experience, respect,
power, fear, envy, and fancy in retail workers’ daily lives. The synchronous dyadic
relations between the controlled and the controller, the watcher and the watched, the ruler
and the ruled, the evaluator and the evaluated, the manager and the managed pave the
way for the workers to redefine themselves with reference to the manager in and out of
the workplace. I observed, experienced and listened that this process of reconstitution of
the worker’ self is open to intrusion and manipulation by the managers. Managers are
well aware that they are seen as idols and every piece of information from their lives
(including where they live, whom they live with, what they eat, what they wear, how they
relate to others, what they say, how they say, how they look, how they smell, how much
they earn, how much they spend) are learnt and sometimes imitated by the workers. In
other words, workers watch the managers as their role models; they admire the managers
and take them as exemplary people not only as managers but also as classed and
gendered human beings.

During the encounter, workers rethink who they are in relation to their managers’
identity, lifestyle, achievements, and potentials as they assume, imagine or witness. Then,
they develop a desire to emulate, or at least to look and act like, their managers. They
start to do whatever the managers tell them just to be closer to their idol. Managers
engineer and direct workers’ actions through the mediation of this desire. They know
how they are iconized and followed, they try to sustain it through sharing information
with them very carefully, try not to destroy their own public image and respectability in
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workers’ eyes, try to create a charismatic ‘pose’ and attitude, and work on this image by
meticulous calculations as a repeated performance of the great, successful, self-
disciplined, goal-oriented, happy manager woman, or to a lesser extent, man. In other
words, managers form a special aura and perform managing by their own bodies,
lifestyles, doing class, and sociability in order to effect workers’ desires, expectations,
and yearnings. Such a magnetic relation between the manager and the managed have a
direct impact upon the workplace since it motivates and encourages the workers to work
harder and longer, and negotiate or resist less. This illusionary bond between the two
sides continues as long as the worker does not comprehend that it is not possible for her
to become her manager, replace her and live her life.

While I was working at apparel stores, one of the phrases that I heard most was “you
should not do/say this because X [the manager] would be angry or unhappy because of
this.” Cihan recounts what he experienced, “when I started to work here, at my first day
here, in the morning, I was waiting to take my breakfast break [20 minutes]. It was
almost 11 AM and nobody had breakfast yet. I started to worry if they do not use this
method here [taking breakfast breaks]. It really mattered for me because I smoke and
when I do not smoke, for example, for three hours I cannot work at all, I would be really
aggressive. So, I was waiting but I was becoming more and more impatient. Then, I
asked somebody when we would take our breaks. She told me that the manager would
tell us when we should. I said what if she is busy or she forgets. She said it is possible,
the manager might forget the workers sometimes. I told her that I would go to the
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manager and ask for her permission to go to the breakfast break. She told me I should not
do that because the manager would be angry and she would take it as a challenge to her
authority. She said she is the manager here. I was shocked; I could not see where was the
challenge. So, I told her she is just the manager here. I went to her and asked kindly if I
could use my break to smoke. It was really easy, she said of course. Can you see it? That
is not something she explicitly does; instead she injects this fear of what we would do if
she gets angry or sad, what if she would not love us. Nothing! It is her job. If it is a
challenge, let’s say it is a challenge. You know what happened afterwards, everybody
started to ask her, nobody waited again for her taking initiative. When she does not say
that we could use our breaks, we now go to her and ask. She cannot say you cannot go to,
it is not up to her; it is my right. I am working here. So, she is not doing me a favor, why
would I have to beg her for this?”

While I was conducting an interview with Eda, she started to talk about her manager
Basak. I asked why she was important for her. She said, “Basak is a model for my life.
She lives alone in Nisantasi [an old, elegant, expensive and prestigious neighborhood at
the heart of Istanbul] in her own apartment. She makes a lot of money [pause] I guess
around 5000-6000 TL [$3500-$4000]. She is not so pretty but she knows how to look
better. She spends a lot of money for make-up and her hair. She goes to her hair stylist
every morning before coming to work to look superb. Also, her clothes are always so
fashionable. She is always tanned, all the year. She is so skinny, she does not like eating,
but she always drinks coffee, a lot of coffee at Starbucks…” Dazzled by her curiousness
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about Basak, I asked her if this fondness affects her performance at work, “Of course,
what she thinks about me is really important in our work. I mean I am a very hard
working sales assistant whether Basak is around or not. But, particularly her approval, her
opinion, her judgment is very important since I see her as a role model, as a life coach,
and myself as an apprentice of her. You know what, I told this to her, I said I want to be
like you one day and she said ‘of course you can, but you need to work hard, you have to
love your job, dealing with our customers and our store’. I believe she likes me because
she made me responsible for the storage. I can arrange and prepare the storage better than
anyone in the store and Basak made me responsible for it.” Later in the interview, I
noticed Eda changed the dates of her leave because Basak requested so; Basak made Eda
‘extra flexible’ in terms of working hours because Basak says a good worker should
devote her time to the store whenever she is called; and Basak enabled Eda to become a
‘performance worker’. I thought this was not supposed to be the case, the position of
‘performance worker’ comes with minor financial benefits and it is open to all full-time
workers who are more experienced more than one year. Therefore, it is not a favor Basak
did particularly for Eda, it is a normal process for all workers. I am sure Ece also knows
this but she prefers to state that it is an example of Basak’s otherwise invisible generosity
and support to her.

When I talked to Gul, a Citron manager, she also accepted this electrifying relation with
her workers, “I know I have a power over them and this does not only come from the fact
that I am a manager, but also, maybe more than that, they take me as a model, as an
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example for their life. I can sense it from their looks, their questions, and their behaviour
even when they do not talk about it. It is not only I; it is the same with other managers as
well. Workers are like fans of a singer around you, they watch you all the time.
Sometimes it is really suffocating. They know everything about you even your private
matters like the person you are seeing or where did you go last night [Laughs].” Then, I
ask her if she uses this admiration for her own or her company’s benefit, “well, when you
are surrounded by young people who are coming from lower classes and living harder
lives than you, you should know that they will be impressed by your social position, your
family, education, and everything you have and they do not. These are very young,
inexperienced people who know only their parents so closely, maybe a couple teachers
from school. So, you appear as the model, as the right person to guide them. It is not I or
you or any other manager. It does not matter who occupies that position. This is the
nature of this work. It is inevitable. [Pause] It gives you a responsibility. I cannot come to
work without sleep, tired, hangover, or in dirty clothes. I cannot make explicit jokes with
them. I cannot share my personal feelings. We work together but they are not my
coworkers in that sense. We are not equal. [Pause] If you ask have you ever used this
bond, I would say yes, but not in a pre-planned way. Of course, I know they watch me,
they imitate me, so I am taking care of myself, my attitude, my conversations with them
but I never thought if they admire me they will work better. On the other hand, if a
worker works harder because she likes me and she does not want me to become upset
with her, it is okay; I do not have any problems with that. Sometimes, we have to work
understaffed and you as a manager have to find extra working hours from the pool of
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workers you already have. I think of the candidates, among them who can come to work
extra hours for me, who will not reject me, who respects and likes me most. Naturally, I
go and ask them first. If this means I use them for the company’s good, then, yes I use
them; I use their love to me. However, this is not exploiting them; I am giving my hands
to them to hold; to hold and to climb. It is a part of my job.”

There is also a gender and sexuality dimension in this peculiar relation between managers
and workers. It is pretty common for young, high school graduate (or less educated)
women workers of lower-middle class backgrounds, i.e. Eda, to be impressed by
relatively older, independent, educated women managers, i.e. Basak, who are coming
from and performing upper-middle class identities. Less frequently, there are examples of
cross-gender admirations like male workers, i.e. Hakan, are influenced by women
managers and women workers care for their male managers’ opinion and evaluation
about them. For me, among the retail sector workers in Istanbul it was really difficult to
see a male worker who has a ‘professional crush’ with his male manager. Instead, even
when they have to admit their managers’ endeavors and successes, male workers have a
tendency to see their male managers not as superior to them, but just as luckier than
themselves as well as insidious, dishonest, pushy, and cocky ‘guys’ just like them.

Also, the cross-gender admirations are easier to be labeled with sexualized ridicule by
other workers. Ozlem is a great example of this.
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She was graduated from elementary

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I will talk about Ozlem’s life in Chapter 6.
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school and normally she could not find a job at Citron because the company requires
minimum high school education. But her manager Talip helped her hiding her
educational lack from human resources and hired her as a cashier. I worked with them
and saw myself how she was a really talented and diligent worker while she was always
thankful and faithful to Talip. In all conditions, the first thing in her mind was to please
him with her performance or working without making him discontented. In addition to
her anxiety about her performance as a cashier, she also always strive to support Talip,
becoming his eyes when he is not around, protecting him from head office’s surveillance,
and talking informally with the job candidates before Talip and shared what she learnt
informally with him. During our interview, she explained her passionate service to him as
an outcome of both of her gratitude as well as her sincere admiration to his self-
discipline, principles and ability to manage. While she presents this relation in fully
professional terms, everybody in the store told me that she was in an unreciprocated,
probably a Platonic love with him.

There are other ways of penetrating and regulating workers’ selves, bodies, and labor
relations in the store. Managers, for example, always compare workers with each other in
their private conversations with them, or worse, in their public speeches that address all
workers in the store. Being compared with other workers and hearing what they lack or
how insufficient their work in front of others is a significant mechanism to force to the
worker to reform her actions. The subject matter of criticism may include behaviors
towards the customers, being timely in the store, make-up and hair, and being fast during
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work hours. I saw many workers who would push themselves to meet the criteria even
when it was really tough in order to escape the verbalized inferiority in front of their
coworkers. If such comparisons and criticism focus on a single person for a while, that
worker is named as ‘the unlucky duck’ or ‘the goat of sin’ of the store, which signifies
the possible firing of that worker in a near future.

Another tactic employed by the managers to regulate workers is harsh, intolerant
disciplinary actions. Managers never let the workers be late to start to work when they
arrive at the store or when they are coming from their breaks. Even being late for a
minute can start a heated debate between the manager and the worker. Also, not in ZIP,
but in Citron for example, workers have to wear uniform including shoes. Workers
persistently try to modify the uniforms or not to wear them at all. Managers thoroughly
watch workers during the day to see if somebody wore a different shirt or changed her
shoes. During the meetings, managers are unpredictably impolite and bitter when their
word is interrupted or a worker whispers something into another’s ear. Rudeness and
shouting in front of other workers and even customers is also another method by the
managers to discipline workers especially when they start to argue back. I witness many
such fights in the store which were ended with aggressive end points such as verbalized
threats ‘get out of here’, ‘I do not want you here any more’, ‘do not come to work again’,
and ‘fuck off’ by the managers. Surprisingly, nobody was fired after these fights and the
two sides always compromised after an hour or so. When I talked to Gul, she said, as a
manager she needs to play her last card sometimes especially when she is challenged
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publicly. Here is an excerpt from my field notes in which our manager Deniz was
underlining who was the boss in the store:
I was coming from home to start my shift. I informed Deniz that I
arrived and started to work in the back office where she was
sitting. Nervous, she thanked to me and left the office room after
she saw something from the surveillance cameras. Without rush,
I also went to the store where I saw Deniz was shouting at Cihan,
“I sent you your 15 minutes tea break and it is 40 minutes right
now! You did not call me and let me know where were you.
What happened to you, when would you come back? Are we
playing a game here?” I was confused, since when Tugba and I
arrive the other two workers usually go to lunch together. And it
was the time, where was the problem? Then, I understood that
they were having a fight over an issue from the morning, about
the ‘tea’ breaks we had. As a punishment to Cihan, Deniz did not
let Cihan to have lunch with Habibe. Cihan opposed and said that
“yesterday Cenk and Tugba went together and now you are not
letting me go with Habibe. You discriminate us and you make us
asocial here.” His voice was really high and challenging. Deniz
did not change her attitude and challenged him, said, “Yes, I am
punishing only you. It is only you that cannot go to lunch with
your friend.” Cihan was not expecting this toughness from Deniz
and he paused. Deniz then continued, “What you do not
understand is that I am the manager here. You should do
whatever I say, whatever I ask, whenever I ask. I led you take
your break and you just disappeared. If you would leave the mall
and a car would hit you, I am the one who was responsible from
you since it was within working hours and you should not have
been there. If I am responsible from your health and well being,
if the police will come and ask me where you were during work
hours, then you are going to do what I say. If you do not like this,
you may leave now!” I never saw her that harsh before. She
walked towards her office, and everybody left the scene silently.

Emotional Government

One day I was having lunch with a coworker from ZIP at the Istinye Park Shopping Mall.
We were talking about usual topics of lunch like how we were tired, how our manager
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Tolga controlled everything sometimes cruelly, how the customers were so intolerant and
aggressive. Suddenly, she told me “it is not possible to do this job in a good way without
feeling great; however, it is not possible to feel great here! So, solve this problem.” While
I was startled and thinking over what she said, my coworker continued, “do not think so
much, actually it is very easy, just act as if you are great. Eight hours, ten hours,
whatever. Try your best to look as if you are really great. You will be relieved when you
finally become a manager.” We laughed.

In this section, I will briefly examine how retail workers are governed in terms of their
emotions, their subjective interiorities that can make sense to (and to be governed by)
others, and their lives in the broadest possible meaning through its potential to affect their
performance at work. Although emotions have traditionally been coded either with
‘pschologizing’ terms, or purely physical and bodily explanations, recent developments
in the sociology of emotions showed that emotions have socio-cultural meanings and
functions while various organizations and bureaucratic institutions try to expand their
space of control and administration into various feelings of their subjects
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(Hocschild
1998; Illouz 2007). Through repetition, forms of feeling and ways of displaying emotions
become norms that should be disobeyed (Ahmed 2007) and in the retail sector companies
actively police and consolidate these emotional norms. Government of emotions, or
‘working with emotions’ (Hoggett and Miller 2000), here denotes two basic operations.

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Hochschild (1983: 19) conceptualizes this trend in ‘managing emotions’ as the
“transmutation” of an emotional system: “what it is that we do privately, often
unconsciously, to feelings that nowadays often fall under the sway of large organizations,
social engineering and profit motive.”
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The first is about governing a worker’s emotional being for purposes of work,
standardizing the quality of service she provides through manipulating her “immaterial
and affective labour” (Dowling et al. 2007) i.e. she should be warm and smiling. The
second is for governing a worker’s emotions regarding her relations with other people
and goods, i.e. jealousy should be controlled within the workplace.

All the managers that I worked with as well as people from the head-offices, especially
personnel of human resources departments, continually ask workers how good they are
doing. When I was more inexperienced in retail work, I was naively trying to answer
these questions. Then, it became obvious for me that these questions and the answers you
are supposed to give (“I am doing great; everything is fine”) many times in a working day
functions to stabilize how you must feel. Of course, a worker may have certain (serious)
problems and she may want to talk to her manager or human resources people regarding
her problem if the subject deserves conversation. Otherwise, the worker is constantly
reminded that she is great and she is feeling good. I also witnessed many times that
managers and head office people change their faces before they enter the store or
encounter with a worker just like actors before walking to the stage. If they seem tired,
bored, unhappy, or angry just one second ago, they are able to change the meaning of
their face, smile, and energize their movements in front of the workers, asking them if
everything is okay.

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At ZIP Kanyon, the manager Deniz was entitled to give a special award (the cheapest I-
pod shuffle) to the best-working sales assistant during the month before Christmas. She
decided to give it to Habibe. But, she was experienced enough to know that such
subjective decisions may trigger a lot of contestation among workers which eventually
turn anger and hostility. Other workers who also worked hard wound think that their
labor was not appreciated and Deniz did nepotism in favor of Habibe. Her predictions
came true and Habibe’s relations with other workers paralyzed because everybody else
was trying to sabotage her work and thus to show Deniz that she was not the best worker
and she made a wrong decision. Deniz comprehended the situation well and explained
everybody (including me) in private conversations that she gave the award to Habibe
because she was a motherless girl, her father was so sick, and she was so unhappy. She
just wanted to cheer her worker up a little bit and that should not mean discrimination or
nepotism because she knew how all her workers work great. Through the talks she had
with workers, she was able to mobilize the feelings of compassion, empathy, and
leniency against the collective anger, jealousy, injustice, and sense of being
discriminated.

Retail work has certain differences than, for example, Fordist factory production model in
which inter-human relations have minor significance, or jobs that requires more official
and regulated contact with people like the State bureaucracy or banking (Benson 1987).
Such a difference stems mostly from two interlinked mechanisms. I will call them as ‘the
front stage’ and ‘the back stage’ of emotional government. The front stage is the
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‘emotional labor’ –a sales assistant’s visible performance or outcomes of her emotions
during work. The answer of the question ‘how she feels’ is a gate to the worker’s
interiority, her inner world, and her ephemeral psychic mood. The worker is demanded to
‘feel good’, or better, ‘feel great’ at work; but, more importantly, she should act as if she
is really good and she is really great. Therefore, her working performance is a gate to her
own feelings and the component of emotional labor is about to create and stabilize this
illusion of feeling great. Retail sector basically requires particular activities and qualities
like listening effectively, tolerance, patience, empathy, understanding, and cheerfulness
that necessitate a specific mood, a particular condition of feeling. An unwritten definition
of retail work is then to feel in a certain way and to enact that feeling before the managers
and the customers. This act of performing positive feelings and stabilizing emotional
being is the front stage.

The back stage of emotional government is to define the worker’s life (components and
reasons of how she feels) as a field of intervention by managers in the name of steadying
and bracing worker’s feelings. Everything in her life-world may affect the sales
assistant’s mood. So, in addition to the front stage, the back stage work operates on the
numerous invisible reasons and factors as they happen in the worker’s life. The back
stage endeavor consists of two elements. The first is the therapeutic attention that the
managers show to their workers. A big portion of the daily working hours of a store
manager is devoted to listen to and to help workers’ problems. Different subject positions
are employed for such listening like the (older) sister, the teacher, the distant relative, or
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the role model. The second is the direct intervention to workers’ lives. For example, a
manager, independent of her current listening role, can force a worker to separate from a
lover, or to stop talking with a friend, or to cancel her credit cards. It is important to note
that these actions are never included in the official descriptions of work and actually
deemed as parts of ‘private’ lives of workers. However, when therapeutic listening comes
together with institutional power it re-positions the worker as a child or an incapacitated
person –somebody to be governed even in her simplest or most intimate conducts. The
only exception that a manager would not interfere an obvious problem is the subject of
family. Managers would very rarely guide workers’ relations with their families and they
never take action when families involve as they normally do about other subjects like the
worker’s friendships or spending. On the contrary, managers seem to have collaboration
with the families in terms of controlling and disciplining workers. The effort of listening
to workers, constituting their lives as a field of intervention and get involved sometimes
is the back stage of emotional government.

I was conducting an interview with a store manager, Gul (aged 30), and we were talking
about managing workers. She said, “I always tell them that this is a professional job. We
are not working at our father’s small shop or doing charity work. We have
responsibilities, things we have to do in a limited time and we are getting paid for this.
You do not have to like this job, you do not have to like customers, or you do not have to
like me. You cannot know whether I really like my job or I hate it. What you have to do
is doing your work in the best possible way, to work professionally. After work, you can
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do whatever you want. It is not my problem.” At this point I asked her managers’ (and
her) interventions into workers’ lives because what she says contradicts with I saw and
listened from my informants (including herself). She went on, “these are for workers who
are responsible or mature enough to direct their own lives. They do not need my
assistance at all. They know what to do when and the possible consequences of their
actions. Intervention is another subject; it concerns another group: They are mostly
younger, more inexperienced, people with issues, some of them are a little bit [pause]
naïve, or they have psychological problems. When you refer to these people, of course I
have to intervene their lives because when something happens because of their stupidity I
have to explain it to the head office. They would not accept my excuse for this or that
worker; they will accuse me for not managing my workers correctly. So, I have to
intervene sometimes into their private lives, what they do, whom they see, if they go out
a lot, is she has new friends, so on so forth. I have to watch them. These workers are like
our students, we as their managers and their families have to manage them.”

The textbooks I reviewed above seem totally engaged in a scientific, objectivist,
bureaucratic, and rational discourse and analysis of the retail work. Their instruction to
the students who want to be workers, and later managers, in the retail sector is full of
terms such as logic, planning, standards, calculation, risk, and efficiency with very few
and ambiguous references to ‘human psychology’ and appearance. So, the students are
invited to imagine their future workplace as it works only through ration, instrumentality,
objectivity, and measurable effort. Nevertheless, retail stores are spaces full of
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unpredictable interpersonal relations and affective labor (Hardt and Negri 2001; Dowling
et al 2007), emotional labor (Hochschild 1983), relational labor (Neuman 1999), and
immaterial labor (Ross 2009). The official curriculum shows very little interest in the
skills and capacities necessary for emotional (self-) government. En route to comprehend
the ‘nature’ and characteristics of retail work and to be successful in this sector, one
needs to think non-rational models of human agency and subjectivity, which specifically
includes a critical analysis of emotionality. Certain emotions or ‘structures of feeling’
(Williams 1977) such as companionship, conviviality, appreciation, fear, shame, anxiety,
affection, respect, hatred, apathy, despair, competitiveness, jealousy, guilt, paranoia, and
senses of belonging, inclusion and exclusion impinge upon the workplace and amongst
people who are working or shopping in it. The retail store is emotionally entangled
although (with a few exceptions I mentioned below) the official textbooks say the
reverse. Emotionality and working on and through structures of feeling appears as
another field of institutional governmentality implemented on workers.

The only exception of the rational and scientific textbooks I surveyed is a part of the book
for the Details of Retail class where notions such as ‘emotional bonds with customers’,
‘emotional eye’ and ‘emotional ear’ are presented. In order to have emotional bonds with
the customers, students are warned to ‘establish a warm climate when a customer
approaches you’, ‘before selling send warm and positive signals to the customer’, ‘listen
to the customer through your emotions and with a sincere attention’, ‘be sensitive to your
customer’s emotional situation’, ‘when a customer expresses her feelings try not to do
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anything wrong to her, be gentle’. Although the text provides a superficial and
instrumental use of emotions and emotional capacities of the workers, it opens a unique
field of regulation in terms of workers’ actions and relations with others.

The piece on the emotional eye mentions the significance of the eye contact with the
customer (“the strongest emotional bond with the customer is founded by your eye”)
stating customers mostly complain that workers ignore them. It reads, “if it is true that
you reflect your ideas on your looks, when you do not look at the customer it would mean
you do not want to contact with her and you are interested in something else. For a
perfect service your attention should be only on your customer and you have to
demonstrate this with your looks into her eyes.” The emotional ear refers to the act of
active listening in which the worker can understand (through the work routine) the
emotional tone of the customer when she talks to her. Then, students are instructed to
listen to the customer and follow her tone and vibrations in order to predict what comes
next and answer the questions of the hesitant customer before she even asks them.
Students are also trained to be attentive to customers’ untold intentions by using their
emotional ears, for example, if the customer is anxious it means she hesitates to buy, if
the customer speaks fast then she is in a hurry and the service should be rapid and
practical, if she sounds confident it signals that she knows what she wants, if she speaks
happily that means she has found something she has been looking for, if she is friendly
that shows her desire to talk to you and you should be active to use her friendship to sell
more products, if she is shocked it proves that the prices are too high for her and you
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should not waste your time, if she is angry it shows that she has been waiting for a long
time and you should be faster to please her, and finally, if she uses a begging tone that
illustrates she needs to buy something immediately, which you must take advantage of it
by showing multiple products to her.

I asked this information on emotional contact and emotional eyes and ears to some of my
informants in the interviews I conducted. Most of the time they found these definitions
absurd, laughed at them, and stated that this was something they do ‘instinctively’, that it
was a part of their job, and they did not need to be instructed to use their emotional skills.
For example, Tugba said, “whoever starts working in the retail sector, after a period of
getting used to the job, I would say three or four months, she will develop such a sense of
reading the other’s mind. What the customer wants, how you should behave her, should
you talk to her friendly or distantly, how much respect would fit her demands, the worker
will know it without thinking for it. Actually, you cannot think these for all customers
you have during a day. How many people you encounter with? Sometimes a hundred
people. There is no time to analyze a hundred people separately. You should know what
to do or what to say immediately.” Burak also said, “At [the vocational trade high] school
they name everything. I mean it is just naming. The content is the same. Go and ask any
experienced retail worker, she will explain you these. I believe it is a talent to relate with
other people easily. Some people have it by nature some do not. You know there is
something we call “insan sarrafi” (a good judge of human character; connoisseur of
human nature) when you look at a person, at a customer you either know what to do, or
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you do not. There is nothing between them. So, if you ask me, the emotional ear thing is
bullshit”. Habibe was a little bit more rebellious when she heard these, she said, “As if I
do not have anything to do at the store all the day, they ask me to concentrate on the
customers’ emotional needs. Is this a part of this job? Who is asking me what my
emotional needs are? I am working as a sales assistant and not as a psychologist. If they
have problems, they should go and see one [psychologist]. I also have problems of my
own. When they do something wrong to me I never say they have issues, I just
reciprocate in the same way and let them think that I also have issues. Theirs is just
indulgence; because of being rich and spoiled. They do not have any real problems like
we [workers] do. I cannot tolerate their impudence (laughs) because my emotional
condition does not allow me”.
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Eva Illouz (2007: 2) defines emotion as “the inner energy that propels us toward an act,
what gives a particular ‘mood’ or ‘coloration’ to an act […] The ‘energy-laden’ side of
action, where that energy is understood to simultaneously implicate cognition, affect,
evaluation, motivation, and the body.” Regulating the public exhibition of emotions and
shaping the reasons and factors behind their formation are crucial elements of

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In the context of airline management in the United States, Hochschild (1983: 186)
refers what Hatice was discontented about as commercialization of feelings: “what was
once a private act of emotion management is sold now as labor in public-contact jobs.
What once was a privately negotiated rule of feeling or display is now set by the
company’s Standard Practices Division. Emotional exchanges that were once
idiosyncratic and escapable are now standardized and unavoidable. Exchanges that were
rare in private life become common in commercial life. Thus, a customer assumes a right
to vent unmanaged hostility against a flight attendant who has no corresponding right—
because she is paid, in part, to relinquish it. All in all, a private emotional system has
been subordinated to commercial logic, and it has been changed by it.”
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governmentality in the contemporary retail sector. However, emotions have gendered
meanings and qualities (Ahmed 2004; Illouz 2007; Shields et al. 2007). The grounds,
methods, and meanings of governing a male worker’s and a female worker’s feelings and
affective states are qualitatively different projects and I will deal extensively with gender
relations and sexual dynamics at the store in Chapter 6 after I will discuss the
contingencies around the constitution of retail workers’ subjectivity in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 5: RETAIL WORKERS’ SUBJECTIVITY

This chapter focuses on the constitution of the subjectivities of retail workers in
Istanbul.
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There is a growing interest in sociology and anthropology towards issues
concerning the production and reshaping of subjectivities and forms of agency in diverse
societies and cultural settings.
99
In contemporary social theory, identity and subjectivity

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Talking about subjectivity within the theoretical and methodological realm of
sociology is not easy. Throughout this dissertation, I have endeavoured to follow an
empirically sound approach for providing a solid backround to the issues I have
discussed. Although I will try to sustain this in this chapter, it might be slightly more
complicated to contest subjectivity within the limits of empirical terms because the
process of subjection consists of told as well as untold stories and visible as well as
invisible issues. When one approaches to a sales assistant to talk about her life, it is
relatively easy to hear a bunch of complaints such as “this job is difficult and boring”,
“there are too long working hours”, “exploitation is everywhere” or “managers mistreat
us.” However, certain senses, insinuations and instances through which retail workers’
subjectivity is constituted can better be grasped by pushing informants into the fields they
normally would not want to talk about, verbalizing problems before they do, and being
immersed in their everyday (especially working) lives to feel as they feel. For example,
affects of shame and hatred, their middle-class ideals, being without any alternative (or,
having worse alternatives) to found a new life, jealousy and class envy, the uses of ‘even
I’ and other linguistic ways of finding a social place for themselves, and the meanings
behind expressions such as “nobody cares for us” or “nobody listens to us.” Therefore, it
is possible to note that the level of empirically based analysis in this chapter would be
different than other parts of this dissertation. I would argue that there might be alternative
inquiries, unorthodox procedures, and other “forms of knowing” available to us as we
“unhinge the primacy of empirical knowledge” (Gomez-Barris 2008: 50) about the
constitution of neoliberal subjectivities among retail workers in Istanbul.

99
See, for example, political subjectivity in Ireland (Aretxaga 1997) in Chile (Gomez-
Barris 2008) in Turkey (Ahiska 2005; Sirman 2002), subjectivity via religious revivalism
in Egypt (Mahmood 2005), subjectivity and embodiment (Biehl et al. 2007; Povinelli
2006), violence and subjectivity (Das et al. 2000; Pine 2008), neoliberal transformations
and subjectivity (Rofel 2007; Ong 2006; Alexander 2006), postcolonial, racialized,
gendered and sexed subjectivity (Butler 1993; Eng 2001; Spivak 1999; Chakrabarty
2002), loss and yearning (Eng and Kazanjian 2002), and workers’ subjectivity in post-
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are broadly discussed around ‘race’, ethnicity, the body, nationality, gender, and sexuality
and not through the economy, work, or class. In this chapter, as well as throughout the
rest of this dissertation, I endeavor to show that ‘where a person works’, ‘what kind of a
job she has’, ‘through which (power) relations she keeps that job or gets promoted’, and
‘how her interactions with other people are effected because of this job’ are some of the
questions that may importantly define who one is, or “the social shaping of human
subjects” (Rose 1999).
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Here, I follow the post-structuralist and feminist/queer frames
of subjectivity, which is conceptualized in discursive constructions and mediations in
parallel with bodily practices under multiple regimes of normativity (Foucault 1997,
2000; Butler 1993, 1997a; Deleuze 1988). In this sense, I try to unearth how different,
contradictory discourses address my informants at the margins of a neoliberal economy
and enable them to relocate and construct their identities and subjectivities regarding the
modern (middle-class, urban, secular, Western, globalized) world of prosperity and a
‘decent life.’

modern and post-Fordist workplace settings (Salzinger 2003; Kondo 1990; Winiecki
2007).

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What does work mean to workers have changed a lot due to numerous reasons
including the composition of workers (feminization of the labor force),
deindustrialization, informalization, globalization (the constant flow of bodies, capital,
and goods), de-unionization (and increased subcontracted work), and neoliberalization of
economies (such as the boom in flexible, insecure, temporary, deskilled, low-end service
jobs). How different groups of workers experience work and find (or lose) themselves at
the workplace in specific cultural settings require further nuanced, empirical investigation
across social sciences and disciplines.
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Although this is not a traditional ethnography that I went to somewhere (non-home) and
spent a year or so with other people than my own, I became embedded in my informants’
everyday lives, mingled with their passions and struggles, imbued with sales assistants’
lifeworlds and frames of meaning throughout my fieldwork period that I spent working in
the stores and the following months in which I was busy with conducting interviews. In
this process, it was impossible not to recognize that there was a strong subject formation
going on at the surface level. Here, the values and principles according to which
neoliberalism is reshaped, fragmented, concatenated, and instructed to the workers for
them taking up relevant subject positions and transform themselves into predictable,
comprehensible, governable worker bodies that social institutions can know and regulate
are constituted.

However, on the other hand, there is also an effective undertow through which workers
reinterpret, re-form, and indeed remake themselves given the fact that their lives are
subject to change triggered by both structural and individual shifts. They literally struggle
to live, to survive, to be intelligent, important, valued, and not to be lost, wasted, or
harmed in the new configuration of economy, society, and culture. As my insightful
informant Cigdem poetically says, “These are the jobs we have; bodies we have; families
and homes we have. Friends and people that we know. These are the lives we have to
live. These are we.”

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Since the inception of modern social sciences, it is no secret that bureaucratic institutions
and other similar large social organizations produce certain types of human beings that
exist inside, navigate through, and function within their social architecture. Subjectivity is
located alongside major institutional, socio-economic, and structural dynamics, while it
mostly works via channels of psychological, linguistic, and emotional interiorities of
social beings. Here, I focus on the subjectivity of retail workers in Istanbul from an
ethnographic approach in order to better grasp and exhibit particular constellations of
power, sociability, identity-formation, affect, and the modes of being in the world.
“Being a salesclerk” (tezgahtarlık) is unrecognized as meaningless as an occupation. My
informants spotlight two issues in order to, at least partially, compensate for the lack of a
prestigious and meaningful occupation: They define mağazacılık (the expertise on the
store) or perakandecilik (retail-logy) as occupational groups. This implies the intention
not to stay as salesclerk forever and underlines (from an optimistic point of view) the
opportunities of mobility within the sector. They also incorporate the organization
(transnational company) they work for in the construction of their identities in a greater
extent. People whom I have talked for this research preferred to say, “I work for Citron or
Mango” instead of “I am a salesclerk.”

Analytical concepts or abstract social formations –for example neoliberalism, the retail
sector, labor power, globalization and its spatial reflections like shopping malls- are not
natural, pre-given, fixed, or unchanging categories that my informants encounter in their
lives. On the contrary, I would contest that subjectivities of individual actors, who
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constitute the neoliberal public, are simultaneously and reciprocally co-founded by the
phenomenon of economics —jobs, wealth, distribution, and consumption patterns as well
as unemployment, poverty, and insecurity (Ray and Sayer 1999).
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Looking closer to
these parallel formations enables us to comprehend how the neoliberal ideology is linked
to modalities of power and positioned at the roots of subjectivation. Otherwise, it could
not be possible to clearly elaborate the complicated connections between neoliberalism,
class, and gender at the existential level. The neoliberal subject is not only generated and
controlled by multiple forms of power, but it also entails power relations and gives
meaning to its multifaceted implications.

I tend to interpret subjectivity as a space of conceptual production in which presumptions
of power relations are re-examined, carried out, or challenged as well as forms of
resistance (such as deconstructing the hegemonic identities, desires, needs, and targets)
emerge. For my informants, the process of subject formation regarding their jobs and
workplace relations is open, constantly ‘under construction,’ rethought and remade again
and again vis-à-vis contingent and circumstantial constellation of power, domination,
exploitation and freedom. Thus, subjectivation is a struggle that they engage in their

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Paul Du Gay (1996: 1) observes, “The expansion of services, the increasingly global
organization of production and exchange, and the ‘feminization’ of the labour force have
revealed the ‘constructed’ character of ostensibly stable, unified, and ‘natural’ economic
identities. In so doing they have served to indicate that rather than being some original,
unchanging ‘base’ –remaining identical with itself throughout all the changes it
undergoes- the ‘economic’ is a culturally and historically malleable category, and, thus,
that any established economic identity is in essence a contingent identity” (original
emphasis).

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everyday lives.
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In this chapter, I endeavor to present a partial examination of retail
workers’ subjectivity through instances when it becomes crystallized and more tangible
in the store, or during our interviews.

When they think or talk about themselves and the social world in which they live, retail
workers do make certain choices about whom they are, and through these choices, they
form their subjecvities: their existential, moral and political sense of being from a given
social repertoire. The choices they make among the alternatives available to them are
produced and shaped by political, institutional and structural dynamics. Accordingly,
retail workers fashion their selves, which desire, have an aversion to, have an attitude,
sympathize with, or feeling closer to specific ideas, social formations, groups, and
objects. They decide on who they really are and which ideas they verbalize in public.
Structural and material conditions delimit and regulate their options for subjectivation.
For example, given the fact that they work in (post-) modern stores in a rigidly secular
and westernized environment, they cannot become Islamist fundamentalists, or defend

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Adrienne Pine (2008: 12), in her study of Honduran subjectivity, maintains,
“Subjectivity results from the subtle, ‘powerful and insidious’ ways in which people are
shaped by living in a social world.” She articulates Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus
to her discussion, “Subjectivity is directly linked to habitus: Our dispositions formed by
‘a whole symbolically structured environment, without specialized agents or moments,
which exerts an anonymous, pervasive, pedagogic action’.” Thus, subjects find, establish
and ‘improve’ themselves through the paths available to them, for and by themselves.
Such a perspective inevitably brings the issues of power and social inequality into the
discussion of subjectivation. While most studies of subjectivity focus on (structural)
violence, including Pine’s, I turn my attention in this chapter to the issues around
workplace resistance, neoliberal ideals, and class relations, which I would contend that as
elemental as relations of violence, memory or political identity in determining or
influencing who one is.
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Islamism, the most powerful recent form of social mobility in Turkey. They cannot
develop, or at least publicly express, homophobic ideas since heterosexual and gay
workers have to work together while it is also not appropriate for them to believe in the
sacredness of the housewife position because they all are aware that women of their class
have to work and they (both men and women) have to live with this. The structural forces
they relate with at the workplace constantly shape my informants’ thoughts about
themselves and encourage them, for example, becoming (or desiring to become) secular,
modern, progressive people.

From a Foucauldian point of view, power and subjectivity are not mutually exclusive
categories but they co-constitute each other. In this sense, my informants’ first and
foremost experience with the exercise of power (of transnational capital, for example) is
through their relations with their bodies and selves. The act of self-identifying,
repositioning one’s being in the given social map, and the constructions of reflexive
practices are both implications of power and subjectivation. Here, subjectivity is
embedded in a dual process. My informants are watched, controlled and disciplined by
corporate power. Therefore, they are subjected to power (subjection). Simultaneously,
they are encouraged to produce a novel sense of selfhood and to insert it into a complex
web of relations of power and knowledge. Thus, they turn into subjects in neoliberalism
(subjectivation).

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In his famous piece “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault (2000: 327) describes
subjectivation as a way that “a human being turns him or herself into a subject,” through
defining her position in certain discourses (taking up subject positions) and governing her
bodily and discursive conduct in order to be separated from other people
(individualization) while at the same time resembling to certain social groups (identifying
with given, saturated social positions, identities). Here, it is crucial to highlight that a
person actively considers her conditions, takes initiative, and exercise agency to govern
her body and soul through the process of subjectivation. The process also points to an
experience of transmogrification, or metamorphosis in Deleuze’s words. My informants
recurrently mentioned how they were different persons before they started working retail
in the shopping mall and how spending time in the stores transformed ‘the type of
person’ they were at the end. As Gilles Deleuze (1988: 106) notes, “the struggle for a
modern subjectivity passes through a resistance to the two present forms of subjection,
the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constrains of power, the
other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed once and for
all. The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore as the right to difference,
variation and metamorphosis.” It is important to keep in mind that, for Foucault,
subjectivity is not a pre-given, fixed entity or a personal property. Instead, it is imbued
with multiple forms of power relations and constructed throughout the person’s
biography. Therefore, subjectivation is an open-ended process, which evolves as a
response to changing corporeal and immaterial conditions.

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Here, I try to contribute to the social scientific explorations of subjectivity by looking
closer at how institutional settings of neoliberalism, i.e. the shopping mall as a
workplace, post-Fordism and post-industrialism continue to determine the terms of
subjectivation of the new working classes in Istanbul. My informants’ subjectivity is
reconfigured at three main axes: The production of the ‘proper’ neoliberal worker-
subjects; resistance and the notion of ‘life’; and the articulation with modernity and
middle class symbols through the desire of becoming a part of urban middle classes. In
the remaining sections of this chapter, I will examine these three simultaneous formations
at the level of workers’ subjectivity in shopping malls.

The framework in which I examine my informants’ subjectivity is directly linked with
Michel Foucault’s (1997; 2000) well-known conceptualization of power and subjectivity.
In this sense, power is not theorized as necessarily repressive, forbidding and
demolishing; on the contrary, modern power produces and regulates the everyday life as
well as proper and functional desires, subjectivities, relations, discourses, bodies and
practices within it. Subjectivity is not an individual attribute, an investment, or
consciousness produced outside, despite, or against power. Subjectivity is constituted and
constantly reformed through social relations of power. In such an interpretation, subject
and process of subjectivation have two intermingled meanings: A subject is
simultaneously subordinated to a form of power and rendered visible to establish an
individual standpoint, an identity in relation to that form of power through discursive
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acts. Subject-formation can only be grasped in these simultaneous dual processes in
relation to power, discourse, and bodies.

Judith Butler (1993; 1997a) argues that subjectivity is formed performatively through
systematic enactments, reiteration, repudiation of identities, taking positions in certain
discursive contexts and across abjections –constitutive other(ization)s that are
unthinkable and unintelligible for the formation of the subject. For Butler, subjectivity is
not a fixation but an opening because it can come into existence only via possibilities of
success or failure of reenactment of social norms. Subjectivity of my informants,
shopping mall workers, is constructed through this sense of opening. They are constituted
via the chance, or risk, of restating desires, stabilizing purposes, and consolidating
relations. Whether it does or undoes the neoliberal normativity, values and priorities that
are exalted by the neoliberal culture, the new retail workers’ subjectivity is built on this
possibility, on this entanglement with specific socio-historical formations.

Agency does not simply mean resistance against forms of power (Mahmood 2005).
Instead, it involves subjectivation: Both becoming a subject and being subjected.
Multiple modalities of agency inform and govern practice (embodied, discursive,
relational, and reflexive). “It is the sequence of practices and actions one is engaged in
that determines one’s desires and emotions. In other words, action does not issue forth
from natural feelings but creates them. […] It is through repeated bodily acts that one
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trains one’s memory, desire, and intellect to behave according to established standards of
conduct.” (Mahmood 2005: 157)

Suffice to say here that sales assistants’ practices of work in shopping malls as well as
gendered, classed, and sexualized experiences do not straightforwardly elaborate the
abjectness of the new working class (urban workers of lower-middle strata) in the new
neoliberal public and agenda; on the contrary, they express an engendering, constructive,
immanent discourse of being in the (neoliberal-izing) world. Such a discourse demands
meticulous explorations of the performatives (utterances and bodily acts) through
producing a subject that is linked to the neoliberal world (obeying the regulations;
desiring to be advanced; belief in self-improvement; a culture of self-interest, materialism
and cynicism, etc.). The neoliberal logic becomes the normative performativity, which is
“one of the influential rituals by which subjects are formed and reformed.” (Butler 1997b:
160) As the retail worker complains about the workplace conditions, resists doing the
tasks, or says, “I also have a life, I am not a slave,” she forms a neoliberal subjectivity. In
this way, reiteration of neoliberal norms fails instead of being re-signified and reproduced
through worker’s body and speech acts. When the worker-subject fails to desire the
neoliberal ideals, she subverts the neoliberal performativity –the set of ideas, rules, and
regulation conduct the mode of being of the subject.

Regarding my informants and coworkers, subjectivity (or, a particular “retail workers’
subjectivity”) signifies a critical space to unthink and remold ways of desiring, feeling,
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knowing, and living (in the fullest sense of the term) in a neoliberalizing society, which is
saturated with images, experiences, and narratives of sorts of poverty, exclusion,
violence, pain, suffering, injustice, inequality, shame and anger. Therefore, the concept of
subjectivity and the process of subjectivation denote the reflexive mode or existence, a
strategy of being in the social world that they are embedded and an entailment of power
relations with certain capacities, a self-conscious unit of governmentality. “This form of
self-governance […] is linked to the unmaking of time-honored value systems and
occasions novel forms of control. Subjectivity thus becomes the ground on which a long
series of historical changes and moral apparatuses coalesce—in the emergence of new
kinds of public-private involvements as well as new kind of political authority.” (Biehl et
al. 2007b: 3)

The Worker-Subject: Production of Neoliberal Subjectivity at Work

As Leslie Salzinger (2003) explicates for factories in Mexico, transnational capital
‘makes’ and not ‘finds’ or ‘hails’ ideal workers
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. Producing rational (trainable), proper
(undemanding), and governable (malleable) subjects of work, ‘smart individuals,’ who
can calculate their advantages/disadvantages and interests meticulously –such as

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Salzinger notes that an ideal worker is “a docile, young, single woman working for pin
money, not basic sustenance” (Salzinger 2003: 126). Although docility, youngness, and
being single as well as the low disposable income match with the situation of retail
workers in Istanbul, sex of the ideal worker is not fixed as it is in Mexican factories. In
the chain apparel stores in Turkey, male and female workers are not positioned
differently according to gender and they both can take ideal-worker roles with a set of
different assumptions and expectations as I mention in Chapter 6.

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searching for higher pay and shorter working hours- is a priority in the mental
programme of discourses that are endorsed by transnational apparel companies.
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On the
one hand this rational, calculating, observant, ambitious, vigilant subject is produced and
endorsed, while on the other hand it is constantly reiterated that this worker-subject is
increasingly insecure, untrustworthy, unstable, and unpredictable especially for
organizational and corporate purposes. In order to cope with this mobile subject, who
desperately seeks her own benefit, workplace is rendered highly sentimental. Managers
are pushed by personnel departments to form strong emotional relations with workers,
manipulate their affective beings, and replace the merely rational pay/hour calculations
and materialism to narratives of personal connection and sociability in the store.
Especially in the smaller stores, such as ZIP Kanyon, labor relations are transformed to
webs of mutual dependency, affinity, commitment, and satisfaction that mediated through
emotions as I have noted in Chapter 3.

Retail workers are compared to other workers on the basis of their actions in the store.
They also see themselves from an outsider’s point of view, always comparing their

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It is significant to note here that “the modern subject of work,” who was a sole
breadwinner male employee within the manufacturing sector, were transformed through
major socio-economic processes such as the structural high unemployment in the Global
North, growing numbers of service sector jobs, the new organizational order required by
transnationalism, and the increase in women’s number in the labor market (Pateman
1990; True 2003). These changes, ultimately affects the targeted worker, whether modern
or postmodern, but definitely not only male any more. Du Gay (1996: 4) elucidates that;
“If, for example, the worker’s relationship with non-work activity is modified by the shift
to service employment then there is no longer the same identity –the worker- in a new
situation, but a new identity. In other words, given that every social identity is a
contingent construction, and given that any contingent identity is essentially relational in
its conditions of existence, any changes in the latter cannot fail to affect the former.”
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performances with others. They both classify and compare themselves in quantitative
terms (such as, “I finished picking the storage in three hours,” or “I sold 120 items during
the weekend and gained an I-pod as a gift”) and in qualitative assumptions (such as, “I
give the best service to customers in this store,” or “I am the most disciplined worker”).

Fabricating rational subjects, who can decide, choose, and conduct themselves, is the
most important managerial purpose in retail stores. In all the stores that I have worked
managers instruct workers almost on a daily basis that they ought to develop faculties,
capacities and personality traits to govern their conduct without being controlled or
supervised, especially when they are alone, when the managers are out of the store.
Workers, who can govern their actions, control their psychological moods, and
orchestrate their social relations with others successfully, are expected to transform
themselves and reach the middle class ideals (through imitation, learning, internalization
middle class values and manners) in order to better deal with, understand, and serve to
the customers.

For example, at ZIP Kanyon, the manager Deniz kept telling us “during a moment of
crisis, or in an unexpected situation, you have to be able to deal with people. It would be
too late when your manager could come and solve the problem. You have to take
initiative, talk to the customers in a proper way; convince them, entertain them, and
satisfy them at all costs.” However, this idealized worker-subject, who is constantly
hailed to become a smart, alert, reckoning decision-maker inevitably engenders a
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reflexive knowledge about herself. She starts to deem herself as redundant and her
capacities are underestimated. My informants often grouse about their potentials were
underused in the stores. For instance, Sinem says, “The company does not take advantage
of my talents, my potentials. Instead, we are forced to work like amele (daily laborer)
without taking a break to think about things. In fact, the company can use me in much
better ways than this. I am an experienced sales assistant. I have worked in many stores
with different managers and clientele. I have observed everything for long years. They
can ask my opinions. I do not say, ‘they should do whatever I tell them.’ I am just talking
about my suggestions, which will absolutely increase the quality of work done in the
stores. Trying my suggestions is free, no cost! However, [for the company] I am not
there. I am not a human being for them. From the very beginning they categorize us as
‘high school graduate sales assistant who cannot speak in English.’ So, she is just a slave
to fold the t-shirts. She cannot have any idea about anything. If one day they can change
their views and start to see what is hidden under this mask of ignorant sales assistant,
they will benefit much. […] But, as you know, what I say is futile. They do not listen to
me, or us. We do not exist, do we?”

In such narrative pieces, worker’s self is repetitively constituted as having greater
capacities and hidden, or spoiled, qualities. During the interviews, my informants almost
always used a frustrated tone when they refer to their underrated potentials. Accordingly,
retail workers assign a value, an inherent capacity to themselves, a worthy position
against the cultural tradition of humbleness and selflessness; while the state and the
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transnational capital should have unearthed and supported the hidden potential of sales
assistants—their capacities, talents, faculties, and practicalities as a group. They both
have not. This particular view of their unappreciated selves and framing their
downgraded potentiality is mediated through the bitter voice, a withdrawn self, and a
reticent subjectivity.

A rather important technique of producing the efficient and sycophant worker-subject in
retail stores is to build dual categories, locate individuals into these binary classifications,
systematize and circulate these in a repetitive fashion. During my fieldwork in the stores,
I noted that there are always the hard-working, eager, creative, participative, gregarious
workers put against the group of lazy, conflictual, easily irritable, incommunicado,
insipid layabouts. In addition to the creation of this classification between at least two
types of workers (simply the good and the bad personnel) and the construction of the self-
knowing subject-worker, who is able to conduct her own self and actions, sycophancy is
methodically fabricated as an expected, encouraged reaction to being rebuked by
managers and customers.

Wanted: The Ideal Worker

Here, I will focus on three examples in order to exhibit how creating the worker’s
subjectivity is but one great preoccupation in/of the transnational retail companies.

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The first example is the flyer that the Spanish brand Stradivarius makes available at the
counters in all its stores. The flyer is called as “micro-CV” and it invites people applying
for a job at Stradivarius. On the front two pages (can be seen below), “would you want to
work with us?” is written. Under this question, we see a young woman, who is in
Stradivarius outfit, looks at us in a mysterious, somehow eroticized way. Her blouse, her
pants and her bag in her hand are stylishly high fashion with an emphasis on her shining
belt and her shoes. Looking her, we definitely think that she knows how to be voguish,
however it is not certain whether this ‘ideal Stradivarius woman’ is a customer or a
(desired or existing) worker. Whom is she actually inviting to do what? Most possibly,
the style that the brand produces through garments is tacitly implicated to be shared by
future workers: This is the modal (woman) worker that Stradivarius seeks to see at job
applications. Therefore, a young woman (since the picture belongs to a woman) who
consider applying for a job at Stradivarius should have a (self-) consciousness to evaluate
how she looks, what the company demands from candidates, what’s her style, and if she
has capacity to improve herself and get closer to the illustrated ideal. Maybe she just asks
herself, “Am I this?” I would argue that in this picture and through the question that it
conveys a job applicant tests her desire and ultimately decide to whom she would
become, to what qualities she would acquire. The eroticized female body, a rather
conventional representation of carnal desire of the male gaze, is used here to provoke
another sort of desire—one that the job applicant would want to transform herself
through the symbols of fashion, bodily codes, and the promise ‘to live with fashion.’

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At the back two pages on the other side of the handout, there is a section to fill for basic
information belongs to the applicant with a spot reserved for a passport picture—a
requirement in all job applications in the retail sector in turkey. There is also a text that
explains the logic of the company in the recruitment process. It reads:
We want to know you
We work as a team and we enjoy to be related with fashion at
Stradivarius stores. Each day that we spend at the store is
different than others: New collections arrive, we have customers
from all social groups, we alter the visual organization of our
store, we work hard, and as a group, we keep learning. We spend
our days at our store this way.
We would like to know you if you like our style, our
understanding of fashion, and our dynamism and you think that
these suit you.
Fill the micro-CV and leave it at our store. We will call you soon.
You too have a career opportunity at our ever-growing company!

The questions that the woman on the front page triggered are mostly answered in the text
on the back page. Stradivarius clearly seeks applicants who think that the company’s style
matches with theirs. People, who are able to comprehend, interpret and evaluate the signs
and symbols and decide they can fit into the company’s norms of acceptability, are
wanted. The work routine at the store is presented as an exciting, dynamic and interesting
experience while, for example, my coworkers testified otherwise as I have put in Chapter
3.

This little two-page handout demonstrates that retail companies start to construct a
model, a standard form for the worker subjectivity, what Casey (1995) calls “designer
employees”, at the very threshold of the store: The moment of decision to become a sales
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assistant. The company wants from the imagined worker –future recruitments- to make
the first elimination herself through measuring, listening, and knowing herself and her
body and then to decide applying for the job or leaving. The manipulation of worker’s
subjectivity by the corporate policies starts even before finding a job within the retail
sector. In this case, Stradivarius puts a mirror to the candidate’s face and triggers the
formation of a self-knowing, rational worker-subject to cooperate in the future.

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Figure 8: Stradivarius flyer (Micro CV).

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The second example comes from the one-day training program that I participated when I
started to work at ZIP. The training was titled “Effective Service” (Etkin Hizmet) and on
the day I was there three people from the personnel department were instructing 11
workers from various ZIP stores. Every new worker should complete this program within
her first month at work.
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All trainees signed a document stating that we would keep
what we learnt there in our minds during our tenure at ZIP. The manager of the
department of human resources, a blonde woman of mid-thirties with heavy make up on
her face, told us before starting to the formal training that the company’s ultimate goal is
to create “the same atmosphere and the quality of service at ZIP stores in Turkey, in
Japan, in Europe, and in the United States.” She added that we, workers, should have
changed ourselves and started to feel like “other people [store workers] in the world
[means in Japan, in Europe, and in the United States].”

The program was designed for inexperienced retail workers. Its content was rather
simple, introductory, and repetitive that I often felt myself as if I were taking a
“Retailogy 101” class. After half an hour all participants were bored and it was obvious
that trainers were also weary although they tried to hide it behind their work discipline.
“Effective Service” simply consisted of five elements: Encountering [the customer],
Communicating [with the customer], Suggesting [garments], Creating [solutions], and
Selling. The basic goal of the education is written in the handout that “to acquire all the

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That day, the average age of workers in the training was 21.2 with me. There were
seven women and four men workers. Among them, there were students, a former trainer
at gym, a former hotel receptionist, and people who previously work at other retail stores.
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necessary information and skills to create a positive and easy shopping environment for
our customers every day” (emphasis original).

In the lessons and instructive ‘games’ we went through there was a contradictory
message: Workers were hailed to be original, creative, flexible, responsive, and “have a
unique persona” while they were also warned for staying within the boundaries of
universal ZIP standards of conduct. Moreover, throughout the education, ‘culture’ was
one of the terms used most frequently to refer the local needs and expectations that
customers might have. Accordingly, and despite the constant emphasis on the global level
of quality at ZIP, a sales assistant should be aware of and compromise global standards of
excellent retail service and attitudinal characteristics of local people. An abrupt example
from this section was: “We have to accept the garments back in processing returns as
long as the customer presents the receipt and the garment is unused. This is a global
promise we have; we have to obey this company policy. Nevertheless, you should not
forget that Turks can abuse this customer right in order to maximize their benefit by
wearing products for several times and then exchange them with other, new garments.
Thus, you should not forget where you live while, you ought to be vigilant against
abusive behavior of some of your customers, and you always act according to our
universal rules and regulations” (My emphasis).

At the last section of the program, the personnel people highlighted that our “love and
devotion to our occupation and to the company” would solve all the problems that we
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might encounter at the store. I could not fully grasp what was that supposed to mean.
Then, a male worker, visibly bored and tired of the education, asked: “Imagine I have
been working alone in my section for four hours and waiting for my coworker who would
soon come and then I can take a break. Yet, it comes out that she will be late for half an
hour. You cannot leave your section because there is no one else to take care of your
customers and you are hungry or you need to use the restroom immediately. This happens
all the time, right? So, are you suggesting us, as a response to this kind of real problems
we always encounter, we need to love the company? Then, why are we taking this
education? It could be a daily email message from the company director reminding us to
love the company!” As he counterpoised, he challenged the power of the narrative the
human resources experts were long striving to construct. They were not able to answer
him and providing us with a satisfactory explanation against his insubordinate assertion.
Such a failure at the end of the day, after long hours spent at educating us and molding
our subjectivities, clearly destroyed the attempt to constitute the ideal worker through
instructions because it could not cover the gaps and clear the minds of the workers. This
instance at the end of the training showed that how the worker-subject is fragile and it
should be reiterated and maintained without being challenged and how the retail
companies should continue their work through subjectivities uninterruptedly.

The last example is a guideline for store managers and the personnel department of the
Spanish retail company Citron. It contains 2 lists. In these lists there are specific actions
and attitudes that are forbidden to the store workers. If workers do one of the articles
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listed, they were fired or they receive a written notice of warning. Among many other
mostly uncontestable matters, the lists include:
1. Misinforming the employer or giving a wrong or unreal
answer to one of her questions.
2. Drinking or selling alcoholic beverages in the store.
Gambling or using or selling drugs [in anywhere].
3. Sharing information about the company or one’s
responsibilities with other companies.
4. Getting sick on purpose or because of improper lifestyle;
using drugs and not being present at the workplace for three
consecutive days.
5. Getting infected by a viral or an indecent, effective disease.
6. Speaking or acting against an employer’s (or his family’s)
honor and dignity.
7. Not fulfilling given tasks or discussing them [in public].
8. Swearing, threatening, brawling, or massing up with
employers or other employees.
9. Abusing employers’ trust and good will, stealing, acting
immorally, giving them deceiving information, or
subverting work discipline.

As these articles from the official company guideline explicitly elucidate or tacitly
remind, the construction of the ideal worker’s subjectivity, the creation of an observant
and calculative selfdom, and the promotion of a character that can grasp the limits of
what is thinkable, doable, sayable and acceptable continues throughout one’s work
experience. Hence the time and space of the endeavor to produce worker-subjects do not
really matter: It can take place before getting a job, during training for the job, and in the
course of employment at stores.

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Workers’ Careers

Careerism plays a crucial role in efforts to shape the subjectivity of service workers. It is
presented as a legitimating, enchanting mechanism in the production of worker-subjects.
Accordingly, a good worker, who is also a decent citizen of the neoliberal public life,
should seek to be promoted, plan her actions using her mind, and maximize herself in
every sense. The imagined worker-subject is the one who desires to navigate her career
through solving problems at work and making sacrifices from her own, personal life. The
invention of the term ‘your career as a sales assistant’ and its reiteration by managers and
human resources departments is deemed highly ironic by seasoned sales assistants since
they satirically state that they have no career. As Gulcan says, “What does that mean? I
honestly do not understand. They keep telling me ‘if you do this it would not be good for
your career, if you want this it would harm your career as a sales assistant.’ But, one
minute, do not you really know that I do not have a career as you do? Simply, sales
assistants do not have careers; they just have jobs. Here today, there tomorrow! Where
you can find a job for a slightly better pay, it is your career. If you say I have a career
then you must show me some progress. This is my fifth year in this business and I am
still at the same place. No improvement. I will not become a district manager one day. I
will always be a sales assistant and I do not call this a career.” Gulcan’s view on this
issue, the disillusionment of careerism amongst sales assistants, is rather common
amongst my coworkers and informants—especially if they are experienced enough to see
that their careers do not move forward. Also, a manager, Pinar recounted a similar point,
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“One day we had Spanish people in the store [from the center office of the company].
They were examining everything we do here. Marisa, the human resources director,
wanted to see how we close a store at the end of the day. We were not ready for that but
there was not any choice. I also stayed in the store with her. Everything was okay finally
at 11:00 PM and then we made the Japanese meeting and the workers went their homes.
Marisa could not believe that our workers’ shift ends at 10:00 and they stay in the store to
pick everything up for an extra, unpaid hour. She said this was undocumented work and
an outrageous exploitation. She asked how we convinced our workers to do this. I told
her, just like I tell everybody else in this business, ‘we tell our workers that if they want a
career in stores, they should do this for their own future.’ Marisa was shocked to see how
this word, career, was powerful among workers [pause] I mean who do not have careers
at all.”

Growing Up

Another theme emerge in the constitution of subjectivities of retail workers is the
preoccupation with the idea of growing up and becoming mature individuals, who are
suppose to follow the transitory path from being a student at (high) school and living
under the hegemony of parents to start working and earning their own money. In this
sense, becoming an adult is a natural and inevitable outcome of starting to labor at a
workplace –parallel to get rid of teachers’ and parents’ authority over their bodies and
actions. If a person works, then she is deemed as an adult, at least theoretically. However,
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lack of respect and the relatively small amounts of money they could earn seriously
damage the self-image of maturity for my informants. Obedience to multiple hierarchies
throughout the work day as well as the enduring poverty (or, a relatively low purchasing
power vis-à-vis the ideals of global consumerism) that sales assistants experience lead
them to see themselves as ‘yet failed to become an adult.’ During my study, I heard many
times that my informants were complaining from the liminal situation they were in
between youth and adulthood. They often cite, “never-ending childhood,” “I could not
fucking grew up,” (bi’ türlü büyüyemedik amına koyayım) and “we are still like
students.”

Retail work, the opportunities and promises it presents, possible realizations or the
painful disappointments produce the abnormal, unwanted, troubling sense of delay,
break, or inconvenience in the life-cycles of sales assistants. They believe that the right
time for the transformation from childhood (or an ambiguous sense of early youth) to
maturity had passed, their only chance was spoiled, and this impediment importantly
affects the way they see themselves. Thus, they must find what is wrong with them and
solve their problems as long as they are able to. Despite such self-diagnosing attitude, my
informants think that the temporary and contingent prescriptions they develop do not
work since they are entrapped in the shopping mall, doing retail work, in their terms “we
are stuck in this job,” “our hands and arms are tied, so we cannot move,” and “no way to
be advanced and having a future in the shopping mall.”

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Another crucial lacking component for feeling like a real, full adult is constructed among
my informants as the experience of catharsis in Connell’s (1987) terms: love, sexuality,
partnership, stable long-term emotional and erotic engagements which are seen as
‘serious’ by other people. The delayed adulthood that retail workers perceive themselves
is strengthened by the absence of a socially accepted emotional relationship and sexual
experiences. For women workers, this lack expresses itself most in their investments to
be married and to leave the family home (“the father’s house”) one day when they will
finally become adults. For male workers, the unavailability of a committed girl friend or a
fiancé whom they can exercise power and perform traditional machismo damages their
sense of heterosexual masculinity and makes them wait at the threshold to become a real
man. The discomfort about the non-existent emotional and erotic relationships is
frequently verbalized as “a girl looks for a real guy, so I do not have a girl,” “I will be
perceived as childish as long as I will not marry,” and “I can only leave the house of my
father to go to my husband’s house, otherwise I will live with my family, as their child,
no matter my age.”

Listening to the Workers

In the stores, workers are systematically invited and encouraged to confess, to tell, to talk
about their stories, problems, suffering, subalternity, troubles, situations at home, how
they see the workplace, and what are they doing in their ‘lives.’ Store managers, other
(professional) workers of the companies such as the personnel department, and even
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customers push workers to talk about themselves and their lives. This process of
utterance, retelling stories, repeating issues put retail workers to a particular subject-
position. In this sense, this narrative encounter (workers tell and somebody listens to
them) might be framed as empowering because it creates a space for the workers, giving
them a voice to express themselves. Nevertheless, making retail workers story-tellers,
narrators of their lives, interpreters of their worlds also assigns a superior position to the
listener–whether it is the manager, human resources specialists or the customer- with a
capacity to solve the problems, cure suffering, mitigate depression, and change the world
in which the worker lives. In other words, the subjectivity of retail worker is produced
vis-à-vis the abstract and symbolic corporate power as she talks about herself, reflects the
inferiority in an understandable, meaningful, categorical voice. The acts that are named
by informants as “going to the manager,” “talking to the human resources,”
“conversations with somebody” reproduce the image that the professional workers of the
company, like the human resources, embody the healer for injuries or the passionate
authority which cares for the workers’ well-being. The transnational company started to
be represented, through its high-ranked employees, as an institution to find solutions and
to solve problems of workers although it never has such a therapeutic aim. Throughout
the production of this narrating subject position for the retail worker, the manager, who
represents company policy and corporate goals, turns into a position that is ideologically
closer to the worker. The manager is tamed and brought in workers’ lives as a person,
who listens, understands, sympathizes, worries, and even struggles for the worker while
the worker is glad to find a powerful alliance to trust and to share intimacy.
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As the managers and human resources departments listen to the lives of retail workers
(especially, their ideas about what happens in the shopping mall and their problems in the
course of everyday life) they constitute saturated, homogenous categories such as “the
world of the workers,” “issues of workers,” and “shopping mall matters” and they start to
see themselves as able to govern workers’ lives though these categories they produce,
analyze and master. Imagining workers by getting narrative pieces together enables
managers to think that they grasp the real motivations of workers; the truth lies behind
their stories, and the inferiority that workers seek to hide. Managers frequently cite that
they were responsible to regulate workers’ lives; it was their ethical mission as human
beings in addition to their unwritten corporate task. As Pinar, a store manager, told me
“their families or their friends do not have the capacity to comprehend the problems of
these children, their melancholy. That is why a big rate of my daily work hours is spent to
listen to them and trying to understand what they want or what is the problem. I work like
a psychologist and I know that I have to do this.”

Retail workers, despite much evidence to the contrary, are stabilized (or stereotyped) as
poor, young, ignorant, inexperienced, stubborn, insular, and reactive people who do not
know the realities of life and do not exactly know what they want for themselves. A set of
discourses, which would address, motivate and govern workers, is produced regarding the
public image of retail workers. In these discourses, the transnational capital is constituted
as the listening, caring, curing, and improving social power while the workers are
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constructed as underprivileged, untrained, unaided, immature, incipient subjects which
need governance for their own benefit even when they do not recognize it. For example, I
heard these words, addressing workers, from store managers and the human resources
staff many times: “the part-time jobs we offer were designated to let you to do whatever
you want in your spare time and to live your life freely,” or “this company sees you as
future managers: if you work hard and obey to the rules in the store, you can become a
manager one day.”

Through the same discourses new forms of desire are enacted for the needy retail
workers. ‘Opportunity’ (fırsat) is a significant key word in this process. The neoliberal
subject is positioned with respect to the opportunities she needs to catch and take
advantage of and the risks she needs to calculate and navigate (Rofel 2007). A rather
mundane remark made by managers in the apparel stores says, “you already missed a
chance in high-school; are you sure you want to spoil this opportunity, too?” Here, retail
workers are reminded that they are there (in the store in the lowest rank, as sales
assistants) because they could not sustain their education further to the university. They
failed in high school and thus they were driven to the store, which is yet another
institution that offers them advancement. And, this is possibly their last chance to have a
decent life. Other examples of such utterances in this discourse are, “would not you like
to avoid poverty of your families, do you really want to live like that?” “Would not you
want to live like your managers and customers? Then, do what we say!”

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Silences and Sociability

Sales assistants’ work experiences in shopping malls [in relation to customers,
coworkers, and managers] stop them to talk about it at the initial stages of their tenure.
The immediate discursive product of entering into this new world saturated with novel
actors and formerly unknown rules and regulations is silence. For a while after they start
working in shopping malls, retail workers do not complain from conditions, they do not
grow anger to managers and coworkers, and they do not feel mistreated. After this first
phase of silence and inaction, in which they endeavor to grasp the workings of the store,
they develop, or socialize into, a new language. As retail workers, they form a new
agency to talk about their experiences and to reconnect themselves temporally and
spatially to the shopping mall, which represents the modern and wealthy city and the
world at large. As they break their silences, internalize to be a sales assistant and start to
tell stories about it, they intermingle with –or, become a part of-- the ‘external world.’
This process of losing and regaining agency, founding a novel subjectivity is loosely
dependent to institutional (formal) interventions.

The school and the family governed the young individual and answer a set of the basic
questions about identity and experience and prevent them to pose further questions and
searches until the work life (adulthood) starts. At this point, transnational capital
produces, mediates and circulates specific concepts, explanations, and suggestions to the
workers. However, the interplay of social institutions and analysis of their direct impact
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is not enough to have a fuller sense of workers’ subjectivity, which requires examining
the role of peer culture, global consumerism, and the dynamics of the everyday
encounters.

Although capital tends to reduce the worker to a single, solitary subject and produces
forms of judgment that concentrate on the single individual such as measurement of
performance, efficiency, cost, punishment and award, retail workers always develop a
sense of communal belonging. Such an alternative sociability, communality is revealed
not through the teamwork principle that companies proselytize, but instead through a
channel of resistance: To belong to a different social universe, as another way of self-
defining, or addressing an unorthodox testimonial. This notion of togetherness as a
reference point, a mechanism to locate oneself is rendered visible especially during crisis
moments. For example, if a worker is accused of something (stealing a garment or
money, misbehaving a customer, skipping work) she always invites other workers’
witnessing as saying “everybody knows me in this store,” “I have been doing this job for
all these years and I have worked with numerous people together, nobody thought I could
do such a thing before,” “go and ask my former managers and coworkers,” and “my
customers know me well.” Although companies underline that there is no ‘we’ but only
‘I’ in terms of evaluation and discipline, workers systematically resist to be seen as
solitary and they repetitively give reference to actual and symbolic communities and their
embodied sociability within them for resistance purposes. Although nobody complains
from being regarded as individuals in terms of performance assessment, when the system
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does not work well they reclaim their identities, reputations, and public images in the
eyes of shopping mall community.

Circularity

Why do sales assistants defend the retail industry, in which they are alienated, exploited,
and seen as outcasts, in their conversations? Why do they keep hoping for advancement
and investing in their jobs in apparel stores? I would contest that it is not entirely possible
to name this insistence as ‘false consciousness’ or the internalization of capitalist
subordination. Instead, I have a tendency to problematize this attitude in terms of a
circularity-linearity of subordination my informants face. Accordingly, to start working at
services, having hopes for the future, striving to become a better worker, and then
realizing the harsh terms of employment and labor relations in the retail business, starting
to complain, transforming oneself to the melancholic and hopeless subject, and
eventually resigning from the job form a linearity, which repeats itself through tenures of
most workers in shopping malls. Saying that, I must mention exceptions, a minority
against this model of linearity, stays in this business (for various reasons, passions, and
constraints), heal their broken hopes and motivate themselves again and again.

But, in both options of circularity and linearity, the retail workers become a part of this
business; they constitute a voice through subverting or reproducing the hegemonic
meanings that are forced them to adapt or internalize. They fashion their subjectivity via
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alternative definitions, desires, and strategies to the repertoire provided by the
transnational capital alongside the compliant passivity of the state and the family.
Therefore, agency does not lie on the choice between resistance and reproduction. It does
not necessarily refer to an exit from the given mise en scène or creating another space, a
type of space-off. Instead, resistance and the resisting agency can be constructed only
within the system, neoliberalism, through playing with the scenarios, experiences,
desires, and subject positions.

The official ideology (say neoliberal transnationalism) that is produced and controlled by
the transnational capital and the neoliberal(-izing) nation state, defines desires and means
while retail workers –positioned as unsuccessful, marginalized and wasted out- redefines
their priorities through these desires parallel to what the official ideology propagandizes.
Thus, retail workers’ subjectivity (or agency) could be framed out of the resistance-
subordination duality. They are subordinated to the new classed pattern of neoliberalism
while they transform what is inside of it; they are creating a place within it to find a way
of being in the world for themselves. Only when they can enter into the discursive
domain of neoliberalism they are able to talk about the workings of neoliberal logic and
resist its manifestations. In other words, there is no possibility to resist by an absolute
negation. On the contrary, my informants can resist only through accepting the retail
worker subjectivity and operate inside its hegemonic desires, passions, and goals. Retail
workers’ subjectivity does not reject the power of transnational capital and the logic of
neoliberal principles, yet it is articulated to neoliberal mentality through a new role:
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through complaint, anger, and indifference. The only available way to become for a
resisting subjectivity is to relate with neoliberalism.

“Even I”

Here [the shopping mall] dehumanizes us (bizi insanlıktan
çıkarıyor burası). I am telling you; honestly, I do not feel myself
like a human being any more. Instead, I am like a slave, like a
servant, or I do not know, something like a robot. As if I was
born to complete a task, for suffering only. It is not like living my
own life at all. (Gulcan)

When I look at the mirror, or when I go to sleep, putting my head
on my pillow, I cannot think of anything that belongs to me in
my life. It feels a big emptiness. Sometimes I say myself this is
the mission I have. I have to struggle and prove that I deserve
better than this. Nevertheless, that sort of optimism just comes
and goes. Of course, I know that this is my life and it will always
be like this. (Yildiray)

I was in a depression last winter. I was feeling so worthless and I
was sure that nobody cared about me. One day I talked to a girl
in the store and she was studying psychology at the university. I
told her I needed her help, I was in a depression and could not
move any more. She said I lost my self-confidence and self-
respect that everybody must have. She suggested me to keep a
diary and be honest with myself. [Pause] I persevered a lot to
write something. However, I totally hated what I wrote day after
day. All I talked about [in the diary] was the store, the manager,
and customers’ craziness. […] I thought my life sucked. I burnt
my diary. I told myself, if this was my life [there was] no need to
keep a diary for it. (Baris)

These three quotes from the interviews I conducted with retail workers can give a cue
how my informants perceive their subjectivities: Dehumanized, robotized, empty,
hopeless, self-abnegated, and unbecoming. These quotes from the interviews demonstrate
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the reflexive process my informants experience. Unlike what popular imagination says
about the lay people, especially for the working classes, they ponder about the meaning
of life, who they were, and particularly what their lives mean to themselves and others.
Such an endeavor of self-comprehension, or rather the self-image, elucidates itself
through the linguistic practice of pronouncing ‘even I’ (ben bile) when my informants
talk about their selves. It repositions them as modest and self-conscious not about
themselves but also about others as well as more inferior and unsettled than people in the
same category with them.

On a regular, empty day in the ZIP Kanyon store, I was folding garments at a table in
Toddlers’ Shop, while Tugba and Mete were chatting at another table in the section Baby.
Tugba was folding the smallest apparels in the store and listening to Mete’s stories. I
could see that Tugba was tired of listening to him and doing her work simultaneously.
Her smiles were artificial as she was talking to a customer and Mete was having fun with
big, sincere laughs. Then Deniz, the store manager, walked out of the storage and called
Mete. After they left Tugba came to me and she made a gesture with her hands and eyes,
meaning that she was bored. I asked what he was talking about and she said, “It is always
the same topic. How he was trying to convince the girls in the shopping mall to have a
date with him, how the girls were impressed in general but this one from MAC (a famous
make-up studio) refused him. He was honestly surprised when she said no and it seems
he could not understand the reason. [Laughs] Stupid! Even I would not date you!
[Laughs]”
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On another day in the store, I was thinking about where I was going to go for lunch and
then I remembered that Cihan was talking about a cheap restaurant which offers a buffet
of Turkish cuisine outside the shopping mall. I found it interesting since I was already fed
up with the eating-places in the shopping mall after the first week. I went to Cihan and
asked him where the restaurant he mentioned before was. He looked at me and thought
for a couple seconds while I was standing and waiting an answer. Then, he said, “Cenk, I
thought it would be better if you do not go there. Eat something here in the shopping
mall. I do not think you will like it there. Even I can hardly eat it.”

After working for weeks at ZIP Kanyon I started to think that I should have moved to
another store for better observing the internal dynamics. One day, I encountered with
Aysen, a former coworker and friend, at McDonalds during lunchtime. We sat on the
same table and I asked her about Harvey Nichols—the famous, glitzy British department
store and the biggest employer in the shopping mall, where she was working. She said,
“Of course, you should definitely apply. I am sure they will hire you at that moment. You
can speak in English; you are presentable [she used it in French pronunciation] and smart.
Imagine, even I can work there!”

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Resistance and ‘Life’

Retail workers in Istanbul develop tactics and answers to the managerial control,
authority, and discipline at the workplace; to the deskilled character of the job and
replaceable quality of workers; and especially for my research, to the deeply felt social
exclusion and experienced class envy. In Richard Edwards’ (1979) words, they transform
the store to a “contested terrain” in which they renegotiate who they are—either through
reforming and improving their selves and reaching the ‘designer employee’ ideal or
through instituting a cynical, ironical and resistant subjectivity. But both routes of re-
imagining who they are pass poststructuralist elements of identity construction such as
destabilization, disjointedness, contingency, flexibility, fluidity and reflexivity. As the
social organization and institutions of the economy takes a new shape via these concepts,
subjectivities are also reconstructed in accordance with the changing economy,
conditions of employment and labor, class relations, and systems of culture and meaning
making in a society.

I would contest that it is not possible to say the hegemony of corporate culture of
(transnational) companies and the technologies of subject making (i.e. control, deskilling,
surveillance, discipline, etc.), which developed via the implementation of neoliberal
reforms and restructuring programs, upon the workers work impeccably. Instead, my
informants and co-workers foster and engender counter-hegemonic subjectivities:
Sarcastic, distrustful, egocentric, disbelieving, incongruous, recalcitrant individuals who
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discredit the retail sector, criticize its conditions, feel expropriated, strive to escape from
this business, and ‘save’ themselves, their lives. They simply think and verbalize that the
jobs they have at the stores in shopping malls occupy their (otherwise free, unrestrained,
promising, creative) personalities, terminate their individual differences, and equalize
them with everybody else. In order to recover their psychological ‘health’, restore their
disguised dignity, and re-individualize, retail workers instigate tactics to resist multiple
forms of oppression and subordination they encounter at the workplace. The most crucial
of these tactics is building a narrative on their ‘lives’ (their time, bodily energy, familial
or emotional relations, intimacy, decision-making, etc) to protect from the poisonous
effects of (transnational) capital.

Due to persisting logistical and technical problems in the stores, which are always
understaffed, retail workers are expected, demanded and even required to work for longer
hours than they are supposed to. In order to force workers to sustain their involuntary
devotion to their jobs managers manipulate workers’ subjectivity regarding their
attachment to the store. Basically, the store is equalized to and represented with the
collectivity of the sales assistants. Retail companies impose the sense of ‘we’ to their
workers. In this framework, acting against managerial demands is framed as ‘betrayal’ to
the workers’ unity, the spirit and the supposedly harmonious teamwork of the store.

Workers’ response to the constructions of the ‘forced attachment’ to the store is two-way.
As long as they appropriate the store, its standards of work, its reputation and desired
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perfection, as they work in a determined fashion, as they internalize that “the store is their
honor,” they take up the “good, exemplary worker’s subjectivity,” they become more
governable and their conduct becomes more manipulatable for the managers. On the
other hand, when they resist or reject to the ritualized forms of over-work, to the foisted
sacrifices, and instead defend their ‘own life’ against the benefit of the store, they turn
out to be a trouble maker, the undesired anti-prototype. When they do not listen to the
managers’ explanations, form their subjectivity otherwise, prioritize their self instead of
corporeal demands, and exhibit disobeying practices, their working selves become
inaccessible and their conduct becomes ungovernable. In short, how retail workers
redefine their subjectivity is a critical issue in terms of managerial hegemony in the store.

The process of subject formation for workers within and through specific logics of
neoliberalism can be deemed as the last step of Marx’s concept of the ‘real subsumption
of labor’ to power of capital: Not only economic, financial, material; but also cultural,
social, existential, affective and symbolic aspects of human life is designated, supervised,
and taken advantage of by capital. Neoliberal logic surrounds all aspects of the existing
social life as well as inventing new forms of human sociability as I have discussed in
Chapter 2. Paolo Virno (2004: 82) notes, “Capitalists are interested in the life of the
worker, in the body of the worker, only for an indirect reason: this life, this body, are
what contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis. The living body becomes an object
to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what really
matters: labor power as the aggregate of the most diverse human faculties (the potential
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for speaking, for thinking, for remembering, etc.)” My informants were well aware of this
process and they recurrently mentioned about their lives as the basics of resistance or the
main line of defense against apparel companies.

In this context, as the object of neoliberalism’s (or, transnational and neoliberal
capitalism as a system) power shifts to grasp human life in its totality, workers have to
form channels of resistance on the basis of their lives. Workers’ bodies and the meanings
inscribed to these bodies, their bodies’ variegated functions and potentials as well as
workers’ psychological and social conditions turn out to be a field of constant scuffle
between the worker-subject and the power of capital. As the company imposes a new
temporality of labor (such as flexible working hours or pushing workers to overwork
without informing them in advance) and new definitions and criterion of needs and
desires (such as earning more money by working longer hours or the belief that if
workers labor more devotedly their chances for advancement would be higher) retail
workers, for their part, assert their own right to govern their times, bodies and energies
and thus forming a resistant subjectivity by reiterating that they ‘also have a life,’ which
they have to protect from the uninvited occupation of corporate demands and
pronouncements.

An understanding of workers’ resistance in the setting of the neoliberal workplace, which
surrounds all units of human life as its domain to rule, must start with workers’
comments, ideas, and claims on their own living, knowing, feeling and thinking bodies as
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well as all features of their social lives. Accordingly, resistance is an invention, a
creation, which enables workers to locate the capillary strategies of power on their bodies
and social relations. Refusing to perform what is taught, to become what is required, to
feel what is exalted, to expect what is promised, to be satisfied with the proposed, to
devote her time and energy to her job, to see herself as part of a team are but a couple
ways of resistance that is available to retail workers.

Spatial and temporal arrangements of labor conditions exceed the borders of the store, of
the shopping mall, and penetrate the temporality and spatiality of a whole sense of life of
the worker with tangible as well as intangible aspects. For my informants, work is not an
engagement constrained within the boundaries of the workplace; instead, it encompasses
and engulfs their lives, nothing is left untouched. They believe that as much as they
devote themselves to work, to the store; they would eventually disappear, lose their
connection with their selves, with their “real lives.” They would become robotized,
soulless slaves, dis-subjected. As they increasingly feel themselves trapped by capital (or,
“capitalism” [kapitalizm] as they name it) they experience the real subsumption of labor
at a subjective level. Therefore, resistance for my informants starts first of all with re-
elaborating and re-asserting the sense of being in the world, freedom, self-examining,
reflexive thinking about relations (and disconnections) with others, repositioning one
towards or within certain discourses, modifying memories and structures of meaning,
creative alternative spaces and sociabilities, and of course thinking and imagining
otherwise to be able to destabilize the post-industrial, post-Fordist, neoliberal
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normativity. It is a discursive act that denaturalizes the neoliberal public and puts oneself
a new location with3in it again. In this sense, a little hesitation, a small act of envisioning
heterodoxa, a basic refusal, simply saying ‘no’ to the explanations and demands, having a
distance to the proposed model of power, can be deemed as a “minimal form of
resistance,” (Foucault 1997) which is essential within the neoliberal constellation of
power and knowledge.

This minimal form of resistance reveals itself as the (particularly the experienced) retail
workers’ wit, satire, irony, incredulity, and mocking against the hegemonic discourses in
the store, the disciplinary workplace order, managers’ interventions, and customers’
needs and demands.
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It was almost a cultural shock for me, who was coming from the
academia where more or less everybody straightforwardly expresses her ideas without
sarcasm or suspicion, to fully comprehend and adapt myself to this regime of disbelief
and recalcitrance. In the store, nobody seemed to believe what she says or what others tell
her. When they intended to explain things to me –the newcomer, the outsider- all the
sentences were formed with ‘but’ because after they recount how it looked (a rule or a
manager’s words) then they cite what it actually meant or the real reason behind these
discursive and bodily practices. When Tugba ridiculed Habibe because she was not
experienced enough or because she was living in a squatter neighborhood (I will talk
about this below) she laughs and whispers me “this afternoon Deniz [the manager] will
give a lecture about the significance of teamwork or respect towards our coworkers.”

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Hochschild (1983: 77-80) argues that irony can be framed as a weapon of those, who
have weaker positions, in order to cope with occupational subalternity in the workplace.
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When Cihan was angry to the manager because of the unpaid overworks he decided not
to come to work one day, and the following day he said “I was sick” to the manager. He
was sure that she knew he was not sick at all. When the manager asked for a medical
report as a proof of his sickness, he satirically asked for permission to go the hospital and
get a report. He knew that going to the hospital for such a report meant long hours of
absence from the workplace and the manager would not accept it. She did not. He just
started working again until the next time that he would decide to feel sick again.

In our interview, Ali criticized his coworkers because he thought they did not disobey the
managerial orders and they simply could not say ‘no’ to their supervisors. He explained
this lack of resistance as ‘a problem of personality’: “They do not have a decent
character, integrity to oppose the company policies. Hit their backs; take their pieces
from their mouths (ensesine vur, lokmasını al—a traditional saying in Turkish, like “a
piece of cake,” describes a stupid person who can easily be governed by others). You
need to be another type of person to contradict [with the managers] and to tell them
‘enough stop!’ The workers are all too weak to think about stuff like these. Like cows,
they just look to their own noses. […] Actually, companies want that type of human
beings. She should sit and she should work when she is told so. The best you can do is to
weep in front of them [the managers] and beg for some favor. When they say yes to some
of your demands, then they become the good ones with conscience, with moral standards.
Or, they would put some carrot on the stick that these fools follow it, work harder and
harder, never asking what I am doing here.”
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On the other hand, another group of my informants stated contentious views with the
ones exemplified by Ali’s words. For example, Alev says, “I do not think it is about
personality or what type of person are you. I have to protect myself because in this
business managers’ demands from you never end. If you cannot develop a strong habit to
say ‘no’ to them you cannot be able to save yourself at the end. You become more and
more tired, depressed and angry. This vicious cycle would eventually lead you to
resignation. However, I cannot do this, cannot take that risk because I have to work, I
need this job. I am 24 years old and my family cannot take care of me any more. So,
without making it explicit, without making scenes or conflicting with the managers in
front of other people, I am protecting myself, silently, taking care of my body, my mind,
my energy, my morality, and my dignity.”

I observed two types of resistance amongst retail workers in shopping malls: The
routinized forms of minimal resistance as Foucault names them (saying no or being
witty) and creating events that blow up as an outburst. Although the latter category takes
place more infrequently, it is much easier to notice and document their developments, the
roles actors play, and their consequences. However, one needs to delve into the everyday
rhythm within the store in order to experience and record the illicit, minor forms of
resistance. Their difference is both produced by and in return shape subjectivities of
workers. As Bora above mentioned it requires a totally different set of emotional moods,
existential positioning to have a fight with the manager, to resign, to send a complaint
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letter to the human resources department, or to exercise physical violence towards
customers and coworkers than coming to work late for five minutes everyday, folding
apparels a little slower than it should be, smiling customers not as sincere as the company
asks, or refusing to wear the name-tags in the store.

While Ali (just like Cihan whom I have quoted and mentioned extensively in Chapter 3)
opts for creating scenes and verbalizing refusals that trigger explicit conflicts between
him and managers (sometimes customers, too) Alev tends to sustain her (indeed
conflictual) relationship with the power of capital without being excluded or expelled all
together through working on rational explanations, negotiations, justifications, sometimes
sacrifices and even self-degradations. Both ways of navigating the self through apparel
stores’ corridors equally but differently produce recalcitrant subjects who do not
volunteer to give what was asked from them, instead, they do develop tactics for struggle.
In terms of subjectivation, I would contend that the way symbolized by Alev’s narrative
here (developing a consciousness about the self as something to be taken care of and
protected, reclaiming this pseudo-egocentric self in proper ways, feeling oneself as a
precious human being instead of membership to an unnamed occupational group) is
equally significant to what Ali epitomizes (having a fight with managers and customers,
criticizing coworkers because they are not capable to uprise, establishing his identity on
the alterity he keeps feeling in the workplace). The both ways that different workers enact
enable them to create discursive spaces to find their voices, interpret the world they live
in, and constitute their insubordinate subjectivity.
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Relating to the Store

For my informants, to start working as sales assistants, ‘falling to the store’ (mağazaya
düşmek) or ‘becoming lodged in the store’ (mağazaya bulaşmak) in their words, is
associated with circumstances, destiny, accident, or a disservice from one’s friends
among most male workers, while women workers generally take the responsibility about
their decision to start working in stores. In other words, male workers in stores negate the
idea of having a desire, even an initiative, to work retail and have a career at services for
the future. Thus, they reject to relate with the subjectivity of the retail worker (whether it
is ‘good,’ ‘successful,’ ‘promising,’ or ‘hopeless,’ ‘ineffective,’ ‘failed’) and locate
themselves outside of the capital’s logic. They are in a symbolic place where neoliberal
values do not (cannot) really apply. Because they did not originally want to work retail,
they did not have an investment to be advanced in this business from the very start, they
did not seek to gain a respectable, middle class status via this job; they are freed from
discursive, bodily, and relational regulations of the transnational capital. By showing that
they did not develop the desire for it and they found themselves in the store
circumstantially or accidentally, most male retail workers state that it is impossible for
them to imagine themselves as embedded subjects in the store.

Reiterating such disinclination is a secure way of escaping from the “suffocated
character” of retail work for most (male) workers. Although it does not provide workers
with opportunities to get rid of the stores and find other jobs, it still allows workers to feel
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less oppressed and more self-determining. For example, Baris mentions his plans to find
a job at (any) another sector and leave the store:
I have been applying for all job posts I see and I do not really
care what these jobs are. I just want to discharge myself. It was
all coincidence that I started to work at stores and now I want to
correct this. [It was] A big, big mistake [for me to start working
retail] […] I am not an ungrateful person; I have been earning my
money from this job for all these years. Nevertheless, this is not
I. It was not I who desired to work here. […] I used to obey the
rules, follow the instructions, and deeply respect managers. Not
any more. It does not matter for me to quit now or two months
later. So, I freed myself from all those humiliating rules and
practices. The funny thing is they still keep me as a worker.
Actually since I have freed myself and started not to care so
much I have become a better worker. Now I do whatever I want
and everything seems much better this way [laughs].

On the other hand, who wanted to work in shopping malls, who thought that this could be
an opportunity to upgrade their lives, who envisioned that she could be promoted and
become a manager were thus re-gendered feminine: Women or gay men. Constituting
retail subjectivity through desire and investment in this job is highly feminized. Gulcan,
for example, notes, “I believe men should seek different jobs, more outdoor, mobile jobs
or office jobs like accountants. Working as a salesclerk is a better match for women. I
cannot imagine a normal man who plans to work at a store when he was at high school. It
is so feminine.” Yildiray complains from this gender ideology about retail work: “All my
friends made fun of me when I told them that I might want to have a job at Citron. We
always believe that all jobs are sacred and a man should do everything to earn his own
money. After all, I am working with my honor. Yet, I think, to say that I want to work at
an apparel store is conflictual with these ideas. I guess I should not want it. It is okay if I
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had to work. Do whatever you find. But, planning and desiring to become a salesperson
destroys the limits. It is not normal for a man to want this.”

The Past

My informants described their pasts (the pre-work period of their lives) as a time of
happiness, freedom, and opportunities. Recalling the past always comes with regret (that
they could not make use of the opportunities they had). Although they use to frame their
pasts (önceden, eskiden) –the time before they started working retail- as a wonderland,
the golden days of their lives, they immediately remembered and started complaining
from the more rigid familial control over their bodies, financial hardships that they did
not have any money to spend, and school discipline which they believe they left behind.
When I asked them what would be different in their lives if they did not have to work,
they reproduced the same pattern with the emphasis on greater freedom, feeling less
authority over their actions and thoughts, having more time to hang out with their friends
or to learn new things, “improve” themselves. Frequently they say that “actually, my life
is already good except the work; I like my life if I did not have to work [in the shopping
mall].”

Constructing the pre-work temporality as an imagined dream-space may also be about the
detachment from and disbelonging to retail work that most of my informants feel
strongly. Their work experience seems not an organic, indivisible part of their ‘real’ lives.
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Just like the state-imposed schools that they had to go regularly and they did not like
(sometimes hated) in the past, workplace is the same poisonous institution that is inserted
forcibly to their lives, they do not feel themselves belong to there, they just get used to it
but never internalize or accept it. Sometimes unconsciously, they wait for a future time
when they would be able to get rid of the store, when they would not have to work in the
shopping mall any more. Even though most of them exactly know and say that there will
not be such a time in their future, there will be no chance to escape from work for better
employment options, it is still their dream-space, their desire to imagine themselves out
of shopping malls. With this construction of “my biggest problem is my job, before I
started to work here everything was better” the worker-subject allows herself to envision
an alternative self who is not bounded to the workplace, who remembers what happens in
the past, and who is aware of other employment possibilities—however unrealistic or
improbable they are.

Types of Stories

Talking about the store, people they encounter, collaborate, or clash in shopping malls,
and company policies –either in a complaining or an appropriating tone— plays a crucial
role in how retail workers take up the desired retailer identities (middle class, modern,
self-improving, hopeful, ‘successful’) and how they come to belong to the contemporary
urban community in Istanbul, to where the ‘real’ life takes place. The work experience at
shopping malls in Istanbul is imagined and talked about in relation to a highly classed
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and gendered understanding of neoliberal concepts such as success, progress,
performance, and satisfaction as well as the notion of modernity that workers perpetually
envisage and seek to achieve. Retail workers’ testimonies document that for those who
could not ‘make it’ in the new economy, life is totally hopeless and melancholic, shaped
at the intersection of poverty, discontent, social exclusion, and an unfitting, inauthentic,
purloined consumerism. On the other hand, the idea of (and desire for) success comes
with notions such as respect, wealth, refinement, comfort, happiness, and freedom.

Throughout my fieldwork period as a sales assistant and during the interviews I
conducted afterwards, I sketched out five different modes of stories told, and reiterated,
by my informants and coworkers. These narratives re-position and re-shape their social
being in the neoliberal order. I explore these types of stories and tease out examples from
the interviews:
1. Success and Hope: These workers feel very lucky and happy that they have such a job
at a transnational chain store in a modern setting. They emphasize their ideals to
become middle class (or becoming ‘modern’ and ‘proper’) and sustain this status.
They like their jobs, and more importantly, believe their promising future in this
industry, they admire their managers and most customers, they desire to marry and
found families, they aspire social mobility and belittle lower classes that simply do
not improve themselves.
Among many people I would put in this category, my coworker Habibe can be an
excellent example. In our interview, she says “there are many people in Istanbul who
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would love to be in our shoes: Having a job with benefits and insurance, a stable
salary and a decent workplace. Nobody disturbs (harasses) us. Our manager [Deniz]
treats us kindly, she tries to teach things about this job as well as how should be like
in our lives in general. […] In the future, of course I want to marry with a decent
person and having kids. However, I really want to be a store manager. I do not know
how I will be able to manage these two [marriage and work] at the same time, but I
am totally positive. I am sure everything will be great if I will not make a huge
mistake.”
2. Loss and Desperateness: These workers are the melancholic subjects of work. They
are not happy with their lives and they cannot do what they want for their future
mostly because of the jobs they have and their sense of ‘enclosure’ and enslavement.
They feel themselves as trapped, as imprisoned, and they cannot escape to save
themselves and found a new life. They often grumble and develop discontent with the
managers, customers, other workers, companies, and eventually themselves. They use
anti-depressants (mostly Pasiflora, a herbal mix that does not need prescription), they
are addicted (to cigarettes mostly, alcohol sometimes, and drug rarely) and they say
they are in depression.
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Beril and I worked at Citron together. During the months we worked together she
gave me the clearest examples of this kind of subjectivity that I wrote my notebook
(as well as in my memories I can still recall vividly). She was an excellent sales

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I am not a psychologist, nor a psychiatrist, and I am not interested in my informants’
real state of mind. However, I think any observer, who spends time at the stores, can
conclude that there are many depressed workers in the retail industry.
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assistant, a bright person with great talent. Nevertheless, she was too unhappy with
her job. She was using the most creative metaphors for depicting her sense of
enclosure and desolation like one day, related to a recent bombing by Al-Qaeda
happened in front of the shopping mall and killed dozens of people, she said, “At that
moment [of bombing] I was working in the store, I remember I was hanging the new
shirts after ironing them, thinking about usual things, about myself. All of a sudden, I
heard the incredible sound of the bomb and then I fell with the strength and pressure
[of the explosion]. The whole building was shaken and I thought it was the mortal
earthquake we had been waiting for years. At that moment, in a second, I thought
‘this is it, I am now free; finally I got rid of here’.”
3. Performance of Entreatment: These workers exhibit their complaints, suffering, and
subalternity in front of managers and coworkers in order to gain advantages,
protection, mercy, and advancement. They constantly manipulate people’s feelings
for making them think that they work so hard, earn so little, become silent against
injustices, make a lot of self-sacrifice, their life is too difficult, and they deserve
more. Some of them articulate this performative reiteration to the state institutions
and ask why the state does not save them.
These narratives and bodily enactment of imploring is highly feminized. More
women engage this kind of talk and men mostly do not approve it, see it a feminine
way of making people pity for themselves. “It is the culture of crying” Yunus says,
“when they [women workers] do not get something they wanted, or when they have a
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problem, they do not strive to solve it. Instead, they try to achieve something with
crying, making people sympathize with them. It is a sickness we as Turks have.”
Like Beril, I also worked together with Tulay at Citron. When I started to work it was
among the very first things I realized that everybody disliked her. Within a short time
period, I started to notice her performance to convince our managers that Tulay was
the most industrious person in the store, the most devoted worker, and she needed
some really small, insignificant favors. For every advantage she wanted to gain or
each single permission to get from the manager, such as to leave earlier than other
workers, she dramatized a script, saying incoherent lies repetitively, finding endless
explanations, and implying the injustices she witnessed but remained silent to keep
peace in the store. After struggling with her for a little while, I came to understand
that it was futile and instead, I tried to observe her as an ethnographic case that one
can encounter really rare in the stores. My experiences proved true and after all these
years Tulay, her excuses, her dramatic performances, and her complex scenarios to
get a little benefit remained unsurpassed in my observations although there are many
other versions of it among retail workers.
4. Muttering Hatred: This is an advanced, darker version of the narrative type 2. These
workers detest themselves, their coworkers, workplace, and everything in their lives.
They are extremely unhappy about their conditions of being in this world and they
verbalize this whenever they find a chance, for example a routine change in their
work shifts. They habitually say that they deserve better than what they have.
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Although generally utterances of this sort can be seen in both genders, explicit
manifestations of class-envy are largely masculine as I will argue in chapter 6.
Like other types of narratives, this is also common among sales assistants but Cihan,
a coworker of mine at ZIP Kanyon, was a great example of this type of worker. One
of the sharpest minds I came across in this business and the talent to observe people’s
actions in a not-so-amateurish sociologist fashion, Cihan kept criticizing almost
everything in the shopping mall and in our store from the architecture of the building
to minor, seemingly unimportant decisions that our manager Deniz made. He kept
admonishing his inexperienced coworkers or sometimes harshly ridiculing them. He
was condemning customers, their class identities, lifestyles, and consuming habits. He
was brutally blamed our manager being inefficient and powerful enough. Yet, his
biggest anger was toward himself because he obviously (and I think rightfully)
thought that to work as a sales assistant was an insult, especially for himself. It was
not a place for him to be, he did not deserve it, he was angry with himself just like he
was angry at the world he lived in.
5. Indifference: These pieces of talk reveal the fact that workers dissociate themselves
from the work environment, do not think over what they experience, and they
consciously alienate themselves from their coworkers and customers. They say they
do not hear what is told to them, they do not consider themselves a part of the store,
they “automatically” come to work and fill their hours, and they are actively
inattentive to what happens in the business. They note that they do not have any
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expectations or plans for the future; neither have they had motivations to be
promoted.
This narrative strategy secures employment in the retail sector in the long run because
workers can only bear the hardening conditions, decreasing tolerance, and
psychological burden by simply dismissing them. This stance of ‘living as if she is
not working here’ is pretty common particularly among experienced sales assistants.
For example, Yildiray mentions, “A long time ago I shut down my brain. I stopped
thinking about anything including work. Indeed, especially work. I imagine myself as
if I was working at a factory, or anywhere else, like cooler [uses in English] places
such as a computer company. I come, do my job during my hours, complete it and
then leave without looking anywhere, gossiping about anybody, with music in my
ears, as if I do not work here. […] I realized that it is the only way to continue.
Otherwise, especially younger guys spend most of their times either with being
jealous about each other or daydreaming about their future careers. It is not the right
way. It does not go anywhere but fights, unhappiness, disappointment, etc. You want
to do this job? Then, put yourself out of it. Treat it like something else. Only then you
can survive without being depressed too much.”
Indifference is also prevalent as a survival strategy among relatively older male sales
assistants. It is hard to generalize but for experienced retail workers, especially after
25 years old, they start to incorporate a “cool pose” (Majors and Billson 1993), which
implies pride, self-respect, inattentiveness, and masculinity. For example, Hayri, who
quitted working retail and opened a small grocery store, said to me “After a certain
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age, you start to become more mature and cool [uses in English] and start no to worry
about things. Do you have a job? Yes [makes a gesture to express he does not care].
Do you have money? Some. Are you happy? A little. Do you complain? Not really.
Just like this; just nodding. You stop worrying about how a bad job I have or how
little I earn. Whatever. It is just cursing everything and leaving behind. […] Because
there is nothing to do. You shall learn to protect yourself, your mind [mental health].
You start hearing less [what other people say], caring less. Anger, stress and other
such things are gone. You have to be nonchalant. […] Your circle of friends also
changes. People whom you know from other places would go to other places and you
eventually lose them. All your friends are people who work at stores. When
everybody does the same job the conversation is always about the same topics.
Whose manager is crueler; which store pays more; whose job is the most tiring?
Everybody knows everything and we just do not want to talk about them any more. If
you come with us one night and listen what we talk you would be surprised that we
never talk about the stores. You would ask if we were pupils? We are so tired of this
business [laughs].”
After I finished conducting a two-hours interview with Cihan, a former coworker
from ZIP Kanyon, while he and I were sitting to finish his cigarette and my coffee, he
told me “I am happy to do this [interview] not only because I wanted to help you for
your project but also I now feel myself better right now. For a very long time, I have
not thought about these things. I set myself as automatic and stopped thinking,
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accepted everything I encountered in this job and in my life. Now, I see that I was
also guilty that I checked out. I should be more involved in what happens in my life.”

Tugrul’s Story: Resignation & Getting Fired

In order to better grasp the conditions through which the subjectivity of the worker-
subject is produced and agency is shaped there is a need to examine exceptional times at
the workplace, temporal breaks in the worker’s sense of continuity and stabilization in
addition to exploring the period in which the worker is employed in shopping malls under
‘normal’ conditions and develop a worker subjectivity, whether complicit or resistant.
These ruptures from the temporality of work are mainly moments of crisis, which end
with either resignation or getting fired.
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While I was working at ZIP Istinye Park, a male worker was transferred from the ZIP
Capacity (Bakirkoy) store. He, Tugrul, started to work in our store almost ten days after I
started to work there and his first day was also the first day of the big winter sales. He
and I were both ‘full’ that day just like the rest of the staff since the very first day of
seasonal sales is really crucial in setting the success (or failure) of that particular store for

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Some of the crises between managers and specific workers are normalized and started
to be seen as ordinary features of flow of relations in the store. For example, in the ZIP
Kanyon store, my coworker Cihan was constantly at conflict with the store manager
Deniz and this tension between the two led them fight sometimes but to this date it did
not cause Cihan’s resignation or ZIP did not fire him. I would argue that such an
incessant, normalized sense of interpersonal crisis between the workers and managers
strengthens the hateful subjectivity (narrative type 4) I referred above.
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the next six months. The amounts of sales within that day ranks stores’ overall
performance. Therefore it is a really stressful day for the managers because their future in
the company will be designated according to their cumulative success or failures. If their
store can be among the most successful (for example, the top three stores) they are
advantageous in terms of future promotions within the company.

Needless to say, it was a crazily busy, extremely exhausting working day for all workers.
My lunchtime was coincided with Tugrul’s and we went to a pasta restaurant in the
shopping mall to sit still in our half an hour break. He was 25 years old and he seemed
like a decent, mature young man to me. He was really happy to be finally transferred
from the other store to here since he moved recently and this store was much closer to his
new home. I thought I should have scheduled an interview with him later because he
seemed an enthusiastic sales assistant, who learns English in order to be promoted and
become a store manager one day. He was living with his family (his mother, his father,
and his younger sister) and rather happy about it because he told me he was able to spend
money on his own pleasures as well as saving a little bit–which was extraordinary for
sales assistants in Istanbul.

At 10:30 PM all customers were gone and almost all garments were folded and hanged in
the store. We were all unconsciously wandering in the store, checking the tables, and
waiting for the second manager on duty, Suzan, to announce that we could change and
leave. Instead of inviting us to the locker room, in front of all workers, she said:
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—Suzan: Tugrul, we are not having fun here, instead of chatting with your
friends persevere and help us to finish [and close the store].
—Tugrul: I am not chatting here. The store is packed, all customers left,
and we have been working for more than 12 hours and still waiting to
leave. I just asked Gokhan if his eyes are okay [Gokhan had a problem in
his eyes, they were infected. Since they look terrible he worked in the
storage all day without being seen by the customers.]
—Suzan: [in a higher voice] Do not tell me stories. I do not think you
would like to continue to this discussion!
—Tugrul: What will you do if I want to continue? Are you threatening
me?
—Suzan: [Exhaled, turned her back and started walking towards the
locker room]
—Tugrul: [really angry] This is not an appropriate behavior for a manager.
This is my first day in this store, I have been working like an amele [daily
laborer] for 12 hours, and this is the first day of winter sales. A good
manager can only thank her workers after such a tiring day and cannot try
to prove her authority over them. I am working here with my dignity and
you cannot play with it just because you want so!
—Suzan: [stopped and looked back at Tugrul, still silent]
—Tugrul: If you are threatening me with firing me, then fire me right
now. Stand behind the meaning of your words (lafınızın arkasında durun).
If you seriously think that I have not worked today and I had fun with my
friends chatting, then I challenge you here: Fire me now!
—Suzan: [started to walk again, murmuring] you just want to continue
fighting.

Tugrul was furious. He did not say anything else to her. I could see him trembling out of
anger. Everybody was frozen in shock. Nobody expected such a strong, coherent, and
bold reaction to Suzan’s obviously unfair and arbitrary attitude. After we left the store, a
group of us walked together with Tugrul. Everybody in the group was praising his
reaction against the manager, who was not very popular among the workers because of
her sulkiness. He got calmer and asked people if Suzan was always like this. He kept
saying that was unacceptably unprofessional. He said, “Just because we do this job, we
should not have to say yes to all injustices or mistreatments. I cannot continue to work by
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losing my self-respect.” Everybody commented that these kinds of conflicts were
mundane in this store and both sides would soon forget what happened that night. Tugrul
said he hoped so and he left.

I did not tell my coworkers anything (I was also an inexperienced worker in that store)
but I thought (and wrote in my field notes that night) that such a challenge to the
managerial authority in front of all workers was not an easily forgettable incident for the
managers in the retail sector. I thought that either the store manager Tolga or the second
manager Suzan would take revenge from Tugrul in some form. Next morning, I came to
work at 10:00 AM. Workers were still whispering about ‘the event’ last night and
recounted what happened, often exaggeratedly. Tugrul came at noon as his schedule
shows and started working. I left for lunch with two coworkers in the McDonalds
restaurant right across the store. Fifteen minutes later Tugrul came to our table and sat.
When we saw him walking from the store towards us just after half an hour later he
started to work we understood that he was not working with us any longer. He told us
that:
Tolga, the store manager, called me to the locker room and asked what
happened last night while Suzan was also sitting there without looking to
my face. As I recounted what happened and emphasized that everything
happened in front of all workers, Suzan said ‘so you are not denying that
you yelled at me before everybody?’ I said I am not denying anything and
just summarizing what happened, this time I underlined that she
threatened me in front of everybody at the end of my first day in the store.
I also said, as far as I knew this was unacceptable in terms of company
policy at ZIP. Then, Tolga said of course I was totally right about that and
what Suzan did was obviously wrong, but I should not have challenged a
manager in front of other workers whom she must have a power on. He
said that I consciously or unconsciously destroyed the inner working, the
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harmony, and the hierarchy of the store. Against this, I told them that they
were not kings and we were not their subjects. We were working there
under specific regulations for a specific amount of money and our
relationship is delimited with that. Other than this, I added, ‘there should
not be any relations of power between us. Especially if you tend to
humiliate or threaten me based on your own moodiness I, as a person,
would not accept it and fight against it.’ Then Tolga became furious. He
said what I was telling them was totally unacceptable and now if I wanted
to stay in that store I needed to sign this report to be sent to the center
office. I read it and it basically says ‘the worker Tugrul went crazy and
started to shout all of a sudden without a reason and the second manager
Suzan managed the situation.” I looked at their faces and thought for a
second. I thought I deserve more value than this. I just tore up the paper
and left the store.

While the company encouraged him to develop an obsequious subjectivity, Tugrul
cultivated a sense of recalcitrance, a resisting subjectivity as a response to Suzan’s
devaluing and patronizing warning to the degree he terminated his relation with the
company. Instead of being subjugated to the authority of managers over his body and
subjectivity he explicitly and publicly challenged the managerial exercise of power and
formed an agency though which he deconstructed the given relations between himself, as
a worker, and the manager as an embodied representative of transnational capital. Tearing
up the sheet, which contradicts with his own framing of reality, was also a symbolic
action in order to constitute –or, reconstitute, his insubordinate subjectivity regarding
knowledge, truth, oppression, and resistance in the store. With his resignation as a
constitutive act against his suppression, Tugrul became a withstander, an impervious
being against operations of capital over his body, labor, and thoughts as well as his self-
and public-image.

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Tugrul struggled for his subjectivation, formed his subjectivity when he constituted a
language of difference, when he failed to react normally, when he exhibited worker’s
misbehavior. In the normativity of the store, he was expected to develop a silent anger
(and therefore a subjectivity that is constructed through murmurs, unspoken feelings—at
least not in public) yet he verbalized his criticism, challenged the manager on the terms of
managing the store and governing workers (on the field where conduct of conduct is
supposed to take place), and moreover, he did not go crazy or became emotional; instead,
he acted rationally (calm, without cursing, explaining what was wrong, unfair and
unacceptable in the manager’s action). He exercised subjectivity on the terms of uttering
what must have been unspoken. Put in otherwise, he played a role that was not tailored
for the worker. His subjectivity emerged here as reflexively producing and entailing a
right to be different, to be variegated, as well as unfixing and subverting the existing field
of power.

I have tried to explicate some aspects of the “ideal subject-worker” of the retail industry
that is produced and consolidated by transnational corporations and some of the routes to
interpret alternatively and actually challenge these coveted models of neoliberal
subjectivity by workers in the first two sections of this chapter. Now, I want to turn my
attention on another crucial feature of my informants’ subjectivity: Their desire to have
middle-class identities and become articulated to an imagined global modernity via their
jobs in the shopping malls (that represents a sort of Western modernity especially in the
first phases of their employment) and their upwardly mobile lifestyles.
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Wannabe White Turks: The Disposition of Modernity and Class

Here, I am concerned with the question of subjectivity among retail workers, who work at
the upscale shopping malls in Istanbul, through their involvement with class and concepts
of ‘good life’, ‘globality’ and ‘modernity.’ The experience of work in such a
consumption place –consisting of the embodied labor relations, the structure of meaning
around their labor, encounters with customers, and being regulated by the logics of
transnational capital- is reshaped by workers’ classed and gendered subjectivities. Their
social and physical being in the shopping mall affects and transforms the ways in which
they see themselves, each other, their multiple ‘constitutive others,’ and their ‘right’ place
in the world.

I would argue that examining how workers’ subjectivities are constructed through
specific ways of attachment and dissociation at the workplace might be important for
comprehending the conditions in which neoliberal citizenship, communities, and public
are formed. Probing the role of the particular knowledge (i.e. retail-logy, as I have
discussed in Chapter 4) and urban non-places (i.e. shopping malls and chain apparel
stores) of the retail (or, services) sector in the construction of the new middle (-lower)
classes in the metropolitan Istanbul can illuminate the dynamics of making up modern
(and globalized) subjects with specific competencies and potentials. In the neoliberalizing
Istanbul, the formation of these subjectivities moulds the contemporary cultural life,
social discourses on difference and exclusion as well as micro- and macro-scale power
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relations. Questions like ‘what is a modern life?’ ‘What are suitable conditions for a
modern work and private life?’ and ‘what the wannabe modern, middle class, ‘successful’
people should do in order to have a decent life?’ are inseparably articulated to the process
of subject formation.

In most cases, retail work is projected as the ‘last chance’ of formal employment for the
new urban lower-middle classes. The global apparel companies as well as the store
managers tend to believe that they are able to present every opportunity for a modern,
refined, and successfully middle-class life to their workers if the workers are willing to
follow the rules and obey the regulations that this business brings in. In other words,
retail workers are frequently reminded that their jobs are the symbolic gates to the world
that they had always desired. For retail workers, there is great disappointment in the
process of realization of their dreams even when they endeavor really hard to play the
game within the rules, being the obedient and diligent workers. Also, the system of
desires (for upward mobility, becoming decent citizens, having a modern lifestyle)
associated with the lower-middle class is not pregiven, fixed and ready before this
process of interpellation through work. Instead, these certain desires associated with the
modern way of life that retail workers are promised emerge during this encounter
between the retail worker and corporations’ discourses. The assumed, designated,
predetermined subjectivities of sales assistants are far from being realistic. They learn
how to desire properly a life similar to their customers, or managers, and develop specific
goals concerning this desire in the course of their work experiences. These subjectivities
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are produced through workers’ multifaceted relations with the transnational capital,
neoliberal idea(l)s, and managers –as the embodied, model citizens.

My coworkers and informants implant multiple subjectivities through a wide spectrum of
social and physical spaces. Retail workers struggle (in order to find or redefine who they
are) at the intersection of a) the ‘non-places,’ such as shopping malls, in which they are
simultaneously marginalized due to their lack of cultural and economic capital while they
are also invited to participate global consumerism and become a part of the modern
world; b) the city, in which their classed subjectivity is shaped according to where they
live and where they belong to as well as which parts of the metropolitan environment are
available to them; c) changing gender relations, which dislocate the presumed masculine
roles and ideals while reconfigure the emphasized femininity; d) labor relations, which
open new forms of exploitation through part-time, insecure, low-wage, and flexible work
patterns in transnational companies with the absence of the protective interventions of the
State or labor unions; e) the political/public realm in which they are rather hesitant to take
sides along with the major social divisions in Turkish society like “secularists vs.
Islamists” or “Turkish nationalists vs. Kurdish separatists” although my informants
partially feel sympathy for secularists and Turkish nationalist political organizations.
109

109
This is not a full political commitment but more of a contingent reaction to the
emerging Islamist and Kurdish movements, which categorically exclude my informants
(the lower-middle, secular, urban, Turkish classes) in different ways. When I chat with
my coworkers and informants on politics most of them noted that theirs were rather
counter-tendencies against the rise of political Islamism and the Kurdish movement and
their fragile alliances to support Turkish secularist and nationalist parties were contingent
and temporary mostly because they believe these parties do not really address them or
364

Therefore, it is not possible to grasp this group of people and reduce the multiplicity in
their everyday experiences to any simplifying or overgeneralizing political project or
theoretical inquiry such as Islamism, Kemalism (official state ideology [etatism] in
Turkey which emphasizes modernization, Westernization and secularization), Marxism,
working class movements, feminism, or versions of nationalism. Retail workers are at the
threshold of social exclusion, hegemonic discourses of modernity and economic
development, post- or high-modern workplaces, cultural hybridity, and alternative
(sometimes invisible) forms of being. They form a resisting and marginal culture in
which they express their own desires, confusions, and meaning systems vis-à-vis the
rising neoliberal public and popular discussions.

Having a job and experiencing workplace conditions at shopping malls is not a “natural,”
inherent, inseparable part of the flow of retail workers’ life. They are neither educated nor
prepared for these jobs. It is not a culture that they grew up into. Instead, these are
unique, exceptional space-offs (de Lauretis 1987) located outside of the poverty and
social exclusion in their lives. The state (as my informants are familiar with state
institutions through the educational settings) and their families cannot extend their
influence into these exceptional spaces and leave the worker alone in the midst of
previously unknown upper-middle classes and almost totally unregulated maneuvers of

defend their issues in their public agendas. My coworkers frequently cited that “under
these conditions,” or “for today,” they had to support the other political options against
Islamist and Kurds, which come to signify what they absolutely do not belong to.
365
transnational companies. What does it mean to have an exceptional space in workers’
lives? What is different going on in there?

Retail workers are strictly local, immobilized subjects in the increasingly globalized
workplaces and organizations while they, as lower-middle classes, share the same
physical spaces with middle and upper-middle class people. Working in shopping malls
denotes their own failure, reminding them that they could not achieve (“make it”) but
instead they were socially excluded and became servants of neoliberalism. It reproduces
the classed difference between customers, who are seen successful because they have
money to spend, and workers, who are deemed as failures because they have to work
there. It also underlines the failure of the developmentalist (social, or the welfare) state
which could not manage to develop necessary strategies to educate and prepare its young
citizens to the new, rapidly changing ‘real life’: Globalized, neoliberal, post-Fordist, late
modern, deindustrialized, insecure, destabilized, and unjust. Every moment they are
present in the store as a sales assistant or as a cashier highlights and reminds my
informants that they are relatively disadvantaged, unlucky, unsupported, and failed. Their
poisonous knowledge on their inadequacy (to become decent citizens, to come out on
top) and subaltern subjectivity (which is established through ‘lack’ and complaint) is
magnified in the shopping mall, as they encounter with the modern middle classes.

In the public culture of Turkey in the early 21
st
century, listening to the stories of squatter
people, varoş, delving into privacies of their worlds, difficulties and struggles in their
366
everyday lives including their most intimate encounters occupied a great deal (Erdogan
2007). Public, in this sense the non-varoş (the socio-political ‘center,’ middle-class,
secular, educated, modern urbanites) was willing to listen to varoş people through various
mediations. Nevertheless, such a ‘voice’ was not provided to the urban, lower-middle
classes, as in the case of my informants, their families, and friends. As a group, or a
community, they did not have the discursive tools to narrate their stories. There was not a
keen public to hear their voices and admit their mediated visibility. Their particularly
disadvantaged statuses in the city and their marginalized struggles for recognition and
respect were remained out of sight to be unraveled. This sort of invisibility and being not
heard by the public left traces of a sense of serious inattentiveness and being lost in the
public sphere. These traces frequently reveal themselves in utterances like “nobody wants
to hear/listen to us,” “even varoş people are deemed more valuable than us,” and “were
we supposed to be terrorists in order to be perceived?”
110
My informants kept reiterating
that they became invisible in public discourses about the urban economy, unemployment,

110
Here, my informants referred to the recent process that connects the Turkish
government and separatist Kurdish groups, which were seen as ‘terrorist’ by many, in
order to have a consensus and reach internal peace in the country. By stating, “Even the
terrorists are listened” by the state (and not them) my informants reposition themselves as
subaltern and unheard by the public as well as closer to the Turkish nationalist political
discourses, such as “urban Turks in poverty are the new disadvantaged.” The sense of
‘nobody listens to us,’ passive and fatalist nonchalance, among my informants turns into
political subjectivity as they compare themselves with the Kurdish people and ‘the
terrorists.’ When they compare themselves with the biggest politically oppressed
population in the country and asking ‘why [even] they are listened and not we?’ they
immediately reposition themselves as an unnamed political group, which is based on their
subaltern class identity that is translated through terms of ethnicity. In this discursive
realm, nationalism covers the socio-economic differentiation and replaces political
subjectivity, which is based on ethnic identity, on economic position that is directly
linked with material concerns.
367
and the economic crisis. Their problems were not listened to by the state institutions and
officials, by the mass media, and last but not least, by people on the street.

The Meaning of Technological Devices

Uses of the latest technology and devices of sociability (internet-based websites and
messengers) meant a lot for my informants. The most significant component of this
cyber-mediated social existence is to log on to the Msn messenger on a regular basis.
Tugba, for example, says, “I connect to the Internet every evening, even for 15 minutes.
If I am too tired to do anything and just pass out when I come home, I wake up in the
next morning a little earlier to log in my online accounts. But, normally, I log in to my
msn messenger account everyday. […] There, I can see my friends, chat with them, learn
what is going on with their lives, get some gossip, and talk about my own stuff. Not about
the store though [laughs]. It is so boring. Yes, my life is so boring. But, there [on the
internet] I add new friends to my Facebook page or remove some, I meet new people,
friends of friends, I watch videos, listen to the new songs. I feel that I exist. Because, you
know, in the store, we do not have any time, any spare time to do anything for ourselves.
We are always face to face with the same people. We do not see the day or the sun. We
do not have connection to the reality. Only when I can connect to the Internet I feel a
little bit better. I feel like a young person, as if I am a normal person [she laughs, I am
sad].” Serkan also makes a similar point, “[on the internet] I feel like as if I go out, as if I
go to somewhere, have a drink, hang out with my friends, my buddies (kankalarım), as if
368
I share my problems, listen to theirs, cheer up a little bit. See? This is like a dream. I
dream to be free a little bit. I do not want super big things. I just want very small things
that everybody automatically has; everybody except us. There [on the internet] is nobody
saying ‘stop talking’ or ‘work harder’ to me. Just me only for an hour, or half an hour.”

While I was working at ZIP stores my mobile phone (an old and humble model suitable
for graduate students, without a fancy screen and the latest developments) started to have
problems even for the most basic functions such as talking and sending text messages. At
some point, it was really inconvenient to try to talk with it because I could not hear
anything, so I was borrowing my coworkers’ phones to talk with people when necessary.
I was procrastinating to buy a new phone just because I was too lazy to go to a
technology store or to check the Internet, explore the new models and make a decision.
My distance and indifference towards mobile phones surprised my coworkers a lot
because cell phones (which brand, which model, does it have a camera, does it connect to
the internet, does it contain music, how many songs it stores, etc.) were so significant for
them. Buying the most expensive, glitzy, cool mobile phones with highest technological
possibilities (that they never need or use), using them for a while (generally for one year)
and then selling them to the second-hand black market and buying newer ones is a
conventional cycle my coworkers follow. Paying the installments of the newer mobile
phones they keep purchasing is also an important expense in their humble budgets.
Sanem says, “[mobile] phones are our only hobbies. We do not read newspapers or
novels because we do not have time for that. We do not watch TV shows [serials, TV
369
dramas that are extremely popular in Turkey] because our working hours change every
week and we cannot catch their show times. So, we can only play with our phones. […] I
do not have an exciting life; I do not have cool [uses in English] friends or fancy clothes.
The only cutting edge thing I have in my life is my phone [she shows me the recently
introduced and very expensive i-phone]. Phones represent what we miss. We compensate
everything with the newest, chic phones.” Also, many informants noted that their up-to-
date, fancy, technologically complex mobile phones are the only presents they give to
themselves, like a reward because they work too much or they sacrifice from virtually all
other things. Technological devices, their multiple uses, and meanings creatively attached
to them constitute an engaging example for their re-appropriation at the grassroots in
order to connect to the world at both symbolic and social levels.

Markers of the Middle-Class Identity: Garments and Place

Retail workers form a strong relationship with the symbolic middle-class markers in the
course of their everyday interactions. The most significant of these symbols are the
garments they sell, buy, wear, and talk about and the location –the specific
neighborhood— in which they currently live. These two plays a crucial role in my
informants’ endeavor to reconstruct their class identities and help them improving their
self-images, fulfilling their aspirations, and getting closer to the middle-class ideals.

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Apparels never mean a mere functionality of covering naked bodies for retail workers.
What my informants and coworkers are able to purchase, how much they save up or
getting indebted for buying expensive designers’ apparels, which piece of cloth or brand
signifies what, who else is able to purchase these clothes and other meticulous
calculations in order to shape their ‘style’ occupy a great deal in their daily interactions
with others as well as how and where they imagine themselves. They constitute a popular
knowledge through which garments they want to wear; which brands and trends they are
familiar to; and the ability to match different types of clothes, materials, cuts and
accessories. Navigating this knowledge entitles my informants having a ‘style’ and
classed taste they continuously invest and in return determines who they are in a
performative, repeating, dynamic manner. Their devotion to the issues of fashion and
style, the way and frequency of their talk about garments, and their knowledge on the
material culture of clothing secure my informants’ social position as less distant to
middle class urbanites while they also put them apart from the multiple social others that
they would not desire to be linked such as Islamists, migrant peasants and people who
live in poorer varoş areas.

My informants’ embodied style (the garments they wear, the accessories they use, the
brand names they carry, the shape their hair have, and if they have any, how their
piercings and tattoos look) is significant not only in terms of constructing an identity for
themselves, finding a suitable place in an increasingly fragmented, differentiated and
destabilized society (Kandiyoti 2002) but also in terms of their chances to find a job in
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the stores. Transnational companies are vigilant against to be stigmatized as using and
abusing cheap labor, employing the varoş youth. In both companies I worked, I observed
that when a job candidate arrives for an interview with the managers or human resources
staff, she is evaluated not only by her credentials (such as her education or previous work
experiences) but also by her style: Whether or not she can pass as middle class, should
her style and appearance fits with the unwritten criteria of class mannerisms, and,
especially for women, how much she invests on fashion and latest trends. Therefore, my
informants’ knowledge about and their experiments with garments, or the very idea of
being fashionable, is crucial in their effort to buttress their precarious middle class
identities.

The question of ‘where do you live?’ or ‘where is your house?’ set the social position of
my informants both among themselves through intra-group differences and towards the
strangers they meet. As this question repetitively asked and answered, just like the
unending process of dealing with garments they choose, my informants’ middle-class
identity is re-examined. If they lucky enough to live in one of the relatively decent
neighborhoods (zoned districts, definitely not in one of the varoş areas) or if they are able
to play with the information about the exact location of where they live and hide it behind
a more desirable zone (saying a little lie about where they live) they can pass the test and
secure their middle-class identities, at least temporarily. However, if they live in one of
the recently built, informal, “unzoned” (imarsız) varoş areas or in one of the old but
decaying neighborhoods and they cannot hide this information, it shows that they already
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failed in their effort for upward class mobility. In this case, they are always reminded that
first of all they should get rid of that part of the city and move to more desirable parts.

In the first store I worked, ZIP Kanyon, the struggle between two of my coworkers,
Tugba and Habibe, provides a vivid example on how the symbolic categories vis-à-vis
the desired middle-class identity are produced and used in the everyday. Although both
their families’ own their homes, and therefore they are not renters, Tugba’s family’s
apartment in Mecidiyekoy, a central district which is very close to the business center but
dominated by low-quality apartment buildings and lower-middle class inhabitants, while
Habibe’s family has a house (most probably a squatter) in Beykoz –a district far from city
center and populated by poor and conservative migrants. Whenever possible during our
chats, Tugba sarcastically emphasized that she grew up within the city center, in the
midst of the urban environment, “the cradle of modernity and urbanity,” and she never
visited ‘remote corners’ of the city (she implies Habibe’s Beykoz) which, for her, could
be named as ‘province’ (taşra) but not the city. Against Tugba’s attack to the
neighborhood she grew up and still lives, Habibe uses another discourse that the city is
full of dirt, chaos and terror, whereas Habibe lives in peace in a distance from the city
center, acting as if Beykoz was not a slum but a middle-class suburb with luxurious
villas.

On a very cold winter night as we were waiting to close the store, Habibe was longing for
being in her hot living room that was heated by her traditional heater (soba). When
373
Tugba heard this, she did not miss the chance to ask how come Habibe’s apartment does
not have a modern centralized heater system (kalorifer) like “everybody else Tugba
knows has one in their homes.” Then, Habibe explained that they were not living in an
apartment building and theirs was a house. Nevertheless, at the moment she naively
confessed this, she immediately understood that she lost the discursive struggle because a
house in Beykoz simply means an illegally-informally built squatter and not a planned,
hygienic, modern residential environment with required permissions. When Tugba and I
walking outside the shopping mall that night, she was celebrating her victory asking
“have not I told you that she does not know anything about the city and she grew up in a
wasteland (dağınbaşında)?”

Another day, when Habibe complaint that in the mornings the shuttle driver did not take
her from in front of her door as he was supposed to and in the evenings he was leaving
her somewhere far from her house that she needed to take a taxi or another public shuttle
to go to her house, Tugba was sardonically whispering, “it must be really difficult to
arrive such a house at the end of the world. [It must] take 2 hours or so from the city.” On
another occasion, when Habibe said that she had not heard of the brand Tugba had
previously worked, Mudo –a famous Turkish apparel store- Tugba was deriding Habibe,
saying that this was yet another proof of her past in the province, definitely not in
Istanbul. “Who in this world could not know Mudo?”

374
Indexing more distant parts of the city as ‘non-Istanbul’ or ‘out-of-Istanbul’ and claiming
a superiority that stems from growing up in the ‘real,’ central Istanbul even though the
class backgrounds were quite similar was also pretty common in the Citron stores that I
worked before. For example Ozlem whose family house (a squatter) was in Umraniye,
was also publicly humiliated by other workers because of the neighborhood that “she is
from” and her family’s traditional, rural background. Her nickname among other workers
was ‘the villager’ (köylü) in the store underlining the symbolic difference she embodied
as a varoş person amongst the urban popular classes.

Among retail workers, symbolic constructions of the middle class capital through
hierarchies of style, knowledge and taste about garments, and the neighborhood one lives
(physical and social location within the city) are articulated to political discourses of
‘white Turks’ (Arat-Koc 2007) (secular, modernist, and nationalist political ‘center’) as
well as ideas of gender equity in the public domain and sexual liberalism (including
homosexuality). As elsewhere, modernity in Turkey has been historically constructed
from a radical rupture from tradition through tensions for not to become too modern
(Kasaba 1997). Retail workers strategically utilize the cultural capital available to them in
the neoliberal order and develop opinions about public issues through a wide set of
discursive, bodily and relational practices (while rendering fields that they do not have
access, such as education and international travel, invisible or insignificant) in order to
take up respected middle class, modern, urban subject positions.

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Neoliberalism creates (or reclassifies) new political, ethnic, social, cultural and economic
categories to be juxtaposed and governed in the hegemonic order of multiculturalism all
over a borderless, transitory world (Harvey 2007). People in these new categories of
governance, increasingly self-identify themselves and refashion their subjectivities in
order to be recognized, representable, and intelligent in the contemporary neoliberal
public life. Retail workers, as members of the growing service-sector and the new
working class (Russo and Linko 2005; Salzinger 2003) constitute rational, contingent and
fragile subjectivities that search for a place and a voice in the neoliberal milieu.

Which new types of personhood—specifically womanhood and manhood- bring what
kinds of advantages/disadvantages and positions within power relations to attract
individuals? What happens when they fail to desire these new forms of gendered
personhood? I argue here that when my informants do not take up the offered subject
positions via neoliberalism, when they fail to desire these new forms of (gendered)
personhood, they are still positioned and discursively linked to neoliberalism. This
positionality is defined via abjection: As an unwanted, unintelligible form of being
outside of global modernity, “the real world” as my informants say. As they reject to be
articulated to the privileged forms of desire, they happen to accept what is depicted as
insular, pre-modern, poor, informal, intransigent, or incapable. I will present a closer look
at gender relations in the store in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 6: GENDER AND SEXUALITY AT RETAIL WORK

Şale:
I met her when I was working at Citron in 2004. Many people mentioned her story of
self-improvement in the interviews I conducted with them as well as in our informal
chats. She is the most well known person of the retail sector in Turkey. In the mid 1990s,
Şale was an experienced cashier at a luxurious Turkish brand, Park Bravo, in its upscale
Bağdat Boulevard store. She was around mid-30s, unmarried, and living with her parents.
After saving enough money, she wanted to go to Britain for an English course for six
months. The owner of the company gave her a leave of absence to support her ambition.
However, her father opposed and threatened her that he would never talk to her again.
Despite him, Şale went to the language program and advanced her English skills. When
she came back to Istanbul the owner of the company promoted her to become the second
manager of the store. Her father made a peace with her. After a while, her boss bought
the brand name of Citron in Turkey and opened the first store. Şale became the first
Citron store manager in the country. Two years later the Spanish company decided to
enter the country with their own office and promoted the extremely successful manager
Şale to an international coordinator position to help other countries’ organization in
Europe. She traveled between countries for more than two years and then she wanted to
turn back to Turkey as the first national coordinator of Citron. Has not even graduated
from college, she now works successfully as a super-coordinator, the person right above
the CEO, governs 6 brand directors, 27 stores, 108 managers, and more than 1000 sales
assistants for Citron Turkey.

Her always tanned and skinny body, her fabulously chic clothes, her incredible power
over store managers and on the center office, and her ruthless, uncompromising, and
focused conduct at work made her a legend among retail workers. She represents the
possibility of achievement when a woman really wants and struggles. She is the most
effective single person in the field of retail sector in Turkey with the exception of
national CEOs who are almost never physically present in the stores. Şale’s self-made
story from a high-school graduate cashier to the top coordinator of a prestigious brand
continues to inspire store managers and retail workers at all levels. They frequently say
that she looks and acts like the character Miranda Priestly (acted by Merly Streep) in the
movie The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Her motto is “one word is enough to express
yourself in highly complex situations to guide people in the retail sector. If you are
always able to find it on the right time, it means you started to become a second Şale.”

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Şale’s story and the way it was mentioned by my informants stand out amongst numerous
other personal narratives in the sense that she, as a woman, could be able to resist all
familial and structural forces against her advancement and finally became an
exceptionally successful figure in the retail sector without giving up on her femininity.
Following her exceptional example, I put four other individual stories in boxes below.
The following first three boxes represent atypical gendered narratives of workers in the
retail sector, people whose stories somehow differ from most of their colleagues, while
the last one recounts an uncommon moment in the course everyday life in shopping
malls.

Scholars have long referred the world of (paid) work, labor relations, job segregation,
income gaps, and conditions of workplace as constitutive fields of the social organization
of gender and sexuality
111
. In this chapter, I will connect the most apparent issues
regarding gender and sexual relations in apparel stores in Istanbul with the emergent
approaches of the social scientific literature on work, organizations, gender, and
sexuality. Shopping malls, as high modern, secular, Westernized ‘fortified enclaves’ of
consumption and entertainment– in Istanbul, a deindustrializing and culturally
fragmented city of the global South, provide a unique opportunity to delve into the
intricate dynamics of gender and sexual identities, class, and employment.

111
For a brief summary of the discussions in this field, see Dunn and Skuggs 2006;
Adkins 1995; Wards 2008 and Acker 2006.

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My coworkers and informants are not radically diverse in terms of age, social class
112
,
location, and racial-ethnic profile. With very few exceptions, their physical and bodily
conditions are almost identical –for example, I haven’t seen any disabled or obese
worker. Broadly, almost all of them share the same political and religious views, which
support the social democrat and secularist-modernist political parties. Therefore, when
they are considered as a group, retail workers differentiate basically through their gender
and sexual identities. Difference amongst workers in most cases is constituted through
gendered and sexualized attributes.

Governing Gender and Work

In Turkey, gender equity is partially achieved in some professions mostly due to the
positive effects of the modernization project since the inception of the state feminism
after 1930s (Oncu 1981; Gunduz-Hosgor and Smits 2008). For example, in 2007, the rate
of female academicians in universities in Turkey was 40 per cent; the rate of female
teachers in high schools was 41 per cent; the rate of female judges was 30 per cent; and
the rate of female print media workers was 50 per cent
113
; while, female workers at banks

112
A distinction can be made here between the college students and full-time retail
workers, who graduated from high school and want to have a career in retail sector.

113
All statistics are derived from the official figures of the Turkish Statistics Institution
website, www.tuik.gov.tr, in this chapter unless otherwise noted. Since these are the
official records they can only exhibit the figures of formal employment. Informal sector
is rather strong in Turkey (Yukseker 2007; Keyder 2000). Scholars note that 25 to 40
percent of all economic activity within the national borders is undocumented. As I have
pointed out in chapter 5, almost all of the big apparel stores are organized in terms of
379
reached the rate of 55 per cent in 2008 –a record in the history of the country (Tamer
2009). However, in overall labor force participation, women in Turkey only gets 26 per
cent in 2006 and the rate was 29 per cent in 1995. In other words, labor force
participation by women in Turkey decreases especially through the economic crisis in
2001. In Turkey, the rate of labor force participation is just 47 per cent for all citizens and
the employment rate is only 42 per cent. As I emphasized in chapter 2, population and the
unemployment rate continue to grow simultaneously.
114
In the service sector (including
hotel, restaurant and store workers) there were 106.000 women employed in 1988. It
grew exponentially and reached 543.000 women in 2007. However, in the service sector
there is still only one woman employed against six men in Turkey.

Women’s employment is always a contested issue in Turkey in spite of the discursive
concentration on religion and ethnicity in feminist research
115
. According to a national
quantitative ‘family structures’ research, 23 per cent of male respondents and 10 per cent

official regulations and retail workers are registered to the state’s (compulsory) social
security system. Among my informants, it is called as ‘having insurance’ (sigortalı
olmak) and it is always a big attraction for workers to have a job with insurance through
which they can access medical system and retirement benefits.

114
In September 2009, there were 870.000 more people in the working age (18-60) than
September 2008; and people who have jobs (except agricultural sector) decreased by
84.000 within the same period.

115
See, for example, the significant work on women, democracy, and politics of religion
and ethnicity, Arat 2007; White 2003; Gole 1997; Saktanber 2002; and Sirman 2000
among others.

380
of female respondents said that ‘it is not appropriate for women to work’
116
. On the other
hand, there is no evident wage gap between sexes. While, on average, working women in
Turkey make 14.000 TL ($ 9350) in a year, working men earn 14.300 TL ($ 9550)
annually. For the retail sector, the average annual salary is 9420 TL ($ 6280) for women
and 10.240 ($ 6827) TL for men. About job satisfaction, 14 per cent of urban women in
Turkey are very happy with their workplaces; 72 per cent are happy; 11 per cent are
neutral; and 2 percent are unhappy with no women who are “very unhappy” about their
jobs. Like wage gaps, there is no substantial difference in job satisfaction between the
two sexes. In urban areas it is slightly more difficult to be employed for women. The
unemployment rate for women was 17 per cent in 2007; while it was 11 per cent for men.
Thus, it would not be inappropriate to say that, although some segments of the female
population in urban Turkey have certain obstacles to enter the labor force (such as
religious fundamentalism or patriarchal family relations), when they are able to find a job
they experience rather similar conditions of work and workplace relations to men.

This statement seems especially true for the retail sector. The service industry is a female
dominated. In the Citron Metrocity store that I worked (specifically at 03.18.2005) the
sex distribution was 20 per cent men and 80 per cent women (12 men and 48 women,
including the managers but not the security and cleaning workers). At my first research
site, ZIP Kanyon, the ratio was 33 per cent men and 66 per cent women (3 men and 6
women) and at my second place, ZIP Istinye Park, the ratio of male workers was 22 per

116
Apparently, respondents were not asked if it was appropriate for men to work.
381
cent (5 men and 18 women). Table 5
117
below shows that these gender ratios that I
recorded in particular stores match with the larger (unofficial) gender ratios from three
big retail companies in August 2009. The Table includes numbers and ratios from the
Spanish Inditex Group (7 brands, including Citron), the British-American-Turkish
consortium Xano Retail Group (3 brands including ZIP and Marks & Spencer) and the
Spanish Mango (the only brand Mango). The number of workers includes people who are
employed in stores and not in the head- or center-offices.

COMPANY
(NUMBER OF
STORES) NUMBER OF WORKERS
MEN
(%)
WOMEN
(%)
INDITEX (109) 2500 (approximately) 30 70
XANO (63) 1500 (approximately) 35 65
MANGO (41) 1000 (approximately) 15 85

Table 5: Gender ratios of employees within stores.

Age is but another factor alongside gender plays a crucial role within the population of
retail workers. In the Citron store I worked the average age was 24.1 (excluding the
managers, March 2005), while it was 23.4 in ZIP Kanyon (November 2008) and 24.5 in

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There are also other big retail groups that have stores countrywide in Turkey including
the Turkish Boyner & Beymen Group (approximately 120 stores), The Turkish Demsa
Group (around 80 stores), the Turkish Unitim Group (approximately 100 stores), the
Turkish Koton (approximately 100 stores), and the British-Arab alliance Al-Shaya
(approximately 80 stores) but they did not respond my several trials for getting
information on their gender and age statistics. Probably they thought I was an undercover
tax or insurance agent, journalist, or a worker of the competitor firms. I was able to get
these approximate numbers from the human resources departments of the three
companies through using personal connections provided by my informants.
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ZIP Istinye Park (March 2009) stores. None of the human resources specialists from the
three companies that I obtained gender figures was able to give me average ages of the
workers at any moment since it requires a huge calculation. However, they all told me
that the average tends to be between 22 and 25 at any moment. Also, they all have a
policy called the ‘maximum age of hiring’. According to this policy, Inditex do not
accept job applications from candidates who are older than 25 years old, while for Xano
the maximum age is 28 but they said 28 is exceptional, and it is 30 years for Mango,
which is looking for experienced workers in addition to starters. The minimum age to
work in these three companies is 18; yet, everybody knows that other companies
(especially smaller Turkish brands) hire people who are younger than 18 years old by
temporary job contract, which is legal for people over 16.

In Chapter 4, I have noted that textbooks prepared for the trade vocational high schools’
sales Assistantship curriculum are shaped by and in return affect discourses of human
resources departments of retail companies. In these course books that I examined, there is
a strong gender-neutral language. Usually sales assistants (satış danışmanlığı) and
salesclerks (tezgahtarlık) are constructed as feminine in popular discourses. Almost all of
my informants stated that this type of job, i.e. working in the stores, is generally
perceived as feminine although there are many men who do this job and a few of them
(especially male workers) think that it is a better fit for men. The gender-neutral language
may indicate the state’s intention and intervention into the forming of the labor force, the
potential employees of the retail sector, from both sexes. In the course books, I never
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encountered an example of constituting the sales assistant as female. It is easier to
achieve this in Turkish since the grammatical third person is not gendered as it is in
English. However, in all cases throughout the pages, the two sexes are articulated by
using clear examples and notifications as ‘the rules for male workers’ and ‘the rules for
female workers.’

Although a gender-neutral approach is incorporated in the textbooks for the future sales
assistants, there are examples that contradict with this discourse. For example, in the
Body Language textbook, ‘gender’ (cinsiyet) is listed among other points that may affect
one’s appropriate manners that students should be aware of. It reads:
Men and ladies [sic] (erkekler ve bayanlar) have different
behaviors that stem from their biological qualities. The
bodily and physical differences between genders lead
unique gendered behaviors. While touching one’s own hair,
putting them to the back of the head, and embracing one’s
own body with her arms is suitable for ladies; putting one’s
hands into pockets is unique to men. According to the
scientific research, men use their right hand first when they
wear a jacket while ladies use their lefts hands first. When
they lie, men look upward while ladies look downward
with their eyes. When they are bored, ladies play with heir
hair while men frolic with their ties, arms of their jacket, or
pencils. If a lady plays with her hair and putting it to the
back of her head, this means that she needs affection and
attention. If a lady’s head falls a side, this shows that she
experiences an emotional moment. High school girls carry
their books at the level of their breasts and we cannot see
this behavior among men. While ladies perceive their
milieu with short-term gazes, men look at things for longer
periods. There are important differences between men’s
and ladies’ [sic] ways of sitting. If a man’s legs are wide
open this shows relaxation while the same behavior implies
sexuality for ladies.

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The general gender-neutral approach in the textbooks I scrutinized is also disputed in the
Effective Communication class. Again rooted in ‘scientific research,’ this text highlights
the gendered differences in ways of communication. “We have different expectations
from and reactions to men and women. Women are more skillful in reading visual and
unspoken messages than men. When they speak there are also differences between men
and women, i.e. the words that they choose. According to the society, if a woman uses
bad language, inappropriate words and cursing, she will be crucified, while a man doing
the same thing would be seen as normal. Women use their body language more
masterfully and more effectively than men. They smile and have eye contact more.
Women also act more closely and warmly than men.” In the same book, there are
gendered instructions for how sales assistants should look. After noting the importance of
social role and status in clothing, the instructions state that women can use more colors
than men, while men’s accessories and jewelries should be small and plain. Again, it is
claimed that, ‘according to researches,’ it was proven that women could be convinced
more easily than men and women were more open to social interaction. The reason
behind this difference, the text says, was that the ‘cultural structure’ that defines social
roles of men and women in distinct ways.

Another example of gendered elucidations from the textbooks comes from the Customer
Relations class. As an example of the difference between genders it is cited that women
shop more than men without buttressing this claim with uses of ‘scientific evidence.’
There is also a note on the decision making process in the family. The book states that
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although most of the time it is the case that ‘the leader of the house’ (breadwinner, man)
who makes decisions at home, sometimes this function is undertaken by collaboration of
the ‘house wife’ and the leader of the house. One last illustration is from the
Interpersonal Communication class. It reads, “Women have a distinct power of
perception since they bear children. In the first years of human life, the baby should
communicate without speaking and the mother should understand her baby without
hearing words. Many scientists claim that this is the reason why women’s power of
intuition and perception is more developed than men’s.”

These examples show that when gender is mentioned in the course books, it is
stereotyped and inseparably linked to biological sexes. Except these illustrations on how
men and women are unchangeably different because of the society, culture, family, or the
body, these textbooks develop a sensitive (and exceptional, for Turkey) gender-neutral
discourse in order not to feminize or not to support the feminized public image of this
job. I interpret this as the state’s investment on retail jobs as a legitimate option for male
citizens’ employment. Although more men are employed in the broader field of the
service sector in Turkey, stores and shopping malls are still female-dominated
workplaces in spite of the increasing numbers of men who work for retail companies. In
the next section, I will focus on the gendered organization of stores for the female
majorities and the male minorities.

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Ozlem:
I worked with her at Citron. Two years later I conducted a preliminary interview with her
for the initial stages of this project. In 2009 we met for another interview. This final
meeting made me see how she negotiated her unique conditions and transformed herself
in the past several years. Ozlem is the only person I met who had graduated from primary
school (ilkokul) in this business. It is not normal for a person with such an education to be
hired in most of the retail companies in Turkey, let alone the most prestigious ones. She
somehow cheated the human resources bureaucracy with the help of her first manager
and started to work as a cashier. When the personnel department found out that
something was wrong with her records months later, her manager defended her and
stopped them firing her. So, she was able to stay at work with a miraculous exception.
She is the seventh child of a Kurdish family that lives in an illegal squatter area (varoş)
Ümraniye. She rides two different public buses from home to work and spend 3 hours
daily.

Her father hit her when he understood that his daughter was working at Citron and he
stopped beating her only when he got money from her. For such an almost illiterate
person she was doing an extremely confusing job at the counter with great arithmetic
skills and she was (and still is) earning the highest amount in her household. For years,
she gave almost all the money she earns to her family and saved as long as she could. At
most of the lunches, she sat separate from other workers because, unlike others, she did
not eat from the restaurants in the shopping mall but brought her own food from home –
mostly pasta, rice, or homemade pastry. She was ashamed of her poorer conditions and
other people were ashamed of her poverty although she was a coworker. One day she
went to a hairstylist to get her hair cut, her father hit her again; blaming her with wasting
the family money on her hair like a prostitute. She rebelled and threatened him by calling
the police. She says, “It was a turning-point in my life. I opposed to him, I shot at him for
the first time in our house. I knew this was his nature, he did not even understand what I
was talking about, but I was struggling in my own way. He did not have any idea how I
had been coping with the managers, coworkers, and customers in the store for all these
years. I became something; I achieved something in this job. I am not an indignant person
and he cannot act as if I were one. So, after that day, I became more and more freer. Of
course, I always help them; I am giving money to them but not all my salary. I am now
eating like other people. I learnt how to be friends with people. I even have a boyfriend,
which would cause me to get killed in the past. Now, it is normal. I am a working
woman; these are normal things for me now.”

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Organizing Gender / Gendering Organization

The shopping mall is a gendered and gendering cosmos. It hosts people whose gender
identities and ideals were already formed in their social lives through interactions within
certain institutional sites like the school, families, and the street. It also replicates,
challenges, and moulds these gendered subjects and produce novel forms of gender
relations. As the artificial lighting and climate conditions within the walls of a shopping
mall might be the same with or totally different from the outside environment; gender
relations in these consumption temples may differ from other institutions; while they can
be overlapping and cooperating.

In Raewyn Connell’s (1987; 1995) terms, the ‘gender regime’ of the shopping mall is no
doubt intertwined with the gender regimes of other social institutions and the ‘gender
order’ of Turkish society. On the other hand, it poses significant challenges to the
hegemonic and emphasized versions of gender identities prevalent among people. For
example, shopping malls are entirely open to both sexes in terms of leisure and
employment just like other modern institutions like banks and schools in Turkey.
Although sharing the principle of ‘equal visibility and participation’ of both sexes with
other modern institutions (and unlike more traditional bazaars, or religious establishments
where sexes might be segregated in the course of everyday life), shopping malls diverge
from the gender order of the society with women’s superiority over men: There are more
female workers, more female managers, more female directors, and more female
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customers, who rule over the relations, in not a “women’s only” place. In Turkey,
women’s obvious superiority in a desegregated social space is exceptional. In other
modern institutions where sexes intermingle, it is usually men who dominate the scene
and women occupy the lower-status, more trivial positions vis-à-vis men. Therefore, the
gender regime of shopping malls is articulated to the broader gender order of society (at
least its more modern half) but it also differentiates from and destabilizes its principles
and presuppositions. Connell (2002: 71) names instances like this as crisis tendencies,
“internal contradictions or tendencies that undermine current patterns and force chance in
the structure itself.” These tendencies, or potentials to trigger a transformation, appear
against specific features of the gender order that Connell (1987: 159) defines as, “a) the
gendered separation of domestic life from the money economy and the political world; b)
heavily masculinized core institutions and a more open-textured periphery; c)
institutionalized heterosexuality and the invalidation or repression of homosexuality” for
the modern Western societies. The features Connell refers to are consistent with the
Turkish gender order, and in this chapter, I try to indicate that the gender regime of
shopping malls have conflict with all three of them.

Another example of the gender regime of shopping malls, especially when they are
considered as workplaces, contradicts with the gender order of society is that work (the
characteristics and requirements of the jobs) is imagined through cultural codes, which
are generally seen as feminine, such as listening, care, softness, cheerfulness, gentility,
patience, and servitude instead of the presumption that work is a masculine field, which
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demands qualities that are believed to belong naturally to men, including toughness,
rationality, competition, seriousness and being saturnine, controlling others and giving
them orders. Independent from the sex of the workers, qualities, which are traditionally
deemed feminine, prevail in the service sector. To be successful, women workers should
not get rid of their feminine ‘natures’ or ‘predilections’ and men are supposed to incite
their deeply feminine attributes that are suppressed by the hegemonic masculine
socialization. The gender regime of the retail sector also deviated from the gender order
of Turkish society by hiring ‘out’ gay men, lesbians, and transgender people without
asking them to pass straight. I will mention the challenge to heteronormativity in the
retail sector in the last section of this chapter.

Women’s visibility, equality with and superiority over men, the appreciation of so-called
feminine values in terms of work, and the increasing recalcitrance against the compulsory
heterosexuality in the shopping malls can be framed as possible crisis tendencies in the
gender order of a still Westernizing, modernizing, and secularizing society. These
challenges toward the traditional, or mainstream, gender forms stem from structural
changes in the organization of power and labor relations in Connell’s (1987) terms.
Global consumerism and the neoliberal policies consolidated the existing reorganization
of cities in the Global South (Harvey 2007; Leitner et al. 2007) and repositioned them as
venues of trade, the digital economy, consumption, tourism, leisure, and service sectors
instead of industrial, working class agglomerations. As new types of business, new
economic sectors, and new jobs are introduced to millions of people their comprehension
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of previous gender identities and performances tend to be transformed according to the
new regulations of the body, work and family. While Istanbul was a predominantly
industrial town in the 1970s, the ideology of modern-nuclear family (male breadwinner is
the head of the household and women stay at home, taking care of children and her
husband) reigned; the neoliberalizing city has lost its manufacturing jobs and has
provided millions with service sector positions with a set of new values and possibilities
such as dual-earning households, single and independent women, delayed marriages, and
consumption priorities in accord with global cultural currents. Services is the largest and
fastest-growing sector in the contemporary Turkish economy as I have argued in Chapter
2, and it is not difficult to predict that it will transfigure the gender order with its own
gendering mechanisms in the future.

Managerial Masculinity

One day, the manager of the second ZIP store that I worked, Tolga, came to me and
asked if I was really doing “a research on men and women.” I told him it could be
roughly defined in this way. He was trying to seem interested, but more than that, well-
informed about the subject and I believe he was trying to show people around us that he
could be able to speak with me about issues that were not related with the store. So, when
I said “states of manhood and womanhood in the store,” for explicating what I was
actually doing there, he said, “oh, then you should look closer to me, because I am the
most masculine person here!” While he was saying this, he smiled, clenched his fist and
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raised it into the air, and looked towards his both sides, showing the workers around us. I
could not give a proper answer to him. I murmured something like “yes, you are right,”
and left there. Nevertheless, this encounter kept me wondering the relation between
power and masculinity in the store.

Although not always in the way that Tolga imagined, in the store, managers represent
gendered ideals for most, especially women, workers. It is pretty common amongst
women workers to desire to be like their women managers. This includes physicality
(clothes, shoes, hair, make-up, and slimness), personality (powerful, refined, convincing),
and lifestyle (independent, high purchasing power, living in their own space, going out at
night and having causal sex or having boyfriends). Women managers exhibit a more
feminine and simultaneously masculinized image for workers as Basak mentions her
manager, “She is a ‘woman like a woman’ with her appearance, clothes, and sexual
attractiveness (seksapel). At the same time, she may act like a man especially when she
gets angry. She might be really tough and authoritarian (otoriter) towards customers and
workers.” Some of my female coworkers admired male managers and expressed that they
would like to have husbands like them.

On the other hand, most of male workers that I worked with or talked to elucidated that
they disliked most of their managers, both male and female. They clearly envy that male
managers have much more money than they have, that the managers do not have to take
care of their families (sometimes they actually do), and therefore they can spend more
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easily on consumer goods than most workers can. Since their biggest complain was about
their poverty regarding their relations with women, i.e. girls do not want them since they
do not have any money, managers’ better financial conditions make them more
advantageous competitors within the men’s game. Accordingly, male managers have
more money and hence they can have better chance with women (at least they are more
desirable from this point of view) they are simply better men. Male workers also have an
aversion to women managers and view them as immoral (they wear tiny clothes and they
have sexual affairs with men outside marriage) and miserable (nobody wants to marry
with them because they work so hard, frequently until midnight, and they get used to give
orders to people; so they do not fit with the ideal image of a wife who should obey her
husband.)

The gender regime at work in the shopping mall features the gendered position of
managers. Whether they are men or women, managers must enact managerial
masculinity: Overly aggressive, intimidating, manipulative, controlling, punctual,
industrious, unreliable, deceiving, and even unethical in their interpersonal struggles with
the customers, workers, and superiors (the center office). They also ought to be
competitive and calculating for example they are expected to know how many garments
they and other stores sold in a given time and what are they doing to increase their sales.
Although instrumentality embraces managerial masculinity, in smaller stores like ZIP
Kanyon, managers are able and actually supposed to instigate a more feminine soft-
power in which they act more understanding, nurturing, and caring towards workers and
393
even customers. However, even these managers, men or women, can easily shift their
relational mood and turn into their assertive, instrumental behaviors. While the process of
enacting managerial masculinity is naturalized for men, retail workers think that either
becoming a manager masculinizes women or the center office choose women who
already have masculine traits to promote as managers.

In retail business, both managers and sales assistants make use of their emotions to affect
other people’s ideas and actions. This requires a strategic versatility and interactive
communication skills. However though they are, managers need emotional and relational
capacities to better govern their workers and their conduct in the store. A repressive
power, which forces, dominates, and dictates, is juxtaposed to such a capacity. While
male and female sales assistants’ cheerfulness takes the form of deference and they
become subordinate, managers dominate all sorts of relations in the store by using their
implicit and institutional power. Workers’ femininity is taken for granted against
managers’ aggressiveness and male sales assistants can only be ‘smartly’ masculine
against the authoritative power of the managerial masculinity. In this framework, not to
lose one’s control, not to become hysterical, to make one’s hands fisted and to raise one’s
voice without screeching are prototypically masculine attitudes and to lower one’s voice,
to retreat, to invite others becoming kind, and to act sycophantically are deemed
feminine. Structurally, workers are encouraged to act feminine while managers are asked
to enact masculinity, independent from their actual gender identity.

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(Hetero)sexuality and Romance in the Store

Heterosexual flirting and jokes are inextricable parts of life in the apparel stores. Almost
all workers participate to the gendered and sexualized discourse of gossip and jests. If a
worker disclosed her interest toward another worker from the other sex it turns out the
most popular topic in conversations among workers. If one of the workers is involved
more than one person in the same store, these love triangles cause explicit conflict and
fights among workers. When I started to work at the first store, ZIP Kanyon, everybody
was talking about the ‘big fight’ that happened before I came there. After weeks of trials,
Sanem told the story to me. Accordingly, a male worker, Volkan, was having an affair
with a female worker, Yagmur. Then they broke up. At that point Sanem says, Sultan’s
(who was married with another guy) interests toward him arose and she made explicit
jokes and comments about Volkan. This made Yagmur furious and she started to make
gossip about the two. A gay male worker, Mercan, mentioned these to the manager
Deniz. The tension in the store increased gradually since Sultan was pressing to influence
Volkan, while Yagmur was getting more and more angry with them, Mercan was giving
every detail to Deniz and she was trying to stop this paralyzing entanglement. One day,
Sanem does not remember why and how, they started to fight in the selling floor. After
all the customers were terrorized, Deniz put all of them in the locker room and did not let
anybody enter. Sanem says they stayed there for an hour. After this incident, Volkan,
Yagmur and Mercan resigned. Later, it was understood that Sultan was pregnant and after
I started to work she was transferred to another store. A very similar thing also happened
395
when I first started to work at Citron. Two women workers started to fight physically in
the selling floor for a male worker that had sexual and emotional relationships with both
of them at the same time. Women workers did not blame him but they tried to kill each
other. When I started to work there, the guy was not there and everybody was still talking
about their fight.

Romantic, emotional or sexual relations among workers aren’t always viewed as
scandalous. In the second ZIP store I worked, there was a couple that had been together
for four years and the guy was working there just to be with his girlfriend, who happened
to like working retail although she did not have to. In the Citron store, a male worker was
trying to persuade a female worker for a date. He strove for months and at the end he
could not succeed. Everybody knew the story and they liked and supported his passion.
On another occasion, during a New Year party, Tulin had sex with Yildiray although they
did not have a previous emotional relation with him. When we asked her why did she did
that, she said she was “so horny and he was available.” Yildiray could not brag about his
conquest because of his premature ejaculation. Everybody knew this in the store, and to
my amusement, it was pretty normal. In the ZIP Kanyon store, we all knew that Habibe
had a crush on the ‘responsible supervisor’ Mete. We were sure that he noticed it, yet he
was trying to behave as if she was his sister. Instead, he was constantly trying to amuse
other women workers from other stores in the shopping mall. His –mostly unsuccessful-
escapades with these workers were a great subject of workers’ daily chat. Cihan and
Tugba were having fun with Habibe’s forever single position. Cihan was saying she was
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too conservative to attract men –implying that she would not let her boyfriend to have sex
with him- while Tugba was claiming that Habibe was a peasant
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and she did not have
the notion of having a boyfriend. Her first boyfriend would be her husband, she
maintained. In my second store, ZIP Istinye Park, it was a little bit more difficult to
establish emotional relationships because of the buoyant working conditions. However,
most of the workers were flirting with people from other stores (they met either in the
personnel shuttles or through friendship networks) and discussed what they knew about
in the lunch breaks.

One day, the manager Deniz told us her story of how she met her husband. Years ago, she
was working as a ‘floor responsible’ (kat sorumlusu) at a Turkish department store,
YKM, and her current husband was working there as a part-time sales assistant while he
was also attending college. On the day she was going to a vacation, he asked her for a
date. She accepted his offer and they made a deal to meet after her vacation. When she
came back a week later she found out that he started a relationship with another worker.
Deniz was extremely infuriated and decided to torture the new couple. She intervened in
their weekly working schedules and prevented them working together. Whenever they
were in the store she made sure that she was also around intimidating them. When they
wanted to go to the restroom she did not let them. After two months of such struggle the

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Indeed, Habibe was born in Istanbul. She was living in the Beykoz district, which is a
working class part of the city with the heavy occupation of illegal squatters constructed
by poor people as Habibe’s family. For Tugba, Beykoz was a village and not a part of
Istanbul; so, Habibe did not have the urban and modern ideas of a relationship with a man
and she was waiting for her husband like the insular peasants.
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girl resigned and eventually their relationship ended. Then, he started to tinker with
Deniz in order to make her forgive him. She said he endeavored to convince her that he
loved only her and he would not betray her feelings again for an entire year. Eventually
she accepted to get engaged with him. Nevertheless, she made him wait for another five
years to finally get married. Everybody was so happy that this story ended with marriage
and happiness. Deniz was warning her workers that love and emotional relations in the
store is not good at all and she would not normally support her workers when they engage
into romance in the store. She maintained that her workers should pursue that relationship
only when there was true love. Otherwise, she said, it would be better to become just
friends and protect the collegiality at the store with respecting the exceptionality of love.

During another slow day, Deniz narrated that when she was working at Mango as a
second manager, the store manager was a married woman. Yet, everybody in the store
including her realized that the manager had an affair with a female worker. She was
saying, “This was outrageous. She was married with a guy. She was having sex with a
worker. She was two-sided (iki türlü). They were both women. Three scandals were at
once. [Laughs] They were making us wait at the closings because they were kissing in the
trying rooms. During working hours, the two disappeared for an hour or so. After I
resigned I heard that the central office changed the manager’s location in order to stop
them having this at the store. She is still my friend. At one point she told her husband that
she was bisexual and seeing this woman worker. You would not believe but the three
lived together for a while. Then, they divorced but they are still friends and she is still
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with the same girl after all these years.” We were all surprised, Tugba said; “everything is
possible in the stores. We have to get used to it.”

Not all companies are as tolerant towards sexual relations between managers and workers
as Mango was. The Inditex group, for example, recently fired two managers, one from
Citron and one from Bershka, from the same shopping mall because it came out that (I
could not learn how exactly) these two managers (both women) were playing the game of
bottle spinning and seducing their male workers to have sex at their homes. I did not
know the fired managers or the workers personally and my informant Nihal told me about
this (later I confirmed this with the center office). I asked Nihal if they were all
consenting adults why the company intervenes and she answered, “Come on Cenk. Is it
possible? Go and do whatever you want with whomever you want with. But, with your
workers? They cannot say no to you. So, the manager who seduces or harasses their
workers, male or female, are using their power over them. I agree, maybe the guys were
really enjoying it, and maybe they were absolutely okay with it. However, we can never
be sure. I think that is why it is a company policy.”

When I talked about this in the store, my coworkers told that, in the ZIP Bağdat
Boulevard store there were a woman manager (around mid 30s) and a male worker (aged
20). Their friends from that store told them that she clearly liked him. Although it was not
an obvious nepotism, when possible, she was making decisions in favor of him. When he
made a mistake she did not give the reaction she normally would to other workers. While
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everybody in the store was watching them and trying to understand if they were actually
having sex, this must have heard by the center office. One day, they told me, a manager
from the human resources department came to the store and immediately fired the male
worker because there was a printed word on his t-shirt. It was against the rules, but
nobody else was fired because of this, as they told me. I, for example, was wearing
printed t-shirts everyday. Everybody, including the manager, knew that this was because
of the rumors. When I asked my coworkers why they thought the company fired the sales
assistant instead of the manager, they all told me this is how it works.
119

My coworkers also told me that one-year ago a male and a female worker were fired from
the Banana Republic Nisantasi store because they were caught while they were kissing in
the storage. Accordingly, kissing in the storage during work hours was considered against
the workplace discipline. My informants Serkan and Aysin told me that a couple of
months before our interview, the managers found two male workers and a female cleaner
having group sex in the underground storage in the Beymen Akmerkez store. They said
that the manager sent a couple of people to the underground storage (located at the -6
th

floor of the shopping mall, under the parking garage) everyday and they work there for
hours in a relaxed environment without any supervision. So, the workers and the cleaner

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Retail companies almost never fire store managers because of the high compensations
they have to pay. Instead they push the managers to resign mostly through threatening
them that if they do not resign they would not receive good reference from the company
for future employment, which will practically terminate a managers’ career in this sector.
On the other hand, firing a sales assistant is much easier and less costly especially is the
worker has been working for less a year.
400
probably felt secure to have sex there since nobody would normally come there, but they
were discovered. Serkan and Aysin told me that all three were immediately fired.

These are the real events happened in the stores or among workers and the loose
community of retail workers in Istanbul somehow communicate to exchange information
and learn about them. As I am interested in the sexual practices, I also concern the way
these sexual acts or gossips are framed in everyday conversations between sales
assistants. When they talk about sexuality, either through clandestine (and somehow
inappropriate, in terms of company policy) encounters or erotic actions between
consenting coworkers, retail workers acquire a distinct voice mediated through joy,
curiousness, fantasy, humor, and disobedience. On the one hand, retail workers
demonstrate that they are modern people, who have contemporary values about intimacy
and sexuality, that they are not insular or retrogressive; on the other hand they
reconstitute their moral subjectivities, as they do not engage these kinds of erotic actions.
What is forbidden or deemed dangerous and improper by the transnational capital’s
governance over their bodies and interpersonal relations and restrictive socio-moral
traditions is questioned, challenged, and transgressed when workers talk about sexual acts
in the store. Conversations, gossip and jokes about sexual acts, telling and retelling them
both consolidates the otherwise lacking pleasure and excitement in worker’s lives, while
they provide another way of being in the world, becoming subjects, as I have discussed in
Chapter 5.

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There is also gendered pattern in this speech acts. Generally, it is male workers who
initiate chats about erotic escapades of other workers and managers in the retail sector
while women workers are positioned as passive listeners. During the act of such
blathering, appropriate and challenging gender roles and gendered expectations in the
workplace are reconfigured. When latest news are distributed by a male worker, such as
two workers were caught making sexual jokes to each other, most male workers
participate the conversation through asking questions about details and producing humor
about the real and imagined aspects of the event. Most women workers listen to this chat
curiously yet silently. Instead, they whisper about what they listened later when they are
alone with other women workers in the absence of men. When Yildiray runs into the
locker room with his unending information about other people’s sexual lives and
performances, ‘the silent girls’ remained even more silent than they usually were. When I
talked to Sevgi, one of the silent girls, she said, “There is another culture here [than the
one she was familiar to]. At home, I am not used to listen these things when there are
men in the room. We do not talk like this in my family. Also, in school we were taught
that some issues were girls and some were boys. Issues about sex were definitely boys’
matter. When we [girls] talk about it we did it as if we were ding something shameful.
We were ashamed. So, when [in the locker room] they make jokes about these, using
explicit words to describe the actions, I do not exactly know how I should feel about it or
how I should act.” When my coworkers recounted me the occasion on the ZIP Bagdat
Boulevard, I noticed that Habibe was just listening and not making any comments. When
I asked about this in our interview, she said, “I know I should be more open to these kind
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of stories. I do not live anything [sexually] and that does not mean nobody does. These
[workers] are young, modern people here and they want to talk about everything without
censure. I guess I am a little more conservative than them. Yet, I am not against it. I am
just slightly more ashamed than them when it comes to sexual things.” However, against
this projected women’s passive, shaming, distant role against sex talk, there are always
women workers who reclaim the field of sexuality (at least, talk about sexuality) inn
order to prove their agency as modern, adult, free individuals. Sevda was for example
was the most radiant participant of such conversations about eroticism and she even
talked about her own experiences when people around her were more personal. She was
also the first one in the store who informed other workers that Yildiray and Muazzez had
sex with intimate details
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. In the ZIP Kanyon store, Sanem was kind of closer to this
profile: An educated girl, who is not ashamed of talking about sexuality, even men’s
jokes that she laughs at them and even exchange and reciprocate them although she never
put herself in the midst of conversation. Other workers deemed female workers like
Sevda, Muazzez and Sanem as more modern, more ‘open,’ and less conservative. They
were named as maverick (yırtık) –a term usually used for men. Thus, talking about
sexuality in public, just like having sex, calibrates gender norms and reposition gendered
individuals according to moral and social standards in the shopping malls.

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I tried to conduct an interview with Sevda but after she was fired from Citron she sued
the company and received a high compensation. She quitted retail work and opened a
small grocery store in a small town in Mugla, southwestern Turkey on the Mediterranean
coast, where she moved with her mother and brother. Later, she left the store to her
brother and started to work for a bank in the same town. I could reach her by telephone
and we talked for half an hour about the how she remembers her days in Istanbul, in
shopping malls and the process of her going to the court against Citron.
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The Masculinized Worker and the Feminized Customer

In the store, a customer is feminized through the encounter he or she has with a sales
assistant. For most cases, a customer cannot help herself; she cannot find her way in the
store. She has to be taken care of. She must be guided into the predetermined
consumption activity in her leisure time, in which she takes garments into serious
consideration and spend some time for them. Looking at the particular models and colors
and having fun and pleasure out of the shopping activity makes the customer more and
more feminine in workers’ eyes. Cihan, for example, says, “I can understand the women
customers. Their entire world is shopping, looking at the clothes, trying them, and asking
for colors and sizes. But, what’s wrong with men? I would want to ask them if I had a
chance, what are you doing here? Go and sit somewhere, at a café, drink your coffee like
a master, like a man. Leave the store to women. Be a man!”

In this context, the worker, whether actually a man or a woman turns to be gendered –or,
he genders himself in Salzinger’s (2004) words- as masculine. At that moment in the
store, the worker labors and he does not have fun, he has a responsibility, a task to fulfill.
It is a complex bodily and mental process that he deals with many different people, he
helps people, most of the time needy people –the feminized customers, he should be
strong and diligent, and work for him is not shameful but it is a field that he constructs
his honor and dignity. If a person works, this makes him honorable, respectable and noble
whatever the sort of job he is into. While the masculine subject reconfirms his honor in
404
the workplace, through laboring, the woman gets esteem and appreciation as she stays at
home, concerns with private issues and devotes her time to her family. The classical
construction of spatial and social gender duality between the private and public spheres
works through the commonsensical notions like the ‘honor and dignity of the working
man’ while every reiteration of this cliché reminds the unemployed men’s failure in being
honorable and women’s assumed place in the private domain. When men enter into the
store, perform leisure by shopping, being a customer –a culturally feminized position
although increasingly challenged- they are automatically relocated to a contrasting
position with the ‘honorable, working men’ against the actual working bodies with
masculinized dignity, whether they are actually men or women.

For example, Tugba says, “I do not find the customer men attractive although there are
ones among them whom I would normally have a crush on. When they wander in the
store, when they look at the clothes, when they ask me something [pause] it is such a
turn-off to me; it is very feminine. When women do this, it is okay. We all do it; it is a
part of us. We like to be taken care of. However, when I serve to a confused man in the
store, I feel like I am the master and he is the one I protect and govern. It was so funny.”
Sinem also emphasizes the same point, “Although this is not a particularly masculine job,
work [outside home] is something for men. I always have the sense that whenever I serve
to men, or women, I become more and more manly. As people say, I am working with
honor and that makes me more mature, more masculine. It is like, I do not know, feeling
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like being a butcher [laughs]. And, when I go to a store as a customer, there I feel that I
am a woman, like a princess. When I work, I cannot feel the woman inside me.”

Where and when else they can connect with ‘the woman inside’ them or project
femininity?
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Ideal womanhood for the new working class women is definitely not
established through work and labor relations. Instead, becoming a real woman, or more
feminine, is imagined through the process of quitting job, leaving the shopping mall,
finding a husband, getting married, and having children. This is the ultimate scenario
most of my informants desire in their collective dreams. When my former coworker and
informant Aysin was pregnant we were working in the same shopping mall, Kanyon,
during her last 2 months of work before the birth. When we do have lunches or dinner
together all female retail workers that she or I knew made similar comments about how
they wished the same for themselves: A nice husband with high enough salary to feed a
family. Aysin was ‘so lucky’ that she was saving herself from the shopping mall, the
cage, and all retail workers hoped that that she would be really happy after that point in
her life –as if all marriages are happy and there is nor risk of divorce.

My female colleagues in the store were totally preoccupied with how they appeared, how
they could improve their styles, and which particular hair color or accessories look good
with their bodies. Concern for the physical outline and fashion were inherently and
irreversible feminine for them. Okan, a male sales assistant who was working at the

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Evren Savci reminded me to include this argument here.
406
Banana Republic next door, was wearing really expensive clothes with an explicitly
elegant taste as well as long hair, which my coworkers agreed that it was difficult to take
care of. My women coworkers thought him as feminine because of his exaggerated
attention to how he looked although we all knew that he was heterosexual. The store
manager Deniz was criticized by female workers (even by men sometimes) because she
was wearing causal clothes, loose t-shirts, blue jeans and sneakers, having no make-up on
her face, and her hair was rather in its natural shape, not done. She focused on work and
she put the codes of her feminine appearance behind and these qualities for my coworkers
denoted a failure in enacting a real woman. On the other hand, in stores where women
managers wear high-fashion, bold clothes, put make up and get their hairs done, female
workers’ admiration to them increase exponentially. More feminine women managers in
terms of appearance and style are better, more desired alternatives for female sales
assistants. Therefore, women retail workers’ conception of womanhood, their thoughts on
the cultural models of emphasized femininity are mediated and bounded with the sacred
marriage-quitting work narrative and otherwise, if they have to continue working retail,
with the up-to-date, chic, exquisite images of women managers and even some regular
customers.

Gender and Retail Work

As I pointed out above, women predominated all the stores in which I worked. Although
some companies explicitly opt for male managers in the stores, like Mango, neither ZIP
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nor Citron had such preference. So, they had managers from both sexes. However, Citron
has not employ any men as a store manager until very recently. Men were only able to
become section managers (women’s, men’s, and children’s) and the highest point was
reserved only for women. When I talked to a human resources worker in August 2009 she
told me that they had only four male store managers and three of them were gay men.
The only straight male manager, she articulated, was working at the Fatih store (an
Islamic district of Istanbul). When I talked to Deniz about the sex of the managers she
told me that she believed the different advantages and the disadvantages of being a male
manager in a women’s store, or vice versa. Nevertheless, she added, a children’s store
manager should be either female or a gay man. When I asked why was that, she said, a
straight guy would not understand the children and babies’ stuff. When I asked her, as a
manager, with whom the workers could get along better, she said, “It depends on people.
I have been doing this job for almost 15 years and I have worked in all positions in many
brands. It is really hard to generalize. [Pause] However, I think I can say that the opposite
sexes deal with each other better, like male workers like female managers, and vice versa.
But, it is really conditional. Look at our store. The person hates me most is a man and all
the girls like me. So, it is not always true with the opposite sexes thing.”

I consistently asked this kind of questions to my informants. Almost all of them stated
that the hypothesis of “opposite sexes like each other” is true in the stores especially with
who the managers protect more: Male managers favor women workers, and vice versa.
When I asked about gay and lesbian managers, although none of my informants worked
408
with a lesbian manager before, most of the time they said, queer managers were rather
objective and they did not judge people according to their sexes. When I asked how did
they see this job, as a men’s job or as a women’s job, they mostly defended their own
gender identities fit this job better. While men were trying to neutralize this job and get
rid of its ambivalent stigmatization as a “women’s job,” women were, on the other hand,
making retail work less of women’s job in order to increase its status and the low-wages
they earn out of it. When I asked, which sex is more advantageous in the retail sector,
most of the male informants said, “women because they better understand the clothes
than men and they can better grasp the needs of customers.” While women said, “being a
man is better because then they [the center office and the directors] listen to you more
carefully as if you say more important things than women and they would promote you
easily.”

Do tasks and responsibilities of work in the store differentiate according to sex of the
workers? In Citron stores and in the second ZIP that I worked there was not any
difference. In the first ZIP store, Deniz always assigned more physical jobs (like
arranging the lower storage at the -4
th
floor, carrying multiple boxes or clothing the
mannequins) to the male workers if they were available. When I asked her while she
always sent men to the lower storage she said, “They are men. I am letting them to hang
out over there. Also, it is a deserted place under the parking lot. Girls might be scared
there.” Nevertheless, Cihan complaint when I asked him what was he thinking about the
job segregation, “I am not a storage worker (depocu) but I am a sales assistant. This job is
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supposed be a civilized one not carrying boxes and cleaning the sheet in the
underground.” When I reminded him that Deniz was choosing him as one of the two best
performance workers in the store he said, “Yes of course she does. She chooses me
because she uses me as a storage worker. She knows that if I decide to leave the store she
will be in trouble. To whom she will send there? I think girls should also go down and
work there. We are equals and we receive the same amount of money. So whatever I have
to do here, they should also be responsible for.”

Another informant of mine, Levent works at the Diesel store in the crowded Istiklal
Street. He says, “Every morning we have to go to the storage, which is in Galatasaray (15
minutes walking distance). Since the street is closed to car traffic, we have to walk to the
storage, get the apparels and carry them to the store. It sounds okay but we do this by a
wheelbarrow as if this is a construction site and we are amele (construction worker, daily
laborer). I think this is an insult. And of course, only male workers should do this.
Women workers are putting lipstick and watch the passerby behind the windows while
we, ameles, bring garments on the street via the wheelbarrow. I made complaints for this
many times and I always got the same answer that this was a company policy and women
were not allowed to do this task. At this point I revolt because we work under the same
title for the same money. Then you [the company] cannot divide us between easier and
harder, more shameful jobs just because they are girls and we are boys. It is so simple: If
they cannot work, then do not hire them.”

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Except these two cases of gendered tasks in the stores, it might be suggested that there is
an absolute equality between women and men workers in terms of the amount of money
they receive and their responsibilities in the store. The nonexistence of gendered division
of labor in the retail sector unquestionably depends on the prevailing notions of
modernity and globality in Turkey as well as the fact that many women occupy high
positions at administrative positions including the store managers, regional coordinators,
brand directors and human resources departments.

The Gendered Escalator and Ceiling

Is there a gendered pattern among workers in terms of their desire or plans to become
managers in the future? Some of my informants verbalized that it was deemed more
‘normal’ for male workers, who satisfy the qualifications like graduating from college
and speaking in a foreign language, to expect to become managers soon than women
workers who have the same qualifications. For example, Sanem says, “when a boy comes
to the store, let’s say just about finishing his college education, of course he and
everybody else in the store think that if he stays in this business, he will become a
manager in a year or two. Otherwise he would not stay.” When I asked her about female
workers, she says “well it is also same for the girls. But, I tend to think that with men, the
process is faster. Maybe because there are more women than men in this business, and
the promotion process seems faster to me when men are at stake.” Berke, a brand director
in charge, says, “It does not really matter whether they are men or women when we
411
consider making them managers. There are men, who are not suitable to perform
administrative tasks, and there are women, who are great fits. Their character is more
important. They should be strong, decisive, and able to control their feelings. These
sound like more masculine qualities, but it depends on the person.” Gulcan, an
experienced female sales assistant, says, “I know that I cannot be a manager […] because
you need to be like a dictator to manage all these people as well as the customers. When
you say something, it should be done immediately, and if not, you must be able to fire
people. Otherwise, this place would not work. You need to be really conscienceless. I am
not. […] Male workers, at least most of them are more ambitious if they want to stay in
the store. A man would not listen to your excuses. He just looks at your work and judges
you with your work. He would not easily believe in your lies. Look at the female
managers. In this sense, they are all like men. They are all experts of human capacities
(insan sarrafı). They look at your eyes and can tell the dream you saw last night
[laughs].”

While a kind of “ambiguous escalator” exists for men, at least for some masculine
features dispersed amongst bodies, in the retail sector in Turkey, there is not a glass
ceiling for women workers. They can climb the ladder as fast as they wish, as in Şale’s
case above. This is not reflecting over an overgeneralizing meritocracy. Instead, the
examples of women’s upward mobility are frequently pronounced in this sector in order
to encourage women workers by the managers and company administrators. Without an
exception, all my informants and coworkers told me that, unlike other fields of business,
412
retail sector provides a perfect gendered equality for workers’ advancement. For
example, Tugba says, “My aunt is a high school graduate. She cannot speak in English
except very few, basic words. She has been in this job for more than fifteen years and
now she is a second manager at a Marks & Spencer store. Only in this job, such a
disqualified, married middle-aged woman could be promoted like this. I always knew that
I would not go to the college either because we are poor (durumumuz yok). So, I always
took her as a model for myself. I always told myself that is she was able to do this, you
also are.” Oray also notes, “Indeed, this is a female industry. If you work at a company
[in another field], you can see that women cannot progress that much. There are a few
unimportant women managers and then all others are men at the top. But here, you can
always see that women are at the top. These companies are European and they protect
women. Also, women know this business better than men. For example, men are better in
terms of engineering and women are better in terms of sales. There is no reason here for a
woman to be stopped.”

In addition to the relatively clear situation in the retail industry in Istanbul that there is no
glass escalator for men and glass ceiling for women workers (Williams 1995; Baxter and
Wright 2000), men are not promoted just because they are men and women are stopped
just because they are women, I would argue that the dynamics of the glass escalator and
ceiling are not sexed but gendered. In other words, nobody is discriminated or receives
nepotism because of her/his sex, whether they are male of female, but they are treated
differentially according to their gender identity: What kind of men or women they are.
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Basically, men who appropriate and embody the new hegemonic masculinity are
promoted while men who are insistent upon enacting traditional forms of working class
manhood are eliminated. On the other hand, women who can exhibit certain traits that are
culturally coded as masculine are deemed as better fits for managerial positions. In
Istanbul’s apparel stores, any person can be advanced and become store managers or
center office workers in various departments, but for this, s/he must entail the required
gendered performances and subjectivities. Therefore, it is an achievement, a process
workers engage, and not a matter of pregiven sex identities.
122

“Every Woman Was Born as a Salesclerk”

Work in the store, duties and responsibilities, is naturalized and attached to femininity.
As Sule says, “A woman is automatically a salesclerk. It does not matter whether she is
good at it, or she is not. Women do the laundry, iron and fold clothes, etc. Tasks we do
here are just extensions of tasks we would normally do at home. There, you have to take
care of your children and your husband, sometimes of the elderly; here you have to deal
with the customers. If you do not know how to cook, you would learn. Here is the same,

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The invisible dynamics of promotion also works through class lines. Everybody in the
apparel stores in Istanbul knows that the middle-class workers, such as university
students who work part-time for having a pocket money or gain experience, can have
higher chances to be promoted if they decide to stay in the retail business. Since their
educations and language abilities are better and their class demeanors naturally match
with the company expectations they can be easily assigned to higher positions. On the
contrary, people from squatter areas or popular classes have to endeavor more to climb
the ladder and most retail workers and managers whom I spoke to believed that without a
serious transformation of selves and bodies, working class people cannot become
managers at least in modern, transnational stores.
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you are expected to know and if you do not, you will learn it. Male workers do not have
to learn excellent folding. Everybody says they are male, they cannot make it well.”
Sevda also makes a similar point, “Women are more sensitive if the store is untidy and
they honestly try to tidy it up while men do not care just like they do not care at home.
While we try to fold everything fast and go home soon, guys just have fun. It does not
bother them. Also, men do not talk about garments when they are free. It is not a valid
subject of conversation for them and we think and talk about it all the time. It is a part of
our lives. […] When women start working as salesclerk, it is a normal continuum of their
lives; nothing is new or special. Men are not like this. They resist entering into this
culture. I think that is why most men cannot do this job and quit. Every woman was born
as a salesclerk and this makes their lives easier here.”

Another discursive naturalization happens through underscoring how women have
presupposed lenience works well with the requirements of retail work. This discourse
simultaneously position men as the natural other of the ideal worker in the stores. For
example, Eda says, “Women are softer, more cheerful, nurturing, relaxed, and dexterous
than men. Stores are stressful places. Only the high sound of the music can destroy your
nerve system and make you more aggressive. Here, everybody is tired, everybody is in
rush, everybody is busy, the line in front of the counter is long, the trying rooms are full,
and the best selling garments are sold out, etc. At one point, there is no patience, you just
want to scream and run out. I think it is easier for men than women to come to this point.
A woman is calmer than a man. She takes care of the customer even when the customer is
415
being intolerable. She mitigates the customer’s rage by explaining things and smiling to
her. A male worker would answer with the same tone. He raises his voice. […] Go and
ask everybody. All the time it is women, who take care of angry customers, not male
workers. Even if he does not give an angry answer, he would look in a certain way to
express his feelings and make the customer more indignant. Men are looking for a chance
to hit to the customer or swear to her. It is the way they grow up. And this contradicts
with the essence of this job.”

Discursive naturalization continues through kindness. Accordingly, courtesy is inherently
gendered: Women are kinder than men, and hence they are better fit for the service
sector. Aysin says, “A man cannot be as kind as a woman. If he tries to be so, he cannot
be a real man any more. So being a man and being very kind cannot go together in the
same person. This is what our society tells us. Also men are physically more unalterable.
It is more difficult for men to be flexible [might be both in physical and relational
meanings]. This is a matter of politeness; everything depends on politeness in this job.
So, women do this job much better than men.” Sanem agrees, “There are heavy jobs that
a woman can not work at, in terms of her body. This is not about feminism or being raped
at work. I do not know. We cannot become miners or truck drivers. You cannot do these
jobs just because you are woman. Working at a store is not a sharp example like these. It
is in the middle. But I still think it is closer to women than men. I know many guys start
to work at stores, however this does not change the fact that this is a job for women. Men
are just imitating us.”
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Professionalization

People I have spoken to consider two types of jobs. The first group involves a
standardized occupation, professionalization, unionization, job security, benefits, higher
payments, and long years of tenure. In their words, this group of jobs belongs to men.
Accordingly, the second group consists of temporary, unimportant, unskilled, part-time,
flexible, low-wage and low-status jobs, which does not require a specific education. This
form of employment is reserved for men. Most of my informants talked about this
common belief among members of the society even tough they do not necessarily share
it. They also indicated that retail work is deemed within the second group. On the other
hand, I have discussed in chapter 3 that the state is reprogramming its educational system
in order to produce professional sales assistants. When I inquire about this I found out
that almost all of my coworkers and informants (including the managers) were in favor of
professionalism through a gendered twist.

Male workers advocate it because they believe it will masculinize the job. For example,
Yildiray says, “The state should take initiative and open more schools including the
university departments like it does for tourism. Our job and tourism workers’ job are not
really different but their education is well established. So, they are respected more and
they earn more just because of their better professionalization. If a guy says ‘I am a
tourism high-school [a vocational school] graduate and I work at the front desk of a hotel,
it is fine. He earns at least double of my salary. When I say I am a salesclerk at the best
417
store, and then I become ‘a piece of a salesclerk.’ Nobody gives a shit to me.” Cihan
makes the same point, “If this job is going to be more professional by the contribution of
the state and the companies we will benefit from it, especially the male workers. Because
it will be easier for us to defend our job in front of our families and friends as if we will
be doing something more serious. Its quality will be the same but its prestige and pay will
increase. More men can work retail under these conditions. It will continue to be
perceived as a women’s job if it will stay in this position.”

Female workers approach the professionalization discussion with a similar standpoint
they defend about men’s entry into the job. Accordingly, more men should work retail,
and professionalization is also welcome for gaining status and higher salaries. On the
other hand, they tend to think that this job will be essentially feminine although more
men would enter. For example, Ozlem says, “I support the company in the
professionalization efforts. We do an important job and we deserve better payment and
benefits. The only way to do that is to invite more men into the stores. As long as only
women engage into working retail we will not receive anything better than this. If more
men start to work here, the company will have to take their families, wives, and children
into consideration. This will eventually increase our salaries because there [he] should
take care of at least another person. […] More men’s entry into this job would not change
its organization. Women are always a better fit for this job. We have much better
performance at the stores. But we need more men to gain respect.” As a manager, Gul
thinks in the same way, “Look at the education industry. We are bigger in terms of
418
financial capacity; our value is bigger. However, my workers receive less than teachers.
Why? There are two reasons. They receive better education at the college. But, there is
not any department at the college for sales assistantship. [I tell her there are now such
departments] Okay (in English) that is perfect. If they ask me I would prefer all my
workers chosen from the graduates of these departments. Managing more professional
people will also increase my prestige. […] The second thing is about the male teachers.
Although they are a minority, the state or the private employers should consider male
teachers when they make payments because a man cannot work for the same money with
a woman. He has to provide a family; a woman does not. So, she can live with lower
salaries. If more men will enter this business through professionalization, this will also
improve our women workers’ living conditions.”

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Erkan:
Erkan is one of ZIP’s window-dressers (vitrinci), the person who organizes the windows
according to the new collections and garments, twice a month on average. Whenever I
saw him working in the store I noticed that everybody was trying to ignore him. He was
not obviously the kindest or most lovely person in the store, but he was not biting
anybody either. I was thinking that people were not treating him nice since he came to the
stores really rare (because he rotates), however one day one of my coworkers warned me
not to deal with him. She said, Erkan might be really aggressive and audacious toward
other workers. I said okay but did not take it seriously. In the second ZIP store I worked,
I observed what she meant. Erkan was working in the windows and a female sales
assistant was helping him while I was folding a table near them. Either she did not
understand what he was saying or he gave a wrong command and she put the wrong
garment on a wrong place. It could be redone in two seconds. He just said, “You do not
understand anything, you stupid bitch.” She and I froze. She angrily asked him how he
could talk with her like this and who did he think he was. He challenged her and shouted,
“I said what I said, and would I be scared from you? What are you going to do about
that?” I was thinking to call the manager because Erkan seemed really furious to her and I
sensed that he might have hit her if she would give another vehement answer to him. She
left the window and called the manager. The manager, Tolga, came in and talked to him
in an assertive manner. He said, “You do this all the time. I have to inform the center
office about your unacceptable behavior in the store. Now, take a break and cool down.”
Weeks later, through a mutual friend’s help, I conducted an unrecorded interview with
him. During the hour we spent together in a coffee shop, he kept complaining from the
feminine character of the retail sector and the store workers. He seemed like he honestly
did not think that what he was doing, the way he talked to the workers and managers, was
wrong. He said, “I am just a tough guy. I am not a criminal and I am not dealing with
customers at all. I do not have to be too nice like them. When I am angry I just swear but
they act like this was the most important thing in the world, as if I killed somebody.
What’s wrong to say fuck off to an idiot salesclerk. They want all of us to be weakling
(çıtkırıldım) [makes effeminate gestures] well I am not. Seriously, I do not give a fuck
(hiç sikimde değil); my job is to prepare the window. They can do whatever they want (ne
bok yerlerse yesinler).” His sense of ‘tough masculinity’ was clearly conflicting with the
hegemonic masculinity of the retail sector, which prioritizes kindness and proper
conduct. After we talked that day I guessed that the company would not let this to last
long. Although he was an extremely talented window-dresser, they fired him the
following month.

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Gender Remakes Class, and Vice Versa

Scholars have elucidated that elements of the axis of social differences, i.e. class, race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the body, age, location, nationality, language, religion and
belief systems, operate simultaneously and inseparably in time and space in an
interactional, overlapping, inseparable fashion
123
. Put in other words, the construction and
navigation of social identities occur through the representation of bodies and the
embodiment process with reference to a variety of contingent relations of power and
culture in increasingly multi-scalar amalgamations from local to global. The relative
coordinates of men and women within employment patterns and division of labor are
essential to public debates on the connection between class and gender in urban Turkey.
Gendered lives in the neoliberal order are forming the frame of the new working class by
articulated to ethnic divisions, anti-Islamism, and the global culture of consumerism.

Feminist social scientists have long been documenting the occupational ghettos that
women are put and the marginalization of women labor force in capitalist organizations
via lower wages and less prestigious positions. In this dissertation, I would argue that for
the first time in the history of Turkish society, a significant economic field, the retail
sector is developing through absolute gendered equality, even women’s advantage, in
pays and promotions. This novel configuration of class and gender definitely affects

123
See for example, Ortner 2006; Bunzl 2004; Fenstermaker and West 2002; Bettie 2003;
Skeggs 1997; Parker 1999; Collins 1986; Alexander 2005; Lancaster and di Leonardo
1997; and McCall 2005 among others.
421
families that young people are supposed to form. Delayed marriages and especially
women’s hesitation toward having children in the retail sector demonstrates the
problematic status of family as a stable of unit of social stratification (through the
‘household income’ tables) in the neoliberal economies. In addition to the contested place
of heterosexual families, the position of breadwinner is also questioned as I demonstrate
later.

The bodies and selves of the new working class that neoliberal policies push to the
service sectors at large (alongside the ‘wasted lives’ as Zygmunt Bauman [2004] refers)
are constituted through the situated intersectionalities of class and gender. In this section,
I show that ‘doing gender’ is integrated into a complex system of social hierarchy and
inequality, which also incorporates the process of class-making (Skeggs 2004) or classed
performativity (Bettie 2003)
124
among workers in the apparel stores in Istanbul. I also
argue that gender relations and gendered attributes intersect and further elaborate class
identities, and in return, classed backgrounds and embodiments determine and reshape
gendered relations.

124
As I have discussed in chapter 3, there two basic discrimination in the workforce pool
in the retail sector in Turkey: Kurds and Islamists. While male and female citizens of
Kurdish decent are systematically denied working retail regarding the requirement of
‘speaking Turkish properly,’ which Kurds may fail and speak in regional accents;
Islamist women are not admitted because of their headscarves. There is not a visible
obstacle for Islamist men but as I recounted in chapter 3 even when an Islamist man starts
to work, he would not be able to survive in the modern, secular culture of shopping malls.
In addition to these two major discriminations within the stores, fat people are also
excluded in most stores.
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Gendered and Classed Labor Force

Feminist studies on work and workplace have emphasized the strong cultural belief that
men are better hires than women since they can devote all their time and energy to their
jobs while women would be busy with familial responsibilities. This is not true for the
retail sector in Turkey. A great majority of my informants noted that companies hire
working class, young and single people who are living with their families. They have
neither children to take care of nor bills to pay. It is a way of sustaining the cheap,
dependent, and grateful labor force. Most sales assistants and cashiers (with the exception
of college students) do not have a dream or plan to leave their parents’ houses and live
alone although the idea of separating from parents before marriage and living alone is an
increasingly powerful ideal for the middle classes. Poorer segments of the society do not
have such tendencies. Therefore classed expectations shape hiring policies of
transnational companies. Since it is financially difficult to get married for the working
class people, they prioritize livelihood and delay their marriages for years. This
predilection enables companies to hire both women as well as men workers because there
is no anxiety or risk for them about women workers who will be preoccupied with their
families.

Another factor of opting for women workers might be their docility against orders by
managers and flexibility in terms of working hours. For example, Habibe says, “I never
give rude answers (diklenmem) to managers like most male workers do. Even when they
423
are getting angry with me when I did not do anything wrong, I keep myself silent and
calm. When they ask me to work full for two or three days, or when they change my
schedule I never rebel like male workers.” During my working tenure in the store, I
always felt the tension Habibe refers to. It is always harder for managers to convince
male workers in changing their working times and asking for longer hours. Also, verbal
fights between managers and workers are always more intense when the involved worker
is male. When we were talking about these observations my informant Sevda agreed,
“When men [workers] have fights with the managers it never ends easily because men do
not know how to stop. They are so ruthless! If [the fight] goes there, they just quit.”

I would contest that such an aggressive attitude against manager’s demands and orders
originates not only from the gender of the worker but also their class identities. Working
class masculinity is constructed through disobedience, disservice, opposition with the
authority, challenging and resisting what is asked from the masculine subject, while
middle class manhood underscores negotiation, civility and rationality instead of
brutality. As Cihan says, “most male workers are weak and fragile before a manager or
before life in general. They are uneducated, poor, and excluded. Even girls do not mind
them. There is nobody around to get scared or dominate. [He] is furious and ready to
explode like a bomb and then a manager comes and starts to shout at his face. He simply
cannot tolerate it. [The managers] do not want to understand. They always say that better-
educated male workers were easier to work with. Who is better educated in Turkey? The
rich. Why is it easier to work with them? Because they are not angry towards [the
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managers], or towards life in general. He knows that it is in his hands to come here to
work. If he does not want to work, he can simply resign. It is not that easy for the poor
worker. His life is harder, he is angrier. […] Educated women are also difficult to work
with because they have self-assurance and they might be more annoying to defend their
rights. So, I am telling you the great combination: The poor, uneducated, miserable girls,
who thank God they have this fucking (boktan) job and the middle class (orta direk)
educated men, who is happy with the job and probably wants to remain within this
business to get promoted.”

Empowerment & Disempowerment

My coworkers and informants frequently mentioned that there was a forceful public
image of retail workers as indigent and miserable people who do a part-time, low-status,
trivial job just because they did not have any other option. Although it might be true that
they do not have a better option for employment, such a perception among masses may
hide the complex gendered dynamics of power relations that workers construct through
this job. It would not be wrong to state that, despite all the difficulties they encounter,
women workers empower themselves vis-à-vis other actors in their lives. The stable and
sometimes relatively high (for their own standards) income; being registered and having
the coverage for basic health-related expenses (insurance); having the autonomy to be
outside domestic space in irregular hours; dealing with numerous types of people and
having experience to negotiate with different classes; and the chance of creating a
425
‘working girl’ profile in their families make the young, high-school graduate women
more respected and self-seeking amongst their social circles.
125
My coworker Alev told
me one day that she uses work and family against each other, “When Tolga [our
manager] asks me to stay late although I am not scheduled so, I tell him that my father
gets angry when I am late before telling him before. He gets angry but he cannot say
anything to me. When my father is angry with me since I go out at night on weekends, I
tell him that this was my job and I was staying for the late shift. So neither side could
oppress me. I make them conflict with each other and I navigate through (ikisini birbirine
kırdırıp, aradan sıyrılıyorum).”

On the other hand, working in the retail sector is most probably disempowering for male
workers. When we were talking about differences of being a man or a woman in this job,
Kaan said, “Who am I? I am a salesclerk! Who respects me? Nobody. When I told her I
am tired, my mother disparagingly says ‘as if he is doing a great job.’ When my father

125
I was having lunch with two female coworkers, Habibe and Tugba, after a couple of
days I started to work at the first ZIP store. Since Tugba also started to work just before
me, the two also did not know each other well. Most of the time, they were talking and I
was listening to them. Tugba was recounting how she worked for Mudo for five years,
resigned, and then started to work here. Habibe asked, “For how long you took a rest at
home before starting here?” Within seconds, I thought it must have been a couple of
months after working for five years, but, to my surprise, Tugba said, “for two weeks.”
Habibe nodded and said, “Oh that is more than enough.” I could not help myself to
murmur, “Why did not you take your time a little bit more?” They both looked at my face
as if I said something obviously meaningless. Tugba said, “My alternative was staying at
home: Wash the dishes, bring some tea for your father, wait for your sister, [in her
mother’s mouth] now you are not a working girl, you should do this and that, etc. Instead
of staying at home, I would come and work here and get my money.” Habibe approved.
That day I thought a lot about why they were there, working at this difficult and low-
paying job and what was their alternative: Staying at home?
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gives me an order and I cannot fulfill it because of my work, he just says ‘quit it. It is not
a real job.’ My girlfriend always implies that I need to get a real job. Her father always
says, ‘I do not have a daughter to give a little salesclerk (tezgahtar parcası). I am the only
one among my friends who does this job. Sometimes, they make jokes about it. They
imitate me as if I am speaking effeminately to sell clothes to women. They say, ‘you can
be security guard instead of this job.’ I like my job; it pays well. But I am really tired of
being insulted just because I work here.” Yildiray agrees with the overall subordination
of men in this predominantly female occupation, “If I was working at another job for the
same money, more people would respect me. […] Like at a factory or in a coal mine; any
job in which you do not have to deal with people and obey their caprices. I think the
problem is not the cleanness of the work or its pay. Accordingly, men should not work in
a job setting in which everybody can come and regulate him (ayar vermek), intervene
him. For women there is not such an issue, their life is easier, [it] just affects men.”

Gender & Class

In the culture of retail work, how one feels comfortable with the opposite sex, the ways in
which one interacts with them, and how the issues of love, eroticism, flirtation and
sexuality emerge in the conversations and jokes determine, or secure, one’s class
position. If a worker is diffident and distant towards the members of the other sex, if his
or her socialization is delimited with his or her own sex, if s/he avoids being involved in
sexual and emotional relations (because s/he does not know how to act properly, or s/he
427
thinks that nobody would like him/her) and in the moments of joking or gossiping s/he is
nervous or panicked these imply that this person is coming from a lower socio-economic
background, or from the “lower strata” (alt kesim) as my informants verbalized it. If the
worker is relaxed and open with his or her relations with the opposite sex, s/he is
confident in groups of both sexes, s/he seems open to emotionality or eroticism with the
other sex and s/he actually seeks it, and s/he is not blushed when s/he is approached by
others this worker is deemed as more middle class, “middle strata” (orta kesim).

This polarization through gender and class is contingent on the greater social division in
Turkish society between the modernizing, secular, educated, urban middle classes and the
traditional, more religious-conservative, rural-based migrant popular classes who live in
the informal squatter areas (varoş) in the outskirts of big cities as I have argued in
Chapter 2. Thus, gender relations, or gendered attributes, as well as talking and practicing
sexuality classifies workers into these two broad social poles with all the connotations
that this division brings in. In this sense, a worker who is open to flirtation and feeling all
right in socializing with members of the other sex is seen as a part of the modern middle
class, Istanbulite culture. His or her parents married with love and not because of their
parent’s desire, they were graduated at least from high school, they have sufficient
money, his or her mother is not covered according to the fundamentalist Islamism, his or
her parents support their children education and well-being and tried to bring up their
children as modern, independent, free individuals. On the other hand, a worker who is
hesitant and anxious about gendered socialization and sexuality means that s/he is coming
428
from a disenfranchised background, her or his parents migrated to Istanbul from rural
areas and located in varoş districts of Istanbul, they were married by their families’
decision, religiosity is dominant in their community, virginity is deeemed vital for girls,
and education is not significant in a person’s well-being. Put in other words, approaches
to gendered issues and sexuality denote the person’s classed location in society and
consolidate his or her public image as interpreted by others in the workplace.

This enmeshment in gender, sexuality, and social class was one of the hardest issues in
my fieldwork process to detect and formulate. I did not have truly insightful answers
when I tried to talk about this in the recorded interviews.
126
However, I had better chance
to catch the ways of classed and gendered imagination of workers and labeling each other
in the first ZIP store where I worked for 10 weeks and observed a small amount of
people. Instead of formal questions and interviews, ‘small talk,’ illicit gossip, and
discontinuous jokes among workers elaborate this sort of stereotyping. Cihan, for
example, while working next to each other, was making comments about female workers.

126
A theme that was often reproduced in my informants’ accounts was the belief that
lower class (heterosexual) men and women do not know to be friends with the members
of the opposite sex. Therefore, Tugba for example, noted, “I can be friend with the girls,
no problem, although I would not want to be their friends for most of the time. With the
boys, it is more complicated. Gay men are naturally okay. With straight men, varoş boys
cannot talk to me because they never have a girl friend as a friend. They always hang out
with other men and in their culture, women are reserved to have sex with and not to talk
or share something. With the educated, middle-strata boys, of course there are dogs
between them, I can be friends and chat about things. I hope I do not sound like I have
prejudices about people. This is what I have lived in the last five years in this job.”
Therefore, friendship between sexes is highly classed among retail workforce in Istanbul.
A number of my informants verbalized similar ideas about it, while another group
opposed such a generalization and defended it is contingent upon the specific individuals
involved.
429
In his understanding, Sanem (a college student who lives with her sister) was a modern
girl; she had boyfriends before and she would have in the future especially if she would
lose some weight. Tugba on the other hand was not as relaxed as Sanem since she was
living with her parents and they intervened in the hours she could come home. But still,
she was coming from a poor but relatively modern family, he maintained, because she did
not have any problems in dealing with men either as a friend or as potential boyfriends.
However, Habibe constituted a reverse example. She is from varoş districts and whenever
Cihan and others made jokes about men, she became tense and shy. Cihan mentioned that
he believed Habibe’s mother is covered with an Islamic headscarf and the male members
of her family would react if they ever heard that she had a relationship with a man.

In the second ZIP store I worked, Sevgi was abjected in the way her coworkers ridiculed
Habibe’s restricted relations with men. I had an opinion about Sevgi that she was an
extremely timid girl, who did not even look at people’s faces when they talked to her.
When several workers go to lunch together, especially male workers made fun of her
introversion about men, as if she would ever stayed single without any emotional or
sexual contact with men. Of course, it is not possible for these young people, who are
locked in the shopping malls six days a week to work, not to like and desire each other,
and ultimately develop intimate relations. One day, when Sevgi, two coworkers and I
having a ‘tea’ break together, Mert sardonically asked about ‘the boy in Benetton.’ I did
not know anything about him, but Sevgi’s face turned red while the other two started
laughing. It came out that Sevgi finally confessed one of the girls in the store that she
430
likes a male worker, who works in the Benetton store. Sevgi was ashamed and left our
table soon. After she left, Mert told us that they male worker, Metin, was a handsome
young guy who was rather popular female workers in the shopping mall. Mert said, Metin
was a friend of him, and in the mornings, before the opening hour, they were smoking
cigarettes in front of the shopping mall doors together. Mert maintained that many
women workers there checked Metin and he would never be interested in a girl like Sevgi
who was conservative about gender and sexuality and coming from a varoş (squatter)
family although he was not rich either. Mert said, Metin had standards, just like him.

The Gendered Class Envy

Amongst retail workers, class envy is gendered. Male workers are almost never interested
in how famous or rich the customers are. The only exceptions are football (soccer)
players and beautiful women like models. Even then, they are not particularly concerned
with customers’ fame or wealth but just with their shared hobby (sports) or sexualized
fantasies. Instead, whenever they speak about customers (although it is infrequent) they
talk about customers with rage, jealousy, comparison, and insubordination. I heard angry
comments such as “he spent my monthly salary on two jackets,” “I hope God will punish
them,” “she treats me as if I do not exist at all,” or “I am fed up living with this insult.”
On the other hand, women workers are having fun with the celebrities and wealthy
customers. Most of them easily turn to a mood as if they were watching a TV show.
Talking to a person that they saw on the television or assisting them and receiving a
431
generous ‘thank you’ from a rich person makes most of female workers happy. When
they are free they enjoy talking about their customers, how much they spend, and what
sort of clothes they wear. Unless a very affluent or renowned customer acts unacceptably
rude towards them, female sales assistants enjoy their presence in the store. I never heard
a complaint or furious comments from them as I always listened to men’s frustration.
Usual utterances about these customers by female workers are like “I loved her dress,”
“how handsome and charismatic he was,” or “I wish I could spend money like them.”

Class envy should be thought in terms of gender identities. Why women do not frame
encountering with upper classes as a problem, while men put it in the center of their
alienation from their jobs? Because male sales assistants are still living with the ghosts of
the breadwinner ideal. As an effect of neoliberal policies, the number of jobs that can
provide workers with the past salaries and benefits as the only wage earner of the
household eroded. Although flexible, part-time, insecure, low-wage, low-status jobs,
which require all adults’ participation to the labor force and make the delayed marriages
even more difficult, prevail men of working class, who do not have social and cultural
capital to climb the stairs and relocate themselves through the neoliberal sieve, have still
an ideal gendered image of the breadwinner (Fuller 2001; McDowell 2003). My male
coworkers endeavor to cope with this ghost of failed ideal –the successful husband and
father, when they are alone in their own world of meaning; facing with a famous or rich
customer pronounces their failure and makes the situation unbearable to them. Women
coworkers, on the other hand, probably do not have such ambition to transform
432
themselves into a gendered position that is structurally impossible. So, when they
encounter with the rich or celebrities they do not display disappointment about
themselves. On the contrary, almost all my coworkers were talking about (seriously or
humorously) about “finding a rich husband.” It is a part of their everyday life to talk
about and yearn the wealthy. It is not a reflective process as it happens with men. While
the opulent and famous customers represent their own unsuccessfulness for male
workers, they designate desire for women workers. In the next section, I elaborate the
significance of the evaporating breadwinner role among male workers in the retail sector.

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Hayri:
Like Özlem, Hayri was also a coworker of mine in Citron. On the other hand, he was
different than everybody else I came to know in this business. He was older at least
several years than us but he was not a manager. Indeed, he could not become a manager
because he did not go to the college and he could not speak at least one of the required
foreign languages, English or Spanish. He started to work right after he graduated from
high school and he says he did all kinds of jobs including being a waiter, a driver, having
a job at a printing house, at a workshop, so on so forth. He ended up being a sales
assistant in little shops and climbed the stairs and became a responsible (the second
person after the manager) at a Citron Men’s store. Normally, this would be a great job for
most workers yet it was not enough for Hayri because he was the only married and father
worker I have ever met. His wife was a store manager at a smaller chain and she was
earning a little more than him, which gradually made him more and more unhappy with
his job. He talked to Şale about becoming a manager with her help, but he said, “She did
not say anything but just looked at my face like a cold snake and nodded.” In the store, he
was performing a mature manhood (ağabeylik in Turkish, like an older brother who cares
for you, protects you, and give advices about what is right or wrong in moral terms)
toward all workers, even the manager who was actually younger than him. He developed
a sense of patience, tolerance and peace (tevekkül in Turkish) out of his subordinated
position and entrapped masculinity, which was simultaneously pressured from his wife’s
career, his failed role of breadwinner at home, and his sense of belittlement at work, i.e.
when our manager shouts at his face. The last time I saw him, he was rather hopeless and
melancholic. In the summer 2009, I searched for him to conduct an interview. He
resigned from Citron 2 years ago and I found out that he opened a little grocery store in
one of the middle-class districts of Istanbul. I visited him in his store. He told me that in
terms of money he did not make much more than he was earning at Citron but he was
much happier at his own store because he said, “I am the boss here. I do not have to
explain anything to anybody. I work way harder and for longer hours. But, it does not
matter. […] Being a sales assistant is a job only for a certain age, I mean for men. After a
certain age, it looks weird, as if you have a problem with yourself. If you are a woman,
there is nothing wrong, you can do that job for 20 years. But, for men, it is just for young
people unless you can become a manager. Being a manager saves your life. I was
between the two options: Opening this store with the money I inherited from my father,
or becoming a manager at a smaller store. I thought if somebody should do that job, he
must work at Citron, it is the best company, and they did not promote me to become a
manager. So, I left the retail sector and opened my own store. As a man, I believe this
was the better way to follow.”

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Masculinity and Retail Work

In this section, I will concentrate on male workers and their understanding of masculinity
in the apparel stores in Istanbul. Although the connection between masculinity and work
has recently become a germane topic for social scientific research on men and
masculinities (Collinson and Hearn 2004) there is a scholarly gap that specifically
address issues of masculinity and the retail and service sector jobs in restructuring
economies around the world.
127

Through the ideological constructions and social practices of the new hegemonic
masculinity (also, a novel form of heteronormative masculinity) in the shopping malls,
male retail workers collectively constitute and naturalize ideas of sexual/gender, class,
racial/ethnic differences that simultaneously exhibit and re-inscribe the socio-economic,
cultural, and spatial hierarchies of the reshuffled economies. I would argue that
masculinity among the new urban working class men in Istanbul is a highly contested
form of social capital, capacity, and possibility. My informants and coworkers constantly
and reflexively renegotiate it.
128
The answers to the question ‘what sort of a man are

127
See Williams 1995 and McDowell 2003 for exceptions.

128
This does not mean that femininity in the stores is not contested. Workers and
managers also critically consider it. However, the discourses around the empathized
femininity in the shopping malls are not compelling as the ones about masculinity. “To
encourage women becoming more feminine,” or “creating modern female subjects who
work outside home and have economic independence,” as well as other discourses on the
female body and subjectivity can be much easily linked to existing projects of
modernization, globalization, and (state or radical) feminisms.
435
you?’ importantly define the vital roles and relations through male sales assistants’ work
experiences and labor relations. Just like the political movements that produce their own
sense of proper manhood, the latest socio-economic transformations toward a neoliberal
world designated new, although mostly invisible, power relations around multiple models
of masculinity and left the members of the new working class, including retail workers,
alone in finding their way and orchestrate their new social selves as I try to demonstrate
in the following sections.

I would argue that the retail worker is not the only self of my informants. It is not the
only element that determines who they are or what kind of a man they are. They have
other parallel social roles, subject positions to take up, such as being a boyfriend, friend,
son, Turkish, heterosexual, or Muslim. Multiple selves and their interplays shape retail
workers’ sense of masculinity in the workplace and elsewhere. Manifestations of
hegemonic masculinity also shift in this process. For example, in the past gay masculinity
was constructed as the major constitutive other, the abject, of heteronormative
masculinity and now the new hegemonic masculinity that is produced and promoted in
the gender regime of the shopping mall converges with different forms of gay
masculinity and the existence of sexual diversity.

The representative stability and practical manifestations of the increasingly global gender
order (Connell 2002) and the positionality of heterosexual masculinity without certain
structural buttresses like the ideologies, which restrict women’s visibility in public space
436
and the loosening grounds of the traditional breadwinner position, put more men into
critical examination of their masculine identities everyday. My male informants’ current
situation (subalternity, poverty, powerlessness, unattractiveness, and lacking respect) and
the positions they desire (the reverse of the list above) are basically about the exercise of
control over women. They are sad because they cannot found authority over their
mothers, sisters, female coworkers, managers, customers, girlfriends and women who
reject them. In this sense, masculinity is an accumulation of capital, prestige, power,
respect, adventure, risk-taking; and male retail workers feel secure and successful if this
accumulation works smoothly. As they have certain lacks in this process, they become
wounded in their sense of heterosexual masculinities. As a response, male sales assistants
construct, internalize, search, and yearn for domination over women and they produce
narratives, explanations why they cannot have this remarkable disposition.

The real and imagined subordination of women as well as desiring and missing it
provides the fantasy of ahistorical male sovereignty, which is beyond contingent and
circumstantial order of things, both material and intangible. Retail work gives an
opportunity to momentarily fix such an inherently unstable relation: The young males of
the new working class think for an instant that they are able to gain a respected and
appealing position through which they can control women and other men. The narratives
around retail work, such as a modern job in a growing sector, help workers to foster this
illusion. They just feel that it works, and then, they come to realize that it does not work
437
that way and they quit working retail. If they do or cannot resign, they become bitter and
melancholic worker-subjects.

The Gendered Politics of Livelihood

Why smaller numbers of men choose to enter retail work and why men in general more
likely than women to quit working retail? Masculine socialization and the influence of
peer pressure (i.e. the working class tendency to identify some jobs at the lowest level as
better fits for guys like security guards or car drivers); the feminine imprint on the
occupational culture of retail work (i.e. qualities like servitude, deference, gentility);
structural preferences of the companies to hire more women than men (i.e. stems from the
idea that women are cheaper or more docile employees); and the low-wage, low-status,
part-time and flexible nature of retail jobs (deemed against masculine needs) may all
affect the gendered mise en scène of contemporary retail work in Turkey. Despite this
undeniably gendered organization of retail work –especially at the level of cultural
imagination- the situation is far from being fixed and unchanging. I would not claim that
today men, who work in the stores, do not fit the cultural mold. Instead, I tend to interpret
the ongoing change in the last ten to fifteen years in the stores that male workers (with
the help of the global companies and the state as I have mentioned in Chapter 4)
successfully transformed the public image and occupational culture of service sector from
a feminine (and less manly, effeminate) one to an increasingly gender-neutral one.
Today, almost no one in the industry, including my coworkers and informants, claims
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that sales assistantship is an inherently feminine job or men, who work retail, might be
effeminate or homosexual just because they do this job.
129

Why does a young man choose to become a sales assistant? What are the alternatives?
Most of my informants immediately answered these questions by saying that there was
not any better option than getting a job at an apparel store. There are strong cultural
discourses at work in Turkish, which highlights the relation between the value of work
and the constitution of masculinity, as in the sayings “he can squeeze the stone” (taşı
sıksa suyunu çıkarır) -means he is strong and able to do any job, and “he can work even
as a carrier” (hamallık bile olsa yapar) -means he can do any job even the least
prestigious ones in the name of having a job. In this sense, being a man requires having a
job including even the worst available ones. Physical labor and manhood are intertwined,
while laziness, constant unemployment and the absence of the desire to work are

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It should also be noted that in the early-modern stores (owned and managed
predominantly by non-Muslim minorities) during the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, the
salesclerks (tezgahtar) were almost always men. The gender segregation at retail work
was transformed especially after 1940s and more women started to work in stores of any
kind. Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2009) for example depicts a
typical small store, in which only women were employed, in a typical upper-middle class
neighborhood in the 1970s. My father, for example, worked as a sales assistant at Vakko,
a spacious and very luxurious Turkish department store, with male and female coworkers
in 1972. He remembers that the owner of the company, Vitali Hakko, a leading Jewish
business man of the day, was instructing the workers of both sexes to sit together and
befriend in the trainings.
After women’s entry into stores as workers and managers/owners, this job started to be
deemed as more feminine. In this dissertation, I am not trying to document the
transmogrification from the stereotypical (early modern, non-Muslim, male) salesclerks
to the diversity among contemporary sales assistants in Istanbul. Instead, I was keen to
understand how my coworkers and informants interpreted this process and locate
themselves within it when it is mentioned in their narratives.

439
considered as deficits of proper masculinity. Masculinity is connected to be able to have a
have job, the desire to work, and the strength to keep working. If a man chooses not to
work
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or he cannot be able to find a job, he starts to be seen as less manly. However,
some of my informants opposed these powerful discourses and stated that, ideally, they
must have been able to do the kind of work that they enjoy and definitely not any job, not
“even the worst ones.” They verbalized that they wanted “modern, civilized, relaxed,
joyful” jobs through which they could communicate with other people and share the
space especially with women coworkers.

A group of my respondents noted that they did not really care what type of job they were
doing as Baris says, “it does not really matter for me. To be a salesclerk or working at a
bank, or, I do not know, at a post office are all the same for me. What I care is where is
the job, how much money I gain, with whom I am working with, how my managers treat
me. [I do not care for] the label or the image of the occupation.” A small group of the
people I talked to spoke critically about the mentality, which seems employment in the
retail sector as an unimportant and trivial issue. Zeliha, for example, noted, “some people
and especially journalists think that we are having fun here. As if the number of shopping
malls and the jobs available at the stores are not important for this country. I do not
understand why they ask these questions. Of course men want to work retail just like

130
Except retirement, which does not harm masculinity only after a certain age. Early
retirements and long years spent at home without work at a relatively early age (like in
late 40s) are also deemed feminizing.
440
women do. It is not a matter of your identity or who you are. It is about whether you can
find a job or you cannot. Everybody needs a job.”

During my interviews, many male respondents told me that their salaries were so low
because of the excess of female workers. For example, Cihan says, “Women are cheaper
than men to employ. Teachers also receive less money than they deserve. Why? Because
there are too many women work as teacher and there are even more waiting to be hired. It
is the same situation with the stores. Numerous women are working in the stores and
when you need more there are thousands at the door. If I were a boss, I would not give
more money either. We receive much less than we should. Look, a store earns more than
all of its workers’ monthly salaries within a single day. Imagine how cheap we are. It is
because of women. They do not have to take care of families and children. They just
spend for themselves [pause] for buying a new lipstick [laughs]. That is why we receive
these insulting amounts. How can I get married and provide a family with this salary-for-
lipstick?”

In Istanbul, sales assistants, even the ones who earn the biggest amounts, cannot live
upon their salaries, let alone taking care of their families. Therefore, it is virtually
impossible to encounter a single mother or male breadwinner among them. I haven’t seen
or heard one. Single motherhood is not prevalent amongst women in urban Turkey
probably because of patriarchal moral and religious pressures. Therefore, it is almost
impossible to see a single mother retail worker, who struggles to survive with the tragic
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payments, in the near future. On the other hand, my informants mentioned that there are
jobs, which ‘are not suitable for women,’ and there are jobs, which ‘are not suitable for
married women.’ Although sales assistantship fits culturally feminine expectations and
thus obviously suits women more than men, most respondents said that, it is not good for
married women. For example, Hakan says, “her husband and her children are waiting at
home for their mother to come home and to cook for them at 11 PM while she still folds
here in the store. It is unacceptable. No man would want this. That is why they [women
workers] are always single and they cannot find husbands.” Cihan also maintains, “Most
women can do this job until they finally find a husband. It does not work with marriage.
She might have a part time job at a small shop, but not at a professional store. And even
this can last only until the children. This is not an appropriate job for married women at
all.”

Men’s Job & Women’s Job

When I was working at Citron we had to wear uniforms provided by the company –
unlike ZIP where we were free to wear what we wanted as long as we comply with basic
rules. There was only one locker room and men and women workers were sharing it to
change. In the mornings and evenings, when more than 30 people gathered in this small
area, there was always a chaos about which sex could gain the main area to undress.
Although women outnumbered men, almost always men started to undress in the middle
of women and thus symbolically reclaimed the space while women had to go to the trying
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rooms to change. It was a great resource for masculine jokes like “we pretend all day as if
the store is for both sexes [or, only for women, a feminine space] and in the evening, here
in the locker room, it comes out that it actually belongs to men.” This act of sudden male
striptease in front of women did not have explicit sexual content. No male worker was
trying to show off his body parts or to impress other workers with his appearance.
Occupying the main area to undress and the jokes that repeat almost everyday made me
think that how these male workers in the store were feeling otherized and marginalized
and how desperately they needed a reverse act to prove their entitlement against their
female coworkers. Although they had to obey the rules and cooperate with women during
the working hours, not acting boisterously and cockily in the store, when they were free,
they started to act and subvert the symbolic gender-neutral order in order to demonstrate
that they were still men --or boys indeed.

Is working retail, specifically in a garment store, seen as a women’s job by male
workers? The modern shopping mall is not a gendered workplace and sales assistantship
is designated for both sexes. Everybody works in this sector has a consciousness that men
and women do, maybe should, work there together. I never encountered a male worker
who complained from working with women or dreamed of a men-only workplace. In
most cases, my male informants and coworkers referred working together with women as
one of the advantages or relatively better aspects of this job. Thus, what Christine
Williams stated about men’s attitudes about working together with women coworkers
does not really match with male retail worker’s experiences in Istanbul, “Working
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alongside women can be deeply threatening to men’s sense of pride and self-esteem, so
many have vigorously defended gender segregation by establishing barriers to women
and treating the few who cross over with scorn and derision.” (1995: 16) Among many
others, Yildiray’s answer can be an example on how male workers feel about their
women colleagues, “I do not think this is a women’s job like [pause] being a nurse. Both
[sexes] can become salesclerks. The companies also prefer men and women workers
together in the stores. They have quotas [for both sexes]. […] For me, it is better to work
with women, as coworkers or as customers. I would not prefer a workplace filled with
men. It sounds like the army, all men. Instead, it is better to be with women. [One] can
compete with women, help them, or have a fight with them. Here, you should always
watch your behavior because there are many women around. Men cannot turn into
animals as they wish (erkekler istedikleri kadar hayvanlaşamıyorlar), the presence of
women stops them, civilizes them.”

Yildiray’s and other respondents’ positive reactions toward sharing workplace with
women originate from two points. The first rationale behind it is about the perception that
retail work is deemed as feminine by people although this perception do not reflect hard
data on who works retail. Hence, in stores, it is men who cross over into women’s
territory –at least in the level of cultural imagination. Male workers do not complain to
work with women mostly because they are doing a job, which is supposed to be done by
women. They are the ones who cross the line, who penetrate into women’s domain. The
second reason is about the character of the job and what it represents in Turkey’s current
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political climate. Male workers tend to think that components of work (i.e.
responsibilities, schedule, relations with managers, etc.) are better organized in favor if
workers when women are also employed. They verbalize that it is a “civilized, kind,
modern” job because women also do the same job and the standards were not set for men
but for two sexes. Most of them also noted that togetherness of the two sexes in
workplace as well as their relaxed communication contributes to the modern,
contemporary, Western, secular character of this job as retail companies and shopping
mall managements strive to construct. Accordingly, workplaces in which only men or
only women are employed, or sexes are segregated, are framed as either Islamic (out of
Western culture and modernity) or backward, traditional, and popular class.

Male workers try to transform the public image of sales assistantship, the way it is
imagined and it is talked about, from a feminine job to a gender-neutral status. With this
move, they want to get rid of the disrespect they face as men doing women’s job and they
plan to create a stronger niche in the labor market. In the interviews I conducted with
men, or in our informal chats in the store, they frequently verbalized, “men are better
workers, men’s performance in the store are better than women’s, men are closer to
become managers, women customers prefer male workers and they are nicer towards
male workers, etc.” probably because they could not say sales assistantship was a men’s
job. They produce many narrative rationales in order to substantiate that it is men who are
actually better workers than women against the stereotype.

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On the other hand, women workers expressed their nuanced discomfort with the labeling
of sales assistantship as a women’s job. They think if more men would start working
retail, their working conditions (especially their pay) will improve eventually. This view,
shared by most female workers, stems from the idea that jobs, which mostly men do, are
real jobs with higher wages and benefits; while jobs that women predominate are
secondary, trivial jobs. Almost every female worker I talked to recounted that if male
workers in the stores would remain as small minorities (or, tokens [göstermelik])
companies would continue to see the group of workers as feminine labor force. For them,
this would increase workers’ fragility and defenseless against corporate benefits. Thus,
women workers want more men in the job to be empowered against transnational
companies while they underline that this job is “inherently” feminine and women are able
to work flawlessly in the retail sector. It is a double strategy for women’s advancement. It
both invites more male workers for better opportunities for women at work and it
simultaneously secures women’s advantageous and skilled position in stores. My female
coworkers and informants often cited that men receive ‘positive discrimination’ (pozitif
ayrımcılık) in retail sector that they can become managers relatively fast just because they
are men, although they also mention it is easier to be become promoted for women
workers.

Some of male workers that I talked to also argued that some jobs are feminine when they
are done in private spaces, at home, and these jobs become more masculine when they
are transferred to the public space. Cooking and cleaning are their major examples: These
446
are the main responsibilities of housewives, but men in professional settings do them,
such as in restaurants and in laundries. My informants articulate sales assistantship to this
occupational culture and explicate that although women take care of clothes at home,
men in stores could do it more professionally. On the other hand, women expounded that
sales assistantship requires a certain amount of affective labor including listening,
patience, tolerance, and cheerfulness, and men could not be as successful as women in
performing these emotional requirements during long working hours.

While men and women workers are constantly fighting in a discursive frame to prove that
retail work belongs to one sex, or their sex is more advantageous than the other, I am not
convinced that sales assistantship is inherently, or unchangeably, gendered or one
particular sex as a group can advance in a smoother manner. People from human
resources departments and managers attest such gender-neutral nature of work in stores.
Workers of both sexes produce these arguments and counter-arguments in order to
empower themselves and legitimate their existence –and co-existence, in the stores.
Although retail work is becoming gendered in their speeches in variegated ways,
members of both sexes aim to arrive at the conclusion that sales assistantship or work in
the store is gender-neutral.

Male retail workers are not concerned with their sense of masculinity when they are
together with their colleagues, men or women. They do not interpret doing this job as a
threat to their masculine self-image. My male informants do not develop implicit or
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explicit rules around masculinity and work such as “if I would do this, I would be
feminized.” There is not a discourse around retail work as a feminizing force in the store.
It becomes an issue when they encounter other social groups throughout their lives. There
are three distinct social groups that male sales assistants confront and publicly discuss the
gendered character of their jobs: Their male friends, who do other types of jobs and do
not work in the service sector; young women who work in retail sector; and older people,
especially theirs or their friend’s families. Only through such encounters, retail work is
referred as a feminine job. Otherwise, male workers do not spell it out as feminine or ‘for
women’ in their everyday lives. For example, Cihan says, “There is something between
some girls here [in the shopping mall] that they do not want boyfriends [who work] in the
stores. They find it cheap, not a good boyfriend they dream. It is not only about money.
They can choose guy who have less money than salesclerks. They just do not like the
guys who are in this business. They say it was a woman’s work, not good for men.” Resit
recounts a typical reaction he received, “My uncle for example, he does not like the idea
that I work in a store. He is really important in our family, everybody listens what he
says. He loves me. But since I started work at Polo [a store] whenever he sees me he tries
to convince me to quit and find another job, not in a store. It is in his mind. This is a job
for women and not for men. He conditioned himself that only women can become
salesclerks and they engage sexual relations with the customers. He acted the same way
when I started to wear earrings years ago. He did not accept it either. It is just for women
he thought.”

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As a result of the rapid transformation of the retail sector (and the service sector at large),
changes in the labor market, and the modern gendered environment of shopping malls,
being a sales assistant is not perceive as a feminine occupation, or women’s job, as it was
in the part decades. Most of my male informants and coworkers noted that there was
nothing inherently feminine in being a sales assistant –although women generally have
reservations against this idea. However, the little prestige, the lack of respectability, and
low wages retail work provides present the emasculating aspects of this job. Retail work
is rendered feminine not because of the quality and its elements like servitude, but
because of the lack of masculine pride and esteem.

The Masculine Body and Subject at Work

The store basically demands women workers to feminize more; to reach the ‘emphasized
femininity,’ while it encourages men workers to shift their understanding of masculinity,
to distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity and to adapt a more refined, modern
and flexible masculinity which better corresponds to the impositions of the retail sector.
Recounting a typical phase I encountered many times in my interviews, Pinar says,
“women are becoming more feminine and men also are becoming more feminine in this
business.” Baris says, “Women need to put more make-up on their faces; they have to be
more beautiful. They also should not be bitchy (cadı) as they are at home. They have to
be soft and obedient. [Pause] Men also change here. We are softer, too. [Laughs] A
rough, working class masculinity (delikanlılık) does not work here. We have to be nice
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and polite. We should be metrosexual. We have to shave everyday, put some cream on
our faces, and take care of how we look. [Pause] Actually, it is like other workplaces. It
does not matter you are a man or a woman, you just have to obey the rules.”

The new hegemonic masculinity in the shopping malls is institutionally created and
promoted by the transnational retail companies. This new model of being a man in the
stores has certain differences than the models of hegemonic masculinity in Turkey. The
first point of divergence is about docility. Men in the retail sector are pushed to learn to
be submissive, obedient, and flexible at work while the process of formation of
hegemonic masculinity lies on concepts like challenge, grumble, and insubordination.
Male workers transform themselves to be more docile towards managerial decisions and
request and more open towards customers’ moodiness. In a parallel to their
transformation of their selves and bodies into a more docile and more flexible character,
they also shift their masculine self-images. While some of the workers are relatively
successful in internalizing the new masculine subjectivity, which is defined through
docility and serenity, and the process of creating new selves, most of male workers
understand this new form of manhood as a temporary performance that they have to stage
in the workplace. As Hayri says, “One should be like that in the store (mağazada öyle
olmak lazım geliyor). They are the rules of the store [pause]. Women act more
immodestly. After a certain point, it becomes their character. They always lie and there
are fake smiles on their faces. It is also the case for men. They ask you to act in a specific
way. Like a soccer player runs throughout the game, without taking a break, non-stop
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[used in English] a salesclerk should do his tasks and put this mask. He should be gentle
and kind. He should not shout or hit anybody. He should not smoke in the store, etc.
There are rules you should obey when you are in the store. After work, do whatever you
want, be yourself again.” In either cases, the transformation or performance of
masculinity center on the concept of ‘honor,’ which is constructed and reiterated through
masculinity and work. For example, many people used the phrase “[I am] working with
[my] honor” (namusumla çalışıyorum). Mete says, “It does not matter if you turn to a
metrosexual man, or a modern man, the store guy, as long as you are working with your
honor. You have to work, and each job has its own rules and regulations. There are
different rules or demands for factory workers that they should follow. The definition of
what sort of a human being is different for different groups of people. [Pause] So, you
have to work. It is not an option for men. Women can have the chance [for staying at
home] although it is decreasing in our day. A man should work and in order to keep his
job he should do whatever he is told by his managers. It is that simple for me.”

Another aspect of the hegemonic masculinity in the store is the inconsequentiality of
working retail in the constructions of a masculine self-identity. While in other jobs,
across a wide palette from professionals to daily laborers, work is a significant aspect of
their manhood, as Christine Williams notes “For many men, their sense of themselves as
masculine is closely associated with the technical skills, male bonding, and the
breadwinner ethic of the workplace; success at work often constitutes proof of their
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masculinity,” (1995: 16)
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for retail workers there is no such connection between their
skills or success at work and their manliness. On the contrary, male workers –especially
the majority who do not desire to remain in this sector, act breezily about their jobs (as if
they do not care to be employed) more than their women coworkers. This attitude can be
detected through gestures and jokes of male workers in ordinary times as well as their
remonstrating stand and their tendency to easily resign during their verbal fights with
customers, coworkers, and managers. In both instances, the downplaying jokes and
expeditious face-offs, male workers strive to underline that this job is not important for
them by any means. Gulcan says, “Men do not take this job seriously and that is why they
make managers crazy for most of the time. With women, problems are different like
laziness or gossip. With men, it is always about mockery, naughtiness, and playing
around. Men always act like they do not need this job and it does not matter if they would
be fired.” Furthermore, investing on and internalizing retail work may be seen slightly
effeminate by the male workers who act ‘cool’ about their jobs. Like many other
informants, Cihan says, “In every store there is group of men who does not care about the
job. They know all the rules, how to do this job, etc. But they do not mind. They just have
fun. They are being the naughty, troublesome kids. They may act properly in the store, I
for most times; but, after work, they just do not act like that role. And there are also a
couple of men who are really into this job. When they are alone, outside the store, they
defend it [the rules] and they say they like it. [Pause] I do not know how to say this, but it

131
See also Fuller (2001), McDowell (2003), and Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2003).
452
looks a little bit feminine to me like the good boys at school. [Pause] I mean, who likes it
in the store?”

The models of masculinity that are available to male workers and the ways they shape
their masculine identities in the gender regimes of the various institutional settings differ.
Here, I am talking about at least three different organizations of gender relations. The
first one is home: How male workers grew up as young sons of their families? The
second place is the school: How did they negotiate the discipline and authority in the
educational system as they work on their incipient masculinity? And, the third
environment is the workplace: How they re-position their masculine selves under the
supervision of a more rigid authority, surveillance and disciplined practices than the
school and the family? In the narratives male workers talk about being a man, most of
them emphasized that the subordination they experience in the store resembles the school
and harms their sense of masculinity. For example, Serkan says, “[we are] suppressed
everywhere. At home your parents, at school your teachers, your girlfriend, here your
managers [suppress you]. It never stops. After that, we look and try to understand why we
are so pusillanimous (ezik)? There is something missing in a pusillanimous man’s life. It
is not healthy to be like that. This system makes us weak.” Yildiray also adds, “You can
be a good man, a successful man outside. But it is not the same here [in the shopping
mall]. In order to survive here you have to be different than the person you are outside.
Tough masculinity or the attitudes of ‘ağır abilik’ (mature, intimidating manhood) does
not work here. […] Like in the school, can the best student of the class be the most
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popular boy? No, of course not. Why? Because he listens to the teachers and do not fight
with anybody, he does not smoke, he does not drive [without a license] etc. Here there
are good [male] workers whom managers love and want to promote. But they aren’t the
coolest (en kıyak) boys. Managers love them, girls do not; they fancy funny guys.”

In our interview Baris asked focused questions about the nature of retail work and
workers’ changing expectations from hegemonic ideals of masculinity, “We work crazily.
If we die here, they should bury us here in the shopping mall. We earn low amounts of
money; you can found authority over anybody with your money. The quality of work is
pusillanimous itself. You cannot give orders to anybody; nobody is dependent on you.
Managers are either women or gay, actually it is generally worse if they are men. So, it
does not have a single positive aspect. What does a man want? When it is evening, after
work, he wants to come home; he wants a hot soup while he talks to his wife and
children. He wants to make love with his wife. In the morning he wants to go to work
again. It is so simple. What do we have in this job as men? Is it close to the answer of
what a man want does from life? No.” While most of my men informants and coworkers
spoke with me in Serkan’s or Baris’s tones, they tried to buttress their sense of
challenged, wounded masculinities by complaining from work and underlining their
predicament, there is also another sort of male workers who prefers to remain silent or
rarely pronounce their positive ideas towards retail work and their plans to be promoted
in the stores. Since they live under heavy discursive attacks against sales assistantship
from their male coworkers, they do not oppose these views in public and form an
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alternative masculinity, which emphasizes the value of success, globality and modern
conduct. When we were having lunch one day, Emre said “I cannot really understand
why they [men] always complain about work and not attached to it to become advanced
in this sector. It is better than most of other jobs but they act as if somebody sentenced
them a punishment here in the shopping mall. I believe this is good job with full of
opportunities if you can use your mind. They [male coworkers] cry and complain
everyday like the old women in neighborhoods instead of struggling and becoming
winners. It is the easier way.”

On the other hand, in order to distance themselves from the feminized character of the
apparel stores or dissociate themselves from the managerial authority in order to be
cooler, male workers developed certain tactics. They, for example, constantly refuse to
have information on fashion although they all are familiar with the contemporary trends
or basic rules of clothing. They reject the idea of talking about fashion and, when asked,
they say, “I do not know anything about fashion.” They also talk about women in a
sexualizing way when there are not women around. They care for not talking about the
women they know
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or about women who have boyfriends. If a man, as long as he does
not come out as gay, refuses to talk about women, i.e. customers or women who work in
other stores, in a sexualized manner, he would be marginalized by other male workers as
if he was a part of the organizational gender regime which forbids such sexual talks. Men

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A “new girl” can be talked about in a sexualized discourse for a while. After male
workers and the new girl start to know each other and develop a friendship, men stop
talking about her in a sexualized manner. She thus becomes a part of their own milieu,
their own honor (namus): Not sexualized but incorporated and watched by themselves.
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also redefine themselves as ‘workers’ (işçi), which has a specific meaning of labor power
in the manufacturing sector, like in factories, in Turkish. Identifying themselves as
workers and mentioning how they are tired at work (doing a bodily job) distance them
from working at a feminine job in a clean space of shopping malls.

The New Hegemonic Masculinity in the Shopping Mall

As I quoted above, Pinar verbalized one of the most widespread ideas about gender
dynamics in retail sector, “this job makes women and men more feminine.” My research
documents that a closer look to the stores may arrive at a rather different conclusion: Men
in retail jobs do not feminize; instead, they develop a new sense of masculinity in relation
to the institutional hegemonic masculinity and they transmute their conception of being a
man. This new gendered ideal consists of negotiation and persuasion instead of violence
and force; speech abilities and stronger expressive qualities instead of intimidation and
oppression; listening and helping others instead of being served and emotional coldness;
openness and acceptance of diversity instead of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, and
misogyny; care for physical appearance and style instead of being dirty and indifferent
among other more contingent and relational qualities.

Yildiray defines the new hegemonic masculinity in relation to the other types of manhood
they come to learn in their lives, “Hyper masculinity (höt-zöt erkeklik, kabadayılık) and
aggressiveness (diklenme) does not work here [in the store]. Or, I do not know how to
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say, you know traditional manhood, machismo. If you have over muscled, have an
intimidating look, they would not like you, and they would send you to become a security
guard. You cannot force anybody to do anything. This is not a street; this is not a jungle.
You have to be talkative, nice, smiling; otherwise, you cannot get your things done here.
You should use your mind. You cannot survive here if you act like a butcher. You have
to treat women politely. It is so important. You have to accept that women are your
equals and even your managers. If you say ‘I do not want a woman give orders to me,’
then bye-bye [in English] to you. It is not important to be strong here; you have to be
right and to tell people why you are right. You have to impress your managers. It does
not matter you are tough guy or what. We do not have fights here, we work.”
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Men’s increasing visibility in the shopping malls as customers or strollers also transforms
male workers’ self understanding of gender identities. Male workers treat male customers
different than they serve to women customers. When they encounter with male customers
they act more serious, more respectful, and more attentive than being relaxed,
inconsiderate, and even impolite as they might act towards women. In most cases, male
workers do not try to start chatting with male customers as they might initiate small talks

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After I listened Yildiray’s and some other informants’ accounts on the new
masculinity they are encouraged to develop in the workplace, I wondered if this new
masculinity exceeds the borders of the shopping mall and exudes other gender regimes
that they live through such as family and the street. Since shopping malls are relatively
new in Turkey I could not obtain enough information to answer such a question. Almost
all of my male informants are in the midst of a masculinity crisis between the store and
other aspects of their social lives and they have not been able to balance it, or stabilize it,
yet. I would argue that a longitudinal research is needed to understand how the new urban
working classes will exactly reconfigure masculinity in different gender regimes and in
broader gender dynamics in the next decade.
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with women customers; they simply answer questions of male customers without making
comments. On the other hand, although female workers may be slightly more diffident
towards male customers, they often act regardless of the sex of their customers. This
gendered pattern of interactions between sales assistants and customers also intersects
with class and age distinctions. As a general principle, if the customer is older than the
worker, the latter acts with more deference. If the customer passes as a member of the
highest classes, if the class gap between the customer and worker is obvious enough, then
the sales assistants serve the customer with visible nervousness and reticence. Therefore,
if a male sales assistant helps an older, wealthier, male customer, he seemingly acts with
greater caution and stress.

One day, Metin and I were chatting in the selling floor when there were not any
customers around. He was complaining to me “I do not like when customers are too
superior than me (benden çok üstün olduklarında). It is more difficult to deal with
stronger people. […] I do not like men as customers. It makes me feel like I am a janitor.
I have been doing this job for years and male customers in women’s store are increasing
every year. I do not know why. I guess they are shopping with their girlfriends or buying
presents for them. However, when you work in a women’s store you expect that you
would be dealing with women and not men. It is not nice for me to talk to men. They
have more money and power than women and they are giving more orders. They are
ruder. […] I can tell that the most difficult part of this job for a man is serving another
man. It is disgusting to accept that I have to please him [a male customer].” When I told
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Cihan that his actions are not the same when he serves to men and women, he admits the
difference, “Men annoy me. It is much simpler to relate with women than men. I can
predict what women will do or what they will say but, with men; it is difficult to get what
they want or when they get angry. So, when there are men around, especially in the
weekends, I act more carefully and more dutifully. I do not want trouble with male
customers.” Sanem underlines that for women workers age and class are more important
than the sex of the customer, “I do not discriminate men or women. If they are human
enough, it does not matter [they are] men or women. However, I am scared of the very
rich because they are more capricious and indignant towards us. […] Older people are
generally more understanding and young customers are a little bit more spoiled. But,
there are some older customers who are really tough against everybody including the
managers. So, before I fully understand the customer and his/her behavior I do not make
an attempt to connect. I just do whatever I am asked for. If I can see the positive light,
then I can be warmer and impetuous (girişken).”

The Ghost of the Breadwinner

As Linda McDowell (2003) argues deindustrialization and neoliberal policies
transformed the possibilities for finding a job for the lower-middle class people who do
not have college education and other essential components of cultural capital, such as
language abilities. When there were factories and manufacturing workshops, especially
men could be able to find secure jobs, which pay ‘living wages.’ After the factories were
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closed and the industry left for underdeveloped zones of the world in the name of cheaper
labor power, men faced with unemployment or low-wage, part-time service-sector jobs
which previously deemed as feminine. Throughout the deindustrialization process, the
basic gender role men were supposed to play, the sole breadwinner –the head of the
household, who earn money to take care of his wife and children, evaporated.
Masculinity was constructed though basic assumptions of this breadwinner position
enables men like being financially independent and sufficient to get married and make
children, the separation between the private and public spaces in which men work and
women live, and masculine homosocial ties that connect men in the workplace as well as
leisure and masculine socialization. McDowell discusses that young men, who come to
age in an era of privatization and sharp unemployment, grew up with gendered fictions
and desires of being a breadwinner-husband-father. Nevertheless they encountered the
fact that it was not an available option for them. Therefore, they inescapably had to deal
with social and economic change and its implications on gender relations, the socially
imposed gendered ideals, and how they reform their gendered selves.

In Istanbul, I came across a similar picture. Young men (aged between 18 and 25) who
work retail in Istanbul right now have still persistent gendered ideals of becoming a
breadwinner as McDowell documents for Britain. However, the jobs that they are able to
find cannot provide enough money and prestige for them to initiate marriage and
founding families. With the wages retail companies pay, even a couple with two jobs
cannot survive in Istanbul without other sources of income and financial support. Put
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differently, the ideal of breadwinner has certainly disappeared for the lower-middle class
youth. For the majority, with their education and social capital, the only jobs that they can
find are service-sector positions including the shopping malls. On the other hand, their
masculine self-image is still based on the breadwinner or the ‘head of the family’ models,
which do not have relevancy vis-à-vis the existing social conditions such as increasing
numbers of women who work and want to continue working as well as the growing
global consumerism. The ghost of breadwinner keeps haunting young lower-middle class
men while they do not have the necessary means to satisfy this gendered ideal and
become real, perfect men as they conceive.

Being haunted by the ghost of the breadwinner has at least two significant aspects in
terms of gender relations. The first effect is about the relations with women. Male retail
workers try to dominate, control, and supervise women that they are erotically and
emotionally entangle with. When these attempts prove unsuccessful and women negate
such a male power over their bodies and social lives, male workers have difficulty in
understanding the reasons behind why women act so ‘weird’ against their ‘natural’ acts.
For example, Baris says, “if you are a boyfriend of a girl [sic] you are suppose to watch
her, follow her, right? It means you are responsible for her; what she wears, whom she
sees, where she goes. If you are not interested in these what kind of relationship you two
have? However, they do not accept it right now. They say ‘you cannot regulate my life’
(hayatıma karışamazsın). If I am not regulating your life, what am I doing in your life?
Then, you enjoy your life!” Although my male informants oscillate for some time trying
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to comprehend the reasons between the gendered expectations and actual relations, they
eventually come to the conclusion that it is because of their jobs: Since they are doing
unimportant, disrespected and low-wage jobs women are not deeming them as serious,
full, admirable, real men. In this sense, they are less manly than men who work at more
prestigious positions that pay more. Almost all of my male informants and coworkers
expressed these thoughts that their jobs in apparel stores (and in other service-sector
workplaces) harm their masculine stand against women they are involved with.

Yildiray recounts a very typical reaction he got from his former girlfriend regarding his
job, “She was always saying that she loved me a lot but she did not like my job [laughs].
Well, to be honest, I do not like it either, but it is the best job that I could find. I am
earning more than many other jobs I otherwise could and it does not have a lower-class
identity (amele bir kimligi yok). She did not accept it, she kept complaining about it. I
guess she or her family did not like the idea that I am salesclerk. Our [public] image is
distorted. Anyway, one day we were fighting, and she called me ‘you, little salesclerk’
(tezgahtar parçası). That was the end of it. I could not be together with a girl [sic] who
treats me like this.” On the other hand, most men I talked to stated that they could
understand why women dislike their jobs and what is wrong with working as a sales
assistant. For example, Cihan says “My girlfriend studies statistics at college and she
works part-time at the Mercedes automobile company. They will probably hire her as a
full-time worker after she will be graduated. So, she is into a serious job. What about me?
I have frozen my education and I have been working retail for two years. Everybody
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knows how much I make; it is really low. It seems that I cannot establish my future here
in this job. I do not know what I will do with my life. A man does not have such a luxury.
A girl [sic] may be confused or she would not want to work. She can get married and her
husband would take care of her. Nevertheless, there is no such an option for a man. I, as a
man, should be realistic, strong, and straightforward. Am I? No. Women like that kind of
men, they want to see their future. It is impossible with this job. Could find another job?
No. So, I admit that I have a serious problem with myself and if she will ever leave me
for this, I cannot blame her. I should shake myself and start acting like a real man.”

The second impact of the dissolving breadwinner position is related with the self-image
of male workers. Without the self-congratulatory, empowering, and condescending
influence of the existing or future sense of becoming a breadwinner, male retail workers
feel themselves devalued and unsuccessful; far from the ideal manliness that they are
supposed to enact. A strong disappointment about their masculine self, hopelessness for
the future and an ever-existing melancholia are shared by most male workers, who are in
this job for some years and do not have hopes to ‘escape’ from it. When I talked to Ali,
for example, “I do not feel it inside me. I do not feel like a man. I am so powerless and
there is nobody to listen to what I say. […] It is different with my father. For long years, I
thought him as a successful model for myself, I tried to imitate him. Everything he does,
how he works, his relations with my mother and with his relatives. He has a respected
position within our kinship. When there is fight at home, he is always the last one who
speaks and when he says something it means the issue is over. He has such a power, such
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a stand (duruş). However, I am not there yet. And, to be honest, I do not have a future
like his. I am still feeling that I am still his child; I do not have authority. My masculinity
is on hold (beklemede). Nobody knows when and how I will turn into a real man.”

Ali’s emotions about his delayed masculinity were shared by most of my male retail
workers. Women workers also reflect on the same issue when we talked about men in the
retail sector. They generally mentioned that they would not like the idea of having a
serious relation with a man from the shopping mall. For example, Gulcan says “Neither
we [women] nor they [men] feel that they are men. They haven’t grown up yet. I am 24
years old and I have been working for 5 years. I am already tired and I do search for
alternatives. Of course I want to marry and quit my job. But, the possibility for me to
meet such a man is really low. […] I do not want to try something with a man who works
in a store because it does not have a future. If he is a manager, than it may work.
Otherwise, to be with another salesclerk does not improve my life. I know that I cannot
respect him and this will destroy everything in the future. [Pause] How many years can
he do this job? Maybe five, maybe six. But, what about after that point? I do not want to
deal with an unemployed man in my life. I have my own problems in my life, I cannot
solve somebody else’s.”

Having such a poisonous knowledge (such as, “no woman wants me” or “I do not have a
future in this job”) and melancholic emotion (such as, “I am feeling like disposable” or “I
do not have power to achieve anything in my life”) about oneself push male sales
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assistants to reexamine their memories and ideas, their comprehension of past and current
conditions, and their potentialities more critically. As a result of such reflexive thinking
they come to realize the neoliberal circumstances they are embedded in and their possible
exits, ways out from the enclosure in the shopping mall, as gendered and classed subjects.
Oray says, “In the past, people were used to be poor, too. But still they got married and
had children somehow. God helped them. They could survive through hard work, little
informal or illegal business like building a house on the state’s land, building squatters,
buying and selling stuff without permits and without paying taxes. Our mothers went
homes to clean them for additional money, etc. These are the ways our people achieved
something together. Today, we do not have these means in most cases. For us, there is
nowhere to build a new house; or nowhere to buy and sell stuff illegally. These pages
were turned for us. I think, we [men] think of something else now. Women can work in
the stores. It is clean and safe for them, and the money is okay for them. But if a man is
doing sales assistantship, he should never stop there. He should not accept it as his fate.
He must struggle. […] My brother [who works in a cleaning company] and I now work
on this project to open this little business to distribute drinking water bottles to homes.
We are constructing a little store at the corner of our garden [of their squatter]. We will
not resign immediately. For some time, we will try both jobs. I for example will come to
work here in the store, and after I finish I will go to our store. If it will make money as we
plan we can then resign and concentrate on opening a second store.”

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As Oray explicitly framed his business plans as a masculine responsibility, a field in
which men should take initiative and prepare the conditions to found a family, in our joint
interview Serkan (male) and Sinem (female) both mentioned that sales assistants should
have worked hard to escape and construct alternative scenarios and strategies for
themselves. They were working for two different big retail companies at the time of our
interview and they were planning to be fired and getting compensations to start a web-
designing business together. While Serkan emphasized the masculine dimension like
Oray, Sinem underlined a more feminist standpoint and said “Women retail workers do
not have to marry at a certain age. Some of them are actually spinsters [laughs]. Times
are changing. Everybody should find her way and establish a future for herself right now.
I agree that for men it might be more essential if they intend to marry with a housewife
and having children. If that is what in your mind than you should act accordingly, you
should become a provider. Otherwise, I think sales assistantship is just a waiting room, in
which you gain some time to arrange things and establish a new life for yourself.
Otherwise, you can easily be stuck in there without becoming anything.”
134

134
Christine Williams (1995) defines four strategies that men who work in women’s
occupations develop. Among them, I have not observed sex segregation (separation of
spaces and tasks between sexes) and emphasizing the masculine aspects of work (such as
technology and competition). However, I witnessed ambition for being promoted and
seeing the current position as the last stop before being administrator. I also documented
disassociation among male workers that they do not connect to the work or workplace
and they act as if they do not care what sort of jobs they have. Since Williams’ research
was about professionals such as librarians and primary school teachers, her informants do
not make plans to transfer another kind of work or starting their own business as the
legitimate option for men while most of my male informants were preoccupied with
alternative scenarios to ‘escape’ from the stores although a few could be successful.
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Hence, the members of the new working class in Istanbul tend to think that the equation
in which unemployment signals failure and having a job denotes success does not mean a
lot in the contemporary conditions they live in. There are many men in the retail sector
who have a job as sales assistants and still think that they are failed, disposable and
lacking respect. The sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness grow against the cultural
codes, which exalt work and the importance of being employed for men such as the cult
of workingman and the ‘I am working with my honor’ discourse as I mentioned above.
For example, when we were talking about how male retail workers are deeply pessimistic
about themselves and they do not find compensation in such cultural discourses, Hakan
says, “Of course it is great to live with your honor, but the thing is, honor does not make
you earn more, or it does not help when you feel hungry. A kid comes to the store and in
his pocket there is money than I earn in a month. He buys whatever he likes without even
calculating how much he pays. Now I ask, did this kid or his father earn this money with
his honor? Do not let me laugh. This fucking sense of honor can only work for us? (Bu
amına koyduğumun namusu sadece bize mi işliyor?) It is just because we cannot make it;
we cannot be successful. If they could find a way, you must see these faggots who are
talking about honor.” Against Hakan’s sardonic inquiries, Ali, for example voices his
suffering, “I have pain in my heart. Clearly, I it gives me pain. I am 25 years old. I work
six days a week like a dog. If accidentally I have a girlfriend, I can only take her out one
day. And even then, I am scared like a dog thinking what I would do if she wants
something. I am taking her to McDonalds like a child because it is the only place I can
afford. I am using the mobile phone messages to pay less even in McDonalds. It is really
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humiliating. I swear I am so ashamed of this. The girl [sic] tries a few times and then
stops seeing me. I can understand why. What would a girl do with a man without money
in his wallet? If you do not have money today, then you should not be a man either.”

Masculinity becomes a critical issue through questions like how neoliberalism and the
new economy affect and transform existing gender relations and gendered ideals. As
more urban Turkish women enter into paid labor force and getting jobs in shopping
malls, they become distant from the traditional womanhood, which has been exalted by
religious and political regimes, based on marriage and motherhood. Such a move from
the traditional gender roles to the new ones (the working, self-made, free woman) is
articulated to the powerful modernizing discourses that have been entailed since the late
1920s. In this sense, the women of the new urban working classes are just taking their
places on the line for women’s legitimate emancipation and participating to the formation
of modern women subjects. Nevertheless, men’s experiences are more radical than what
women go through. In the service economy, men have to learn to work with women,
under women and for lesser amounts than women earn. The new insecure and flexible
jobs destroy men’s presumed breadwinner role and leave them alone with their
unrealized, long-yearned ideal manhood. Shopping malls produce a new hegemonic
masculinity, which can have conflicts with gender regimes of other social institutions and
the gender order of Turkish society. A new system of relations between divergent
masculinities at the workplace is constellated and transnational companies regulate the
new hegemonic, marginal and dissident masculinities through intervention, promotion,
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discipline and punishment. Therefore, neoliberalism and deindustrialization process
rapidly creates a new gender order and gendered culture for citizens while I would argue
that it is much more compelling and transformative for men than women.

Berke:
When Berke was at college studying engineering he needed an easy, part time job. So, he
started to work at a Marks & Spencer store as a sales assistant. Then, he came out as gay.
After finishing school, he stayed in the retail sector and became a store manager first, and
then he was promoted to a vice-directorship at the center office. There are many other
examples like him in the stores: Out gay men who work at virtually every level of service
industry. What is remarkable about his story is an instance he experienced years ago.
While he was a student and a part-time worker, a new guy was hired to the store he
worked at. “He was playing the tough guy. He changed his voice when he was talking to
women, he was always really solemn and when he accidentally smiled he did it in a way
as if he did something shameful. His body and gestures [pause] everything he did was
very masculine. And he was like, asking ‘what am I doing here?’ as if he is in a Turkish
bath for women. When a straight guy talked to him he relieved a little bit because he was
naturally his buddy (kanka). And, he was not talking to me at all. Actually, it was obvious
that he was avoiding me. It was okay for me. I could live without him. At first, I thought
he was attractive, but then I changed my mind. One day, not too long after he started to
work, we were having lunch all together. I guess we were eight people at that moment:
Six girls from the store, he and I. Of course, he was sitting at the other corner, the most
distant place from me, as if I would jump and kiss him all of a sudden. Then, he made a
comment about gay people; honestly, I cannot recall it precisely right now. But, it was
something like, ‘gay people should be cured. They are not normal, they are sick.’ Or,
something like that. I was not paying attention because I was familiar with this kind of
talk and I had learnt not to hear this bullshit. However, girls at the table, our coworkers,
started to stand up with their food, and sat to another table. All together, without saying a
single word. I froze for a second, did not really understand what was going on, and then I
also left the table with them and sat the other table. Within half a minute he became
alone. He also froze. He did not say anything, he did not ask anything, not even a single
word. We immediately started to talk as usual. The other day, he did not come to work.
We talked to our manager and explained her what happened. She said we did the right
thing, although we did not decide to do the right thing, and she added if he was not
belonged to the store, he should not have stayed either. [Pause] I am a vice-coordinator
for the same company today and I never forget this memory. It reminds me how difficult
it might be for a gay person to survive at work, even in this business, and how we need
open-minded, respectful, and courageous people to work with.”

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A Queer Sector?

While I was writing this chapter one of my informants called and told me that a female
manager at Citron came out as lesbian. My informant was so excited on the phone saying,
“as far as I know this happens for the first time in the history of the company.” I asked
her if it was not normal regarding the fact that Citron and other retail companies hire a
large number of gay men. She agreed and added, “I believe there are more women who
are lesbian or bisexual in this sector. They hide themselves because they are afraid of
being discriminated. The stereotype lesbians are tough; they are seen very masculine, and
as if they cannot serve people and that the women [customers] would be afraid to talk to
them. So, she has been already a very successful manager, working for the company for
more than three years. Nobody can say anything against to her like she was not doing her
job well. I am sure there will be others who will follow her.”

My informant was right in the sense that I have not met with a single out lesbian or
bisexual woman manager or a sales assistant although I recently have spent a lot of time
in the retail sector and met with numerous people. The only exceptions to the absence of
lesbians were a self-identified bisexual (woman) coworker of mine from 2004 –I lost
connection with her later- and the bisexual (woman) manager of Mango that Deniz
recounted and I mentioned above. Hence, it would not be too wrong to note that the retail
sector in Turkey seems like a great land of opportunity for gay men while lesbians and
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bisexual women have reservations against getting retail jobs or coming out in the
industry.
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In the remaining pages, my focus will concentrate on queer men in the stores.

Modern apparel stores in Istanbul seem like a safe haven for employment for visible, self-
identified, out gay and bisexual men. Especially foreign-owned retail companies and
most managers have an explicit tendency to employ gay sales assistants, merchandisers,
and window-makers. Some of my informants called this gay-friendly policy as ‘positive
discrimination for gay men.’ In Turkey, gay men can waive compulsory military service
as being reported as ‘psycho-sexually disordered’ (Altinay 2004). There is strong
common opinion that many institutions and especially the state bureaucracy do not hire
people with such a medical-military report of proved homosexuality. Almost
exceptionally, retail companies, especially the transnational ones, accept hiring not only
out gay men but those who have these military reports without any hesitation. For
example, Tugal says, “this is my third company and I have not had any difficulty about
this issue. In my first workplace, I was talking to the general director about the military
[service], I was complaining about it, trying to find an escape, and then they encouraged
me to get the ‘pink report’
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so I could continue working there without a break [to
perform military service]. I know many people do this in the retail business. I went there

135
For a previous research, I talked to 40 lesbian and bisexual women in two cities in the
country and none of them (neither their friends that they mentioned in the interviews) was
working in the retail sector while otherwise their work experiences were diverse
including a tanker captain and a broker (Özbay and Soydan 2003).

136
Gay men as well as the popular discourses about the subject ridicule the medical-
military of homosexuality report as the ‘pink report’ just like the ‘pink triangle’ that Nazi
Germany used to identify homosexuals.
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and diagnosed as psycho-sexually sick, disable. Since then, I have never encountered any
difficulty in getting jobs because I have a report. Probably it would not be the case if I
was trying to work at banks or state institutions like schools.”

Just like the official, medical-military report of homosexuality, feminine performances,
or effeminacy, is also a troubled issue for open gay men to find jobs in Istanbul. Unlike
many other workplaces that a rather uncompromising version of homophobia reigns,
shopping malls are diverse and flexible enough to allow workers who enact atypical
gender and sexual performances. They are “counter-heteronormative, which implicitly or
explicitly challenged heteronormativity” (Menon 2009: 98). Tugba, for example, says,
“[visible gay men] as they are, cannot work at schools, at hospitals, at factories, etc.
There are so few places for them to find jobs even when they are educated and qualified.
It is not fair at all not to let people to earn their money just because they are different.
Stores are nice in that sense. If you are feminine as a man, it does not matter. They would
hire you if you do your job flawlessly.”

On the other hand, this openness or tolerance to effeminate performances and self-
expressions do not mean a free-floating gender repertoire. The boundaries of normalcy
are also drawn in the stores. For example, transvestitism
137
is usually coded as the
unacceptable extreme, the moral limit of cosmopolitan work environment, and the
gendered and sexualized abject: An unavailable, unthinkable gender/sexual option for

137
Transvestite and transsexual sex workers are visible in Turkey on the street as well as
popular discourses of the news media (Selek 1999; Kandiyoti 2002; Berghan 2007).
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retail workers. Although I heard rumors from my coworkers and informants about
transgender retail workers that were seen in the stores in the past, I never encountered
with any in shopping malls during my research. When I interrogated it with managers and
human resources experts, they noted that gay men (however effeminate they could be) are
often admitted but transgender people are not. Aslihan, a human resources director for an
apparel company, for example, says, “[employing a transvestite] is too much for us, at
least for now. I know our company employ them in Europe and if we decide to hire one
our European supervisors do not stop us. So, it is up to our decision. Nevertheless, I
personally do not think that it is a good idea. As a country, we have a certain social
structure that we should obey. [Our] society leads us. Our customers would not like it.
Gay men in this job can be a little effeminate; we can understand that. We have not had a
major problem with that until today. But, at least for now, there is no chance for us to hire
a transvestite in our stores.” Deniz, the manager of the first ZIP store I worked,
underlines the public image of transgender people in Turkey, “since everybody thinks
that they are doing prostitution, they would automatically think that there is a kind of sex
work going on here, too. This is absolutely impossible to handle for a store, or a shopping
mall. I guess it is the main reason why we cannot hire talented transvestites here. Other
than that, I do not think there is a great difference between working with gays, lesbians or
normal people.” My informant Tugal told me that, “In my previous workplace we did not
wear uniforms. So, we were free what we wanted to wear. Sometimes I wore [laughs]
kind of girly clothes like tight sweaters or t-shirts. One day, I wore golden-color skinny
pants with a tight, white t-shirt. I was looking really cute and on my way to the work, I
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started to worry about my clothes since people were looking at me strangely. I am used to
it, they always look at my clothes and me. Anyway, when I entered to the store, my
coworkers made sounds like ‘waaoww look at Tugal’ [laughs] and then the manager
came in, she looked at me really nervous. But, she did not say anything in front of other
people. We started working without a problem. I could feel some customers’ [women]
gazes on me. Then, the manager invited me into the office and there she told me that she
could understand my desire to express my difference and she did not have any problems
with that but those particular pants were unacceptable in the store because, she said, I
looked like a transvestite. She exactly told me that I could not come to work like a
transvestite. So, she called that day off for me. I did not work that day. I went to home
and changed my clothes [became sad].”

Gay men do not work only as sales assistants, or window-makers, but they also become
managers in the apparel stores in Istanbul. One of the components of the new hegemonic
masculinity in the retail sector that is radically different from other existent gender
regimes is about to be open to follow orders of gay men as well as of women. When a
gay person is a coworker on the lower ranks of retail hierarchy it makes a different sense
to male and female heterosexual workers than working under the supervision of a gay
manager, who is not in a subaltern position. In other words, especially for heterosexual
male workers, it is a different work experience to be managed by gay men just like by
women. For example, Alev highlighted this contrast, “There are rumors about Tolga [that
he was gay] but I do not know if he really is. However, in the previous store I worked the
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manager was a gay man. Everybody knew about it; he never hid his sexual preference. It
was surprising for me to see a gay manager. Right now I cannot tell why but back then I
could not imagine a gay man to become a manager. I tended to see them just as weak
people, [pause] like very emotional and weak. Seeing this manager, who was really gay
[laughs] but totally tough on people and managing the store with great talent, transformed
my understanding. I came to realize that gay men can also become managers; good
managers indeed.” On the other hand, working under the supervision of an out gay
manager could not be transformative for all workers. Hakan, for example, says, “I try to
be serious at work. I keep telling myself this is your job, you should focus on your work,
do not deal with people, etc. Marks & Spencer was fine. I like the workplace except the
manager. I do not know if I am allowed to tell this, or if it is appropriate to say, [pause – I
believe I nod here] he was gay. When he did not yell at me, when we work in harmony
(ahenk ile) everything was fine. However, I could not stand him rebuking me. I do not
like women managers either. But, honestly, I do not think I would try to work under a gay
manager again. I comprehended that I am not good at that.”

After I listened to stories about the visibility of out gay men in stores as managers I
started to ask questions about them to my informants. For example, many people whom I
talked to told me that while (heterosexual) women managers tolerated male workers’
errors and (heterosexual) male managers protect women workers, gay managers tend to
be more objective toward sales assistants in most cases. Ezgi says, “I put managers in
three categories: Women, men and gays. […] Gay managers are the best because they
475
better evaluate your work, they know both men and women, how they act, how they think
and prepare themselves to face with them both. It does not matter if you are a girl or a
boy in front of them. They are also better equipped to deal with customers. […] Honestly,
I think gay managers are the best solution for the stores. I believe many people in this
business would confirm this.”

A detailed analysis of queer political economy in Istanbul is out of limits of this
dissertation.
138
There is an empirical and scholarly deficiency on the socio-economic
profile, cultural habits, and the life-style of the queer communities in Istanbul. Even the
most basic questions like where queers live, which occupations they concentrate in, how
much money they earn on average so on so forth remained unanswered except urban
legends and the popular discourses in the news media. In my interviews with my gay
informants I tried to comprehend how they exactly they find retail jobs satisfactory in
terms of wages and status regarding the heterosexual male workers’ constant complaints
and discomfort from being sales assistants. Although it is far from being a representative
claim, my one bisexual and four self-identified gay informants stated that they are happy

138
For partial answers to such an inquiry, see Yuzgun 1986; Hocaoglu 2002; and Ozbay
2005. Very few research done on queer groups in Istanbul are motivated and informed by
the poststructuralist queer theory, which has been criticized for its lack of attention to the
contours of contemporary capitalism and class dynamics. For example, see Kirsch 2000
and Lancaster 2003.

476
with their jobs especially when they compare their jobs with the alternative positions they
could have otherwise.
139

Another observation I want to share about gay workers in retail companies in Istanbul is
that there is a growing feeling of security amongst younger gay men, for example college
students. Independent from the disciplinary education they get at the college, they tend to
think retail sector, especially the apparel stores, as a legitimate alternative if they cannot
find jobs in the field they are educated due to their out gayness, effeminacy, or the
medical-military report. Such a sense of security, of guarantee that they would not have
to hide their sexual identity or manipulate their normal behavior to mask their gayness
increases the number of out young gay men in Istanbul. As Tugal says, “you can talk to
all gay people, especially with younger ones. Either they or somebody they know well,
their friends, worked at the stores for some time in their lives. Since everywhere is filled
with the stores, and their numbers are growing we can say that we will not be hungry

139
In one of the two focus groups I organized with people who were born after 1980,
college gradate, are able to speak in at least one foreign language, and work as
professionals, there was one gay man. Selim studied management at the most prestigious
university in Turkey, he has been abroad many times and works for a famous
transnational company’s administrative branch. He said that he never thought the retail
sector, especially at the level of stores, as an alternative to his career. He noted that he
was not out in his workplace except for a very close female coworker. He mentioned that
he was not actively trying to hide his sexual identity however he thought if he was a
‘visible, flamboyant [used in French]’ he could not get the position he had at that
moment. He said that out gay men could better find jobs at sectors like advertisement,
communication, media, cultural industry, music, and entertainment with the exceptions
that can find jobs at offices of multinational companies especially if the managers are
women. Other participants of the focus group agreed with his ideas. When I talked to my
gay informants who work in retail sector they also listed the same economic fields as ‘the
most welcoming’ to gay employees alongside retail companies.
477
[poor, jobless] at all. [In an imaginary workplace] if my manager thinks that I am too gay
and fires me, that’s fine, I can always work at a store. It is his problem, not mine
[laughs].” Berke also says, “People start to think at the last year of college, or even
earlier, whether I should hide that I am gay and act straight in front of other people and
find a job at a serious workplace or they come out and find a job as a gay person. Some
of them, if not most, have a predilection to get this business which one is growing fast
and prejudice free instead of trying to pass straight for the rest of their lives. It is so
unhealthy to do that. [It will] eventually develop one’s personality and creates
psychological problems.” On the other hand, Yalcin underlines another dynamic that is at
work about gay workers as parallel to what John D’emilio (1983) elucidates for the
origins of a modern gay identity became possible in relation to the development of
capitalism, “You can see that all [gay] people in Anatolia [rural Turkey] now desire to
move Istanbul: When they start college, after the college, to find a job and found a new
life. It is like a flow of gay people. Jobs are critical here. If they think there is no job here
for them they could not dare to come to the big city. As they know that gay people are
hired here without being discriminated because their sexual behavior, they run to
Istanbul. More jobs to gay people make Istanbul the gay center of the country.”

Although Yalcin implies that gay people are not discriminated because of their sexuality
in the shopping malls, the reality I observed is far from equality to access to jobs on the
478
basis of the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity with sexual identity.
140
Simply,
self-identified Kurdish gay men as well as gays who do not fit into a middle-class mold,
the White Turks, are not deemed suitable to work in the stores. Gay men in Istanbul are
not a homogenous community and they most significantly divided by the lines of class
and ethnicity. However they could perform the undesired effeminate bodily displays
individually, middle class gay men are seen as having the necessary cultural capital
(‘culture,’ ‘style,’ ‘taste,’ and ‘vision’) to start working and actually be promoted in the
retail sector while gays from varoş (basically the poor and Kurds of the squatter areas)
are denied access to the jobs. Tugal says, “Varoş gays cannot work in the modern stores
that we are employed like Citron and Mango. Instead, they might be able to find jobs in
peripheral stores [in the bargain outlets] of the brands or in the Turkish brands, which
pays lower wages. But, I am quite sure that nobody here [shows the shopping mall,
Kanyon] wants them. It does not matter as if they Kurds or Turks, they are just varoş,
they do not fit here.” During the focus group, when I tried to ask about gay workers who
are Kurdish or who live in varoş districts, Selim said he did not know anything about
them and he added “I do not share anything with them except my sexual orientation and I
am not rather sure how they are conscious about that.”

140
The importance of sexual identity and class position at the workplace was first
elaborated on Kath Weston and Lisa Rofel’s (1984) classical Signs article. In my
participant observation period or during the interviews I never encountered a Kurdish or
varoş gay retail worker unlike the diversity among heterosexual employees of the same
apparel companies. Although effeminacy of gay workers is a highly contested but more
or less allowed issue in shopping malls, I must note that more masculine gay workers,
whose masculinity is refashioned according to the apparel sector’s standards as I
documented in the previous section, are explicitly preferred over more feminine gay
workers. Therefore, it would not be wrong to say that, masculinity is a capital, a
significant factor in the workplace relations, among the out gay workers, too.
479
Jokes and Harassment

Patti Giuffre and Christine Williams (1994) analyze the tense boundaries within sexual
jokes and harassment between gay and heterosexual workers in restaurant business in the
United States. They underline that, just like normative gender roles, heterosexuality is
also done, “normalized and naturalized through its ritualistic public display,” (1994: 380)
such as (hetero)-erotic hints, jokes, gestures, and comments. There is a thin line between
(hetero)-sexual jokes and sexual harassment in the workplace. All the coworkers I
worked together and my informants were well aware of this line in their everyday
interactions. Especially heterosexual male workers that I shared social spaces with were
extremely careful towards their female coworkers in order to prevent any
misunderstanding about their utterances, even their gazes. Nobody I talked to said that
their coworkers or managers sexually harassed them. The only exception was Saniye,
who said, “We were working under this manager. He was in mid-thirties, single, and he
thought he was really attractive. When there was a Russian [woman customer] in the
store he ran them to show himself. […] One day, I sensed that I was being watched in the
selling floor. When I carefully looked through the shelves I saw him directly looking at
me. I smiled to him and he went away. Maybe he was just watching how his workers
work. I do not know. But, honestly, he seemed too happy to me. I am a woman. I can feel
480
who looks at you with which purposes. But he never advanced this. He did not even
imply it. I just sensed his interest.”
141

When it comes to gay retail workers and their relationships with their heterosexual male
coworkers, the seemingly unproblematic sexual jokes and comments can trigger cold
wars and implicit confrontations in the store. Although actions that are interpreted as
sexual harassment might occur between gay and heterosexual workers and managers, the
tenser subject between the two is the sexualized jokes. For example, Tugal, an out gay
retail worker, said that, “In the store I worked for a little while 3 years ago, there was a
manager. He was engaged [with a woman]. It was a store on a street. Relations are much
informal than modern stores, like we do whatever the manager asks exactly when he
wants. No rules, just the manager’s views. […] One day, I was folding jeans on a table
and he was walking towards me. I thought he would pass from in front of the table.
Instead, he walked behind me and while he was passing he touched my back [ass] and
whispered ‘work hard.’ I jumped because it was not nice. What he did was inappropriate.

141
Although none of my heterosexual informants gave a positive answer my question
‘have you ever felt you were sexually harassed at the workplace?’ except Selin, I think
the jokes my coworkers Tugba, Cihan and Mete were doing about Habibe’s virginity,
sexual conservatism and the fact that she did not have a boyfriend could easily be
considered as harassment. However, neither Habibe nor others were thinking so. When I
pushed them, they all insisted that these were usual jokes they make each other at the
workplace. Likewise, the male coworker of mine at ZIP Istinye Park who tried his
chances on a female coworker for a date more than one time could be deemed as sexually
harassing her. However, she did not seemed disturbed at all and my coworkers stated that
his was not harassing but just proposing. Therefore, at least for the heterosexual majority
in the shopping malls in Istanbul, a relaxed, tolerant and flexible comprehension about
sexual harassment is at work. It forms a culture, which mediates otherwise unacceptable
or improper jokes and comments, and all workers seem to share it without explicit
problems or contestation about it.
481
I thought he did not mean a sexual act; he just made this impolite job because I was gay
and he thought we gays communicate like this. Before everything else, he was a
heterosexual guy. So, he kept touching me when he got a chance. He was always doing
this as if he was joking friendly. One night, I could not understand how and why but we
were alone in closing. When we locked the store I said good-bye to him and started to
walk on the street. Then, he came towards me and asked if I would like to go to his place.
I was shocked. I asked why. He said we could watch a movie together and then sleep. I
froze. I told myself ‘OK [uses in English] Tugal, this is not friendship. He obviously
wants more. I told him it was not possible. And, to my surprise, he said ‘are you sure you
are saying no to your manager?’ I ran without even giving him an answer. I did not go to
work the other day. They did not even call. […] So, my only sexual harassment case
ended with my unemployment [laughs].”

After we completed the recorded interview, my informant Resit, who is a heterosexual
male, mentioned that he was proposed to participate a group sex party by a gay
‘supporting manager’
142
. He said he did not go to the party because he felt that although
the manager said there would be women and men, gay and straight, together he sensed
that if he went there he could not escape from the manager who invited especially him
and not others, on purpose. When I asked him if he was thinking that this was sexual
harassment he said he could not be sure. He also added that it was totally inappropriate

142
Sometimes, companies rotate managers between stores or assign them temporary tasks
such as working in a store for a month in order to help them. These managers are called
‘supporting’ (destekte).
482
and disturbing to receive a proposal from him. When I asked him what if this proposal
was made by a female manager he laughed and admitted that he would not be disturbed
and most probably he would gone to the party.

As Giuffre and Williams (1994) note sexual jokes or play in the workplace are interpreted
rather differently according to who makes a joke to whom. In this sense, heterosexual
men workers feel more threatened and give stronger reactions to jokes or teases made by
gay men while they do not perceive a problem if a heterosexual coworker initiates a
similar action. When we were chatting after our interview, Ali said it would had totally
different meanings for him whether a straight or gay coworker touches his ass or makes a
joke about it like ‘your ass is cute.’ He said he would definitely had fun with the
heterosexuals while it would made him nervous to be touched or commented by gays. He
said when gays touch him or look him in a ‘different way’ the whole meaning changes:
“Gays desire me, straights [uses in English] do not. That is why they are different. I have
no problems with working with gays. But I do not like to be a target of their humor or
ambiguous actions. I have one or two close [gay] friends. I am not homophobic at all.”
Baris also says, “Everything gays make has a different meaning. If it is necessary to
criticize myself, I must accept that I tend to understand differently what gay and straight
[uses in English] coworkers say or do to me. Maybe, it is kind of a prejudice. I am ready
to understand everything in a twisted way when a gay person says it. I do not know if this
makes me a gay enemy; I hope it does not. […] It is not that they touch me or
483
compliment me. It does not always have to be sexual. Sometimes, especially if the
manager or supervisor is gay, any normal thing they do disturb me.”

Contrary to these sexualized narratives of homosocial interactions, Serkan, a heterosexual
sales assistant, says, “It does not make any difference to me whether a homosexual man
or a woman likes me or says nice things to me. We are modern people; we do not live in
a village. Everything can happen in the workplace. We must be open and tolerant. So, for
example, we were opening the Citron Nisantasi store and there was this really
experienced guy. He was older than me, maybe five years or so. He knew that I was
normal and I had a girlfriend who came to the store to have lunch with me. Yet, I could
sense that he was into me. Everyday it increased. His attitude towards me never got ugly
though. He just made me feel it. I never returned his implicit calls. It is very normal for
me. He could be woman, too. The last day we worked there, before the opening day was
also my birthday. And this guy bought me a present. It was really nice. My coworkers
made fun of it. I did not. It was normal for me.” Another heterosexual informant,
Yildiray, also made a similar comment: “I have been working with gay men in this
business for long years. You can see gays at al levels in the retail sector. So, I know how
to talk to them. I know how they think; how they react and how they joke. Some my
friends from the neighborhood [that he lives] for example they are really intrigued when
they see a gay. It is quite abnormal for them. For us, there is no problem. I also make
jokes with them and have fun together in the store. Last week I was wearing red briefs
and when we were exchanging we had great fun with a gay coworker.”
484
After he told me this, and after I tried to envision the fun Yildiray and his gay coworker
had about his red briefs in the locker room, I almost instinctively asked him if he was not
afraid to be seen as gay by others. He laughed and said, “no, no. Never. If you are sure
about yourself, you should not be insecure about how people think about you. Everybody
knows me [that I am heterosexual]. […] I never push myself to do things that I would not
normally do in order not to be seen as gay. I am just acting like myself.” Yildiray’s clear
answer was quite typical for other heterosexual workers in the apparel stores. It is not
even an issue that workers worry or talk about. The consciousness, or awareness, that
heterosexual male sales assistants are doing a culturally feminized job alongside many
out gay men formed an unspoken understanding, a sort of heterosoxa, amongst retail
workers. For example, my coworkers and informants never assume that anybody is gay
without hearing this from the person, or when they talk about a particular person they
always suspect about alternative sexual identities and they frequently ask if he was
bisexual.

In this context, accepting, peacefully living with, and adapting oneself to the visible gay
identity of some workers in the workplace operate as a decisive standard for being
modern. When we talked about the exceptionally high rates of out gay workers in apparel
stores, it was always me who problematized this and my informants almost always
reiterated certain values and principles that they learnt and appropriated during their work
experiences in shopping malls such as globality, diversity, and Europeanness. Whenever I
strove to understand if my heterosexual male informants have ever been anxious to be
485
seen as gay because they are working as sales assistants or because there were many gay
men around them and people could confuse or generalize, they underlined that ‘it is
normal’ for them and they do not find it strange. In terms of embodied masculine
performances they entail in the store I have hardly encountered or heard of an
exaggerated form of masculinity vis-à-vis gay workers or discriminatory, homophobic,
belittling, or dehumanizing actions or comments (like Berke recounts above) which
otherwise are common among Turkish men on the street (Hacioglu 2002). On the
contrary, Cihan almost intuitively said, “I do not have any problems with working with
gay men in the store. I had also gay managers in the past. One [pause] Two… Right, two
[gay managers]. Nobody can think I am gay just because I am doing this job or one of my
coworkers is gay in the store. This will prove that person’s sickness or stupidity; I would
not care about that. Actually, there are so many normal guys, I mean not gay, doing this
job in the stores right now. All of them cannot be gay, right? How many gays are there in
Istanbul? [Laughs] So, a smart people should not think that way. […] If I do something
meaningless just to be seen as more masculine than I am, or just not like gays, then it
means I have some problems with myself. I believe a healthy person should not endeavor
to prove that what he is not; he just acts normal for himself. If somebody asks me are you
gay, I would not try to hit him, I do not think it is an insult. Most of my friends do that
though. Go and ask them, they will punch your face (suratını patlatırlar). [Laughs] I
would just say ‘no, I am normal, but it was a nice try’ (iyi denemeydi ama ben normalim)
[Laughs].”

486
Tokenism

Tokenism does not affect heterosexual women and men in the stores because they are
never the only representative of their gender identity and they do not face with
marginalization and stereotyping in the apparel stores they work. On the other hand, gay
men are most often the token, especially in the smaller stores. Companies may hire at
least one gay man in mid-size and larger stores. Deniz, for example, says, “This is a small
store. The number of workers seasonally shifts from seven to ten. But, I always demand a
gay worker from the human resources [department]. Just like I insist somebody who can
speak in English without a problem. […] I specifically ask for a gay worker because their
visual talents are much better than normal men and women. I can leave the store to him
and he would recreate all the design alone. Also, when they deal with the customers,
especially with women, they are flawless. […] More than one gay would be too much for
this store, this is not a gay bar [laughs] I think 10 per cent is a good ratio [of gay men in
the store].”

My informant Gul works as manager at a Bershka store in which 30 people work. She
says, “Right now I have two gay workers. Maybe I should say ‘at least’ because there is
no way for me to learn everybody’s sexual preference. But with these two, I am rather
sure because they do not hide it. Overall, they are great workers. They are especially
good at visual issues and fashion. Which garment would look nice with another, which
color is fashionable right now, etc? They know these basics of operating a store.
487
However, they are not good at the counter. Not only these two, but in general. Male
customers also do not like to talk to them. So, I assign them to the women’s section. […]
For me, it does not matter whether you are a man, a woman, or a gay. You could even be
a transvestite as long as you do your job. If I sense any harassment or attack towards my
gay workers, or any other worker, from anybody, I would protect them. I would not let
people to be discriminated because of what their preferences are in my store.”

Tugal is an out gay sales assistant at Pull & Bear. He is also a student of interior design at
the college. He says, “I think being the only gay person in the store is not a bad thing at
all. The manager can compare the girls and boys within themselves but I am unique
[laughs]. Although they say they would not be sure that most managers, maybe except the
homophobic ones, protects the gay personnel because it is good to have gay workers in
the store. For most of the time, it does not happen in a day. This business is really open to
gays and there are many of us work as sales assistants. Some prefer to stay and get
promoted. When a straight [uses in English] person enters this job, she might never have
encountered with a gay before. The same is true for the managers. By time, they learn
that we exist and work just like them. […] If a store is small I think only one gay is
enough, but in larger stores more gay people should work. I would say a 20 percent quote
[for gays] is good for the store.”

Yalcin, on the other hand, thinks that the nuisance he experienced one day was because
of his token status in that store: “I was working in the trying rooms that day and I was so
488
tired. It was really crowded and noisy inside. There was a line in front of the door; people
were waiting to use the trying rooms and a coworker of mine and I was rushing to fold
everything that customers tried. All of a sudden, a woman’s head appeared between the
curtains [of a cubicle] and she asked something. I could not understand what she was
saying because of the high volume of music and people’s conversations around me. So, I
shouted her that I could not hear. She replied me in a really rude way, saying ‘because
you are bending too much’ (o kadar kırıttığın içindir)
143
. I was shocked and could not say
anything to her. Everybody heard her scream in the trying rooms and it was so shameful
for me. She could tease me like this because there were not many gays. I was the only
one there and she knew that I would be fragile if she attacked me. If there were two or
three other gay workers around me or in the store she could not be so deriding against
me.”

Although tokenism for gay workers in the apparel stores in contemporary Istanbul
compels them in certain situations as Yalcin mentions and they even yearn for greater
visibility and numbers in the workplace, I argue that the increase in the number of
shopping malls and ‘modern’ stores as my informants call them, opens up a new
possibility for out gay men, and maybe lesbians in the future, and arm them in their
struggle against homophobia and heteronormativity through occupations, workplaces and
labor relations in addition to the cultural and political contestations. When the
phenomenon of the queer sector comes together with women’s high rate of managerial

143
To bend (kırıtmak) in Turkish is used to refer effeminate men’s bodily and speech acts
in a derogatory way.
489
and administrative positions, changing gender dynamics that are manipulated by the
service sector, and the new hegemonic masculinity produced and promoted within the
stores, it becomes a little clearer how the retail sector, the fastest growing economic field
in Turkey, intervenes and reshapes the existing gender and sexual relations and create
new possibilities for individuals to exercise their classed, gendered, and sexualized selves
through work.

490
Chapter 7: Epilogue

In previous chapters, I have attempted to demonstrate that there is an increasing need for
a more thorough examination of the novel urban lower-middle classes in the city of
Istanbul through the transpositional processes of globalization and neoliberalization in
order to inaugurate a meaningful interpretation of social change. Neoliberalism creates
new forms of subjectivity, alternative ways of identity-construction, and different
configurations of relations between selves and cultural Other(s) all around the world via
gender and sexual relations, ethnic and racial dynamics, class affiliations, constitution of
proper desires and aspirations (to become wealthier, happier, more modern, more
individualized, etc.). Through this neoliberal restructuring of the everyday life (or, of life
itself) previously unknown or unarticulated binaries are fostered, such as global-local and
(self-) improving-deteriorating, while existing axes of social difference such as class and
gender are redefined and adapted to the recent ambiguities and contingencies. I would
argue that in the luxurious apparel stores, which serve the burgeoning transnational
middle-class taste, located in the ostentatious shopping malls that were erected to fulfill
Istanbulites’ desires to become globalized and more modern (as well as more secure and
to have pleasure in sterile places), a microcosm of the neoliberalizing Turkish society and
logics of the neoliberal sociability is represented by the intercourse of managers,
customers, and retail workers—the three heterogeneous social groups that encounter and
interact in the selling floor, affected by local and global currents and conditions, and
created a dialogical influence upon others’ way of seeing themselves. As it should have
become evident throughout the stories and anecdotes I have recounted in the previous
491
pages, “the neoliberal sieve” creates positions with specific capacities, skills and rewards,
relocates people across the social hierarchy, and transforms their identities according to
the needs and priorities of late capitalism. It structures the social organization of the
contemporary economy and fills up roughly two ranks: Servants and surfers of
neoliberalism. Clearly, retail workers in Istanbul—just like numerous others who have
low-end, deskilled jobs- are servants and customers—presumably middle and higher
classes- are surfers; while managers can be regarded as a liminal category of the stage of
the apparel store since they are both privileged in terms of class identity but they are still
performing service to customers.

Tugba, one of my former coworkers and key informants, is one of these people who
comes from the lower-middle classes and has ended up as a servant in the new economy.
She grew up in a poor inner city neighborhood surrounded by business areas within a
“traditional” nuclear family. She graduated from the accounting division of a vocational
trade high school. She was an average student, she says, and when she prepared a list of
preferences for the central university entrance exam she could only be admitted by
Bahcesehir University. When she was preparing her list of preferences she did not know
that this was a new private college. Due to the lack of her and her social environment’s
investment in education and cultural capital nobody warned or informed her about this
and she thought that it was a public university with affordable tuitions. When it came out
that she could only be admitted to a private university her father proposed to sell their
apartment in order to cover the tuition but she declined that offer. “I could not accept it; I
492
could not live with it. It is the only asset my family has and I could not want it from them
for my college expenses. Plus, the value of the apartment can only cover the tuition. What
about my other expenses such as books and food? I was really touched by my family’s
generosity but it was unrealistic. However, I went to a trade high school and I was
supposed to be good at accounting and office management. I really wanted to go to
college to advance my skills and find a decent job. In the following three years I took the
[central university entrance] exam but could not be successful because I was working at
Mudo [a Turkish department store] at the same time. You can only make it [pass the
exam] when the information is still fresh in your head. I could only be admitted to
colleges in Anatolia [out of Istanbul] and my father did not let me go to Anatolia. He said
I was a girl and it was better for me to stay with my family. So, here I am. I could not
move forward from where family is. They are kind of poor people; poor but with honor. I
am now 25 years old. [I am] living with them and working at ZIP for a miserable salary.
[…] I think I could not defeat the system [Cenk: The university entrance system or the
system of social injustice in Turkey?] I guess both, everything. I could not win and
despite my talents I am here now.”

After the period we worked together at the ZIP store in Kanyon shopping mall, Tugba
tried to transfer to the Spanish Inditex group, mostly because their working hours are
lesser, there were not any unpaid overtimes, and the salary they offered was higher. The
only disadvantage she would have there was that Inditex did not provide shuttles from
home to the shopping mall. Tugba was concerned not only because of the amount she
493
would pay to the shuttles herself but also of her security during traveling to home from
work at midnight on a deserted corner of Istanbul. The store manager Deniz saw her
hesitation and convinced her to stay at ZIP by guaranteeing lesser working hours and a
little increase in her salary. Later, I talked to Deniz about Tugba’s unrealized transfer to
Inditex and her intervention in the process. She said, “I did it not only for myself or my
store because she is an excellent worker; but I also prevented her transfer for her own
good. I know that her father would not like the idea that his unmarried daughter works at
Istinye Park, a shopping mall out of residential areas and a desolate place at night, and
she might leave the store after 11:30 PM? I know that he would not accept this; he would
discomfort her and eventually make her quit. She wants a career in retail sector and I am
sure she will get it but two resignations from ZIP and Inditex will definitely not help her
for her purposes in the future. So, at least for now, it is better for her to stay here with
us.”

Deniz told this to me in late June, 2010 when I spent an afternoon sitting at Starbucks in
City’s shopping mall. After I left the ZIP Kanyon store that she was the manager, Deniz
attempted to transfer to another multinational retail company for similar reasons as
Tugba’s: Fewer working hours (or the legal standard, 45 hours per week maximum),
more money, and stronger hopes for future promotion. After two seemingly positive job
interviews she had at the center office of the company, she received a phone call from the
human resources department basically saying her English needed to be improved for her
to be considered as a store manager. “I know that I am a great manager. I can administer
494
all sorts of store types with great success. I am not bragging about myself and this is not
uncorroborated self-confidence. But when you tell me ‘we cannot hire you because you
cannot speak in English’ I feel about myself really bad. I cannot cope with it. I cannot
learn to speak in English after now. I do not have the time or money for it. It means
better, more professional companies will not employ me in the future. I have to stay
where I am whether I like it or not. It does not depend on how hard I work or how much
energy I put into my job. It is not about me. That is so depressing.”

A few months later ZIP has opened a new store at City’s and assigned Deniz as the store
manager to this big, double-floor location. She was promoted from being the manager of
the relatively small and insignificant store at Kanyon to this flashy position. As a result of
her perseverance ZIP City’s became the most successful ZIP store in Turkey within first
two months after it was opened. She brought her former workers Tugba, Cihan and
Sanem to this new store. Her former second manager Mete resigned and started to work
at Citron as a cashier. Ironically, he was making more money although he was doing a
lower status job for lesser working hours. Habibe stayed in the Kanyon store and became
a ‘responsible supervisor’. Since she was always ambitious and passionate about retail
work everybody thinks she must be happy about it. After Deniz left, Tugba came to
Starbucks to chat with me in her lunch break. She said I was the person who introduced
Starbucks to her when I started to work with them two years ago. “Before you I had never
tried Starbucks because it looked like a place for managers and not for me. It was
expensive and classy. I also could not understand or pronounce the names of coffees. I do
495
not know if you ever noticed but when you took me to Starbucks back then I always
wanted whatever you ordered because I did not know what to order. [I did notice] Of
course, I am not here everyday. It is still expensive for me. But now I know about it. I do
not have a shock when I walk into a Starbucks. […] While we were working together you
kept asking us what changed in our lives after we started to work at shopping malls. Now
I can tell you that, among many other things I have seen and learnt I visit Starbucks and
have a coffee latte sometimes [laughs].”

After we chatted with Tugba more than 45 minutes—she was late but she trusted that
Deniz would tolerate, if she notices at all, since I was there- she left and Cihan came to
see me. One of my key informants and the sharpest critique of the retail sector, Cihan was
surprisingly joyful and happy in this new shopping mall although he was still working
under the supervision of Deniz whom he unendingly complaint from. “I do not think that
she is inherently bad. Of course, she does definitely wrong things to me and to other
people. Also, I think that becoming a manager in this business has to be a dirty position.
Otherwise you cannot be able to manage people. Nevertheless, we are doing well now.
She respects me and I reciprocate. Maybe all the problems that we had at Kanyon were
because of external reasons such as the store was understaffed all the time and the
company treated us in an explicitly disfavoring way like delivering products without
letting us know in advance. There are not any problems of this sort here. We are all very
civilized (medeni) here [laughs].”

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That day Sanem was not working. Deniz told me Sanem needed an internship to graduate
from university where she studies management. Deniz dealt with the center office of ZIP
(Xano Retail Group) and found a position for Sanem. Thus, she works at the store for
three days and at the center office for three days during the summer. Deniz was elated
about Sanem’s progress and her possible future at the center office. Among these people,
Sanem was the only one who was a college student and coming from a middle class
family although she is not from Istanbul but from Zonguldak, a provincial town on the
coast of Black Sea. Hence, the neoliberal sieve works through class lines once again and
the only worker who has a (although ambivalent) middle class background can race for a
middle class occupation while others, who were coming from socially excluded and
disadvantaged segments of Turkish society, continue to work either with no advancement
(like Cihan and Tugba) or with small and insubstantial upward mobility (like Deniz and
Habibe) at least for the last two years.

I would like to divide the timeline mentioned in this dissertation into three basic points in
history: the period I worked at Citron, long before this research (Septermber 2004 – May
2005), my job experience at ZIP and the interviews (the research term: July 2008 –
September 2009), and now (while I was completing this dissertation; roughly, summer
2010). This timeline indicates the fluctuations and transformations both in some of the
people’s lives that I have talked about here and within the retail sector in Turkey in the
last six years.

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One of the persisting patterns in this period is a high turnover rate. Workers’ predilection
to change the stores, companies, or shopping malls they work at significantly impact both
their lives—professional and private- and transnational retailers’ policies and actions.
Another stable element in the Turkish retail sector is that the stores are systematically
understaffed. Although there is an increasing young, unemployed population in the
Istanbul metropolitan area retail companies are not willing to hire new people as much as
it is necessary because a) It is too expensive for them to hire a new person because of the
legal expenses and the time devoted to the each new employee such as training and
guidance, b) Transnational apparel companies are explicitly searching for middle class
mannerisms and educational credentials among candidates and they definitely opt against
varoş youth (people from inner-city slums or squatter settlements at the outskirts of the
city) that represent insularity, backwardness, poverty, and a misfit to the global
hierarchies of taste, c) For most of the time the job candidates, who are middle class and
who are willing to take low-end service sector jobs, are university students that can be
employed only as part-time workers. Yet, part-time sales assistants are more expensive
than the full times to hire. Struck within this dilemma between employing middle-class
students as part-time workers and hiring the less desired (if not varoş) candidates as full-
time, corporations prefer to navigate a balance that is sustained through recruiting
minimum numbers of member of staff in the stores. In other words, they pretend they do
not have such a problem. Of course, this withholding policy increases the burden over
managers’ and sales assistants’ shoulders, trigger discontentment in the workplace, and
contributes to the high turnover rates.
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In terms of my informants’ lives, there is not much change. For most of them, the only
novelties they have are the new workplaces, different shopping malls and rapidly rotating
coworkers. Labor relations and conditions of employment are simply consistent: Most
workers in the retail sector in Istanbul work overtime –paid or unpaid, they earn
unacceptably low amounts of money, they encounter regular resentment and disrespect
because of their class identities and weak cultural capitals, they do not receive any
institutional support or training in their efforts for ‘self-improvement’ while it is endorsed
in the corporate discourses, and last but unquestionably not least, they feel the ever-
increasing sense of insecurity, plasticity, ambiguity, resilience, exclusion, and alienation.
The only available insecure, temporary, flexible jobs without benefits in the retail sector
push workers and job candidates radically alter their lives according to the demands and
promises of this economic field in parallel with a model of neoliberal subjectivity (the
reflexive, entrepreneurial, mobile, egocentric self that continuously works on herself as a
project) and gender relations (the decline of the traditional male breadwinner position, the
new ways and areas to institute masculinity, a new womanhood which simultaneously
emphasizes femininity and independency).

On the other hand, there are also minor changes in the Turkish retail sector. The most
important single field of change is representation. How shopping malls, apparel stores,
transnational companies, and retail workers are rendered visible in public discourses?
When and how are they referred, in what terms, and in which contexts? Companies as
organizations, stores as workplaces, and sales assistants as a class of workers are now
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talked about more than five or ten years ago. One of the issues that were discussed
broadly in public was about the legal proposition to close shopping malls on Sundays like
other countries in the European continent. The companies, which administer shopping
malls or have stores in these places, absolutely opposed the idea and argued that most of
their profit comes from sales during weekends, such a one-day break from routine of
work would harm the business, and force companies fire workers even though they do
not have such an intention. For their part, retail workers and managers I have talked were
all supportive for this offer. They were stating that the worst thing about their job is the
requirement to work on weekends while all other people have free time for leisure, being
with their families, or staying alone. They maintained that customers should have visited
shopping malls on weekdays (after or before their working hours) or on Saturdays and
Sundays should have been declared holidays for everybody as “a universal human right.”
Finally, the state institutions (mostly, The Ministry of Labor and Social Security versus
The Ministry of Trade) presented a compromising view that pays attention to both sides’
demands and arguments and offered ambiguous solutions such as decreasing and
delimiting the working hours on Sundays. Then, the charismatic Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogan involved in discussions and said:
We have to accept this: Now, there is no possibility to exist for the
ideas, which defend that we must put shopping malls aside or there
must be no shopping malls or shopping malls should not be open
on Sundays. We have to prioritize people’s demands. My citizen
(benim vatandaşım) takes his wife and his children to the shopping
malls on Sundays. It is his entertainment. They [shopping malls]
improved the business so far that now they put a trainer for the
children that people bring with. On the other hand [the citizen]
purchases cheaper and fresher products. This is an important and
serious demand of the citizen, of the people. I will not approve any
500
decision that causes this pleasure to disappear. (April 10
th
2010,
www.milliyet.com.tr)

In this short statement, the prime minister makes it clear that “his citizen” is male,
married with children, not working at a shopping mall, and not working on Sundays.
Hence, it is his natural(-ized) right to visit shopping malls and buy consumer goods on
Sundays against the demands and proposed rights of the retail workers who are counter-
arguing for free Sundays like everybody else have. At the end, after the prime minister’s
intervention, the proposition (which was already in circulation for at least two years) was
either withdrawn at the parliament or the article on shopping malls was erased and the
public discussion ended. At least, for now.

Except the debate on redefining Sundays as workdays or holidays, how and when
shopping malls (especially workers and labor relations within them) become intelligible,
visible, and noteworthy for the neoliberal public? I can mention four categories of such
exceptional appearances (or, hypervisibility) when shopping malls are talked about
without contributing to the recognition of existing work regimes or retail workers’
predicament: a) The economic crisis (in the economic discourse ‘the stagnation in
services, entertainment and consumption’ is always represented secondarily only after the
emphasis on the manufacturing sector, the real jobs and the real workers); b) Grand
openings (state bureaucrats and politicians participate these ceremonies and underline the
economic growth and development in Turkey) that showcases connection to modernity
and wealth; c) Celebrities captured by paparazzis when they wander in shopping malls
(all major newspapers have regular pages to present daily news from the preeminent
501
malls including Kanyon and Istinye Park); d) Scandalous news such as a toddler who fell
from the stairs and died at Cevahir shopping mall (a crisis of safety) and a man, who was
caught when he was shoplifting, was beaten by private security guards without the
police’s information at Akmerkez shopping mall (a crisis of human rights and disrespect
to human dignity). All these types through which shopping malls are rendered sensible,
recognizable, governable, and as an essential element of modern urban life in discourse
document and consolidate retail workers’ collective feeling of being voiceless and
unheard by the neoliberal public: “Nobody cares for us; nobody is willing to listen to our
problems.”

While the labor regime and working conditions within shopping malls in Istanbul (as well
as the poverty and social exclusion workers experience) is turned into something nobody
is aware of or concerned with –and thus become naturalized and normalized- through
systematic silences and inattentiveness, the only channels to give a voice to the voiceless
retail workers are mediated by critical, marginal, alternative representations: Weekly
nonconformist comic journals that are owned and produced by young, leftist intellectuals
and newspaper columnists who incorporate an unorthodox and disapproving attitude
against the policies implemented by the state or capital. My coworkers and informants are
familiar with both representations despite the fact that they have no tendency to follow
public discussions through newspapers, journals, or magazines. Here, I would present
two examples that are both referred by my informants.

502
The first one is from the popular column of Umur Talu, a leftist daily contributor who is
well known for his sensitivity for workers’ rights and social inequality in Turkey,
published under the title They Are Slaves, Too (Onlar da Köle) in the national newspaper
Sabah on April 1
st
, 2008. In his article, Talu publishes a letter written by an unknown
reader as a response to his previous essays about workers of every sort that are
suppressed and exploited by the state or private companies. It reads:
We also exist!
Do you know who are ‘we’? If you are not one of us it is not
possible for you to know us. [We are the] people who you do
encounter everyday -maybe a couple of times, talk to, smile, argue;
people who are effective on your consumer choices; people who
are cold or lovely sometimes; people whom you are not interested
in for how long they have been standing; most of them are young
and some are getting old while they are still young […]
Of course, we are lucky because we found a job somehow while
thousand others are waiting outside for these jobs. Our jobs are
relatively clear, chic and elegant regarding miners, dock laborers,
or agriculture workers. [I am not talking about] the unchanging
workers of small shops, who became trademarks of business, but
thousands in grand shopping malls or hundreds in big stores:
Whether you call us salesclerks or sales assistants at that moment.
There is not such a ‘shopping mall phenomenon’ as in Istanbul in
the ‘rich’ Europe. Paris and London have their century-old big
stores. Rome, Milan and Vienna have their century-old shopping
boulevards. Yet, they do not have thousands of great shopping
malls. Turkey (Istanbul) caught a very modern(!) era in this sense.
Let it be!
The group of sales assistants, who serve to the rich, constitute one
of the most fragile parts of ‘modern army of slaves.’
[Below is] the condition of our humanity (with exceptions who do
not find suffering acceptable for himself, his workers, or human
beings).

After this introduction the letter continues with recounting some of the material ‘facts’
(the hardships and injustices retail workers have to live with in order to be employed)
such as the unpaid overtimes, illegally long working hours, the lack of benefits and the
503
sense of insecurity, very long hours standing without having breaks, unregistered work
for most workplaces and too long trial periods for transnational companies, the
unquestionable principle of ‘the customer is always right’ against human dignity and
patience, and finally the absolute lack of state control and intervention to protect the
disempowered workers’ rights.

This contribution by Talu is widely read and shared among sales assistants in Istanbul.
Although it points to the very normalcy of their everyday struggles and a kind of
embodied knowledge that they inherently have, it is so refreshing for them to see
somebody, a respected public figure in the mainstream mass media and his readers,
finally paid attention to their world and spoke about it. For many retail workers, this
particular column as well as other (in fact very few) other mentions in the daily press
moved them from doxa to heterodoxa in terms of their own experiences at the workplace
that it is not normal, inevitable, or acceptable to work like this but instead it is highly
contestable, resistible, and renegotiable in front of public if they have the proper voice
and ability to verbalize their problems with transnational companies. Such awareness
gives them an opportunity to problematize the neoliberalizing state’s role (or better, the
absence of the state) in configuring relations between workers (citizens) and capital, and
make a call to political parties for addressing their urgent nuisances.

The second example comes from the illustrated page Dudullu Postası (Dudullu News)
created by Serkan Yilmaz in the vastly popular weekly comic journal Penguen. Dudullu
504
is a varoş (squatter) district in Istanbul and Yilmaz writes stories and draws comics
pretending he owns a local newspaper in and for the area. Therefore, he constructs an
alternative language and visuality to the mainstream middle class narrative from a
distinctly varoş point of view. In this particular week he wrote an imagined news-story
about “guys on the corner now hang out in the shopping mall” (see figure 1 below).

Figure 9: Dudullu Postasi by Serkan Yilmaz, from the weekly Penguen

505
In the text, Yilmaz satirically recounts that the (male) youngsters (street corner guys) of
the neighborhood (somewhere in Dudullu) who normally spend time in the empty lot
developed a habit to frequent shopping malls. It reads:
They dress up and go to the shopping mall for entertainment. It is
obvious that they think they are handsome. They check the girls,
wander [in the corridors], eat the free food samples, use perfume-
and hair spray-testers, and wander again. They write their
telephone numbers on small pieces of paper and leave them on
tables if they make eye contact with girls.
That girl will never take that paper because a shopping mall is a
modern person’s empty lot. They [modern people] fancy to hang
out there [just like the un-moderns hang in the empty lot].
Whenever they have chance, they would go there.
Hey boy, it is not good for us here. Look at yourself! There are
mirrors everywhere, look at yourself, look at your appearance. No,
no do not enjoy what you see, do not think you are attractive. Be
realistic for a second.
Hey boy, what do you wear for God’s sake? [Insults to their
clothes, hairs, and overall ‘style’]
Only McDonalds would want you here, maybe it will make you
‘the best worker of the month.’ McDonalds will make you work as
if you were on the [agricultural] field. You will be devastated
again. If you will not change there will be no change, do you
understand? Fuck the system [in English] do you understand?

In the same frame, there is also drawing by Yilmaz that depicts the youngsters in a
shopping mall (see picture 2). In the picture we can see elevators and shop windows with
two women (both blonde: another symbol of Europeanness in Turkey) who wear modern,
Western clothes. There are also three varoş males in the picture—the youngsters Yilmaz
both talks about and addresses in the text. They all have black hair and moustaches
(which decode conservativeness and rusticity) and they all wear traditional, outdated
clothes. We can see that their ‘style’ does not fit in the shopping mall just like their body
language: Their hands in their pockets, they stand weirdly, as if they are too happy, not to
506
know what to do in a shopping mall. It is clear that they are not used to hang out there;
they are the unwanted and uninvited outsiders within the space of modernity. They do not
belong to the shopping mall except to be employees of McDonalds, which is famous for
extraordinarily low salaries and long working hours. Otherwise, they would better leave
the shopping mall and turn back to their neighborhood to spend time in the empty lot
without crossing the cultural boundaries between the varoş milieu and the modern, urban,
global middle classes.

Figure 10: Detail from Dudullu Postasi

Throughout this dissertation, I have talked about shopping malls and retail stores in
Istanbul that are owned or operated by transnational corporations. Producing garments
and transporting them between and within countries constitute the other two significant
parts of the global apparel industry. Since my focus has been on workplace
507
governmentality within the (high) modern stores and subjectivation among contemporary
retail workers I could not examine critically the manufacturing and transportation aspects
of this business. Nevertheless, it could be argued that there is an increasing consciousness
in the public about the production conditions of the garments sold in high-end stores and
ritzy shopping malls. Despite the fact that it is not as strong as, for example, the concept
of ‘fair trade’ coffee (Jaffee 2007) yet, there is an incipient concern among both
customers, who ask or check where the garments they are about to buy were produced,
and social critics of multinational companies. For instance, Adrianne Pine (2008: 174)
elucidates the situation in Honduras; “Factories that subcontract to produce products for
retailers such as GAP make it possible for those corporations to turn a blind eye to abuses
that take place during the manufacturing process.” In Turkey, for example, there is a
group of social scientists, medical doctors and activists that struggle against apparel
companies for recognizing Silicosis sickness as an inevitable outcome of stonewashing
blue jeans. Three filmmakers, Petra Holzer, Selcuk Erzurumlu and Ethem Ozguven,
made a documentary titled Toz (Dust) in 2010 in order to receive public attention to the
inhuman conditions in the sweatshops producing garments for national and multinational
companies. On the other hand, unionized workers employed by the national apparel giant
LC Waikiki made public demonstrations and received media attention when they were
fired without severance pays and indemnifications (because they unionized, became
members of a union).

508

Figure 11: The Demonstration against deunionization of apparel workers.
“To our People: We will win through resistance for our bread!”

Figure 12: The Demonstration against deunionization of apparel workers 2.

[Islamically covered] women workers are seen in the demonstration. In front of their
clothes, “Viva our resistance” is written. Workers who have jobs at sweatshops and
factories belong to apparel companies or their subcontracting firms have a slightly
different class position than my informants who (are able to) work at shopping malls.
During my research these manufacturing workers haunted my research as the ‘undesired
others’, or abjects, that my informants never imagine to be similar to, let alone
collaborate with. Against my informants’ emphasis on modernity and the ‘wannabe’
middle class identities, which is symbolized by women’s Western appearances as well as
relaxed gender and sexual relations, these women workers’ Islamic presence highlights
509
the symbolic differences my informants have tried to imagine. However, their class
positions, which are stabilized and saturated through their relations with (transnational)
capital, are getting closer via the deunionized workers’ public protests and my
informants’ complaining whispers, cursing murmurs, and implicit sabotages. “The devil
behind the mirror” (Gregory 2007) is just same for both worker groups: The logic of
neoliberalism, transnational capital, and the complicit nation-state; however different
they are that they yearn to believe.
These two pictures were taken from the informational handout that workers delivered on
the street.

During the summer of 2010 the impact of the last (global) economic crisis, which also hit
the Turkish economy, started to disappear. The constructions of new shopping malls have
resumed, the openings of new stores have rescheduled and the retail industry has changed
its frozen mode to active and aggressive growth once again. However, this is not
necessarily good news for workers who are temporarily unemployed or trying to transfer
a better company as in the cases of Deniz and Tugba above. A new cohort who was born
in 1992 are now high-school graduates and available for retail companies to hire as new
(read inexperienced, docile, and cheap) sales assistants. The excess of the young
population, persistent urban poverty, and chronic unemployment simultaneously
contribute to the perception of “thousands outside are waiting to have such a job”,
increase the pressure over retail workers, proliferate the amount of risk they face, and
worsen the situation at the workplace. On the other hand, the growing retail industry
brings in its own dynamism and rapidly changing the norms and rules (however unstable
and untrustworthy they are). For example, the German & Swedish retail company H&M
has decided to enter the Turkish market and open its first store at Istanbul Forum
shopping mall in November 2010 with 10 other new stores projected for 2011. In order to
510
attract experienced sales assistants, store managers, and brand directors H&M offers
higher pays, 2 (instead of 1) weekly holidays, and individual private insurance that covers
health fees in addition to the already guaranteed advantages by other companies such as
additional payment for food and transportation. Since H&M consciously maneuvered to
raise the bar and elevated the higher standards in the retail sector in Turkey, other
companies will eventually (and hopefully) follow it and provide more advantages and
rights to their workers in the near future.

Class is an intricate issue that tangled with both virtually universal intersectionalities such
as race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, gender, sexuality, the body, location, religion, and age
as well as situated, contextual, and specific arrangements such as a nation’s history, its
involvement with modernity, forces of globalization, impact of neoliberalization, effects
of Occidentalism, or other discursive and/or practical dualities in which symbolic
differences are created and articulated with class structure (Skeggs 2004). Class also
works through the constitution of subjectivities and the formation of governmentality that
constellates these subjects within a given social and cultural order. There are always
newer key terms, or criteria, such as mobility (Urry 2000), reflexivity (Bourdieu 2004;
Adkins 2002), flexibility (Ong 1999), networks and connectivity (Castells 2000),
individualism (Bauman 2001), and risk (Beck 2009) that are under constant
reconstruction for conceptualizing rapidly changing class identities, identifications,
relations, and affiliations in the world.

511
Neoliberalism has not only reordered the existing social groups and restructured the
nuanced differences between them; but it also has added new emphasizes and even
triggered the formations of new class positions. One of these new classes that
neoliberalism has importantly contributed to its expansion is the service-sector workers,
alongside for example finance workers (Ho 2009; Fisher and Downey 2006) and the
creative classes, such as advertisers and web designers (Florida 2003).

Here, I have tried to demonstrate some of the indications of the emergence of a new
lower-middle class of workers in urban Istanbul in close relation with the neoliberal
restructuring in both Turkish economy and the metropolitan administration of Istanbul;
the long-delayed aspirations of becoming modern and --more recently- global within
Turkish society; the entrance of transnational companies into the Turkish (labor) markets;
establishing a (post-) modern workplace governmentality; forming proper subjectivities
with a set of appropriate desires, anxieties, shames and fears; and reshuffling existing
gender (and sexual) order, identities, and relations.

Despite the fact that Turkey has systematically been neoliberalizing since 1980 and the
number of people, who have jobs in the services sector, has been increasing remarkably
(and reached hundreds of thousands) social scientists’ attention to this field in Turkey has
remained exceptionally weak. In other words, we do not really know about the two most
crucial spheres of the formation of a new (lower-middle) class: Labor dynamics (what are
the workplace conditions, what are the terms they work under, how the relations between
512
employers and employees are configured, etc.) and culture (how they define themselves
individually and communally, how they search for a place within public culture in
Turkey, how their gender and sexual identities are shaped, etc.).

This dissertation addresses these questions through analysis of four major areas, which all
permeated an individual chapter above. The first was a close study of the shopping mall
and apparel stores as workplaces and interactions that take place within these spaces. The
second was introducing the concept of governmentality in order to fully grasp how
current management strategies (with support of the State) produce its workers, watch
their lives, and intervene when necessary for corporate goals. The third was an
examination of the constitution of subjectivities of retail workers mostly based on their
class positions and work experiences (including developing a sense of resistance) as well
as their ethnic, political, gender, and sexual selves. The fourth one was an exploration of
the effective and evolving gender and sexual regimes among the members of this class.

Gender and sexuality play a critical role in the process of the articulation of neoliberal
values, visions, and moralities with the subjectivities of individuals, who find themselves
within the conditions of this new working class. Shopping mall is a women- and
femininity-dominated workplace. Heterosexual men strive hard (sometimes fail) to adapt
themselves to this female-dominated gender regime in which they do not have the
‘traditional male privilege’ any more, they receive orders from women and gay men (less
masculine subjects), and they do not have the chance to satisfy the patriarchal
513
breadwinner role which requires getting married with a non-working woman, having
children, and feeding them on an uneven division of labor. Instead, men are pushed to
develop a more egalitarian, pliant, open and even subordinated “new” masculinity. As the
case of retail workers in Istanbul can demonstrate, neoliberalism demands and
superimposes such a novel masculinity (together with a set of ideal womanhood and
queerness) which relocates men through servitude (pleasing others instead of supremacy),
deference (kindness towards others instead of recalcitrance), reflexivity (being seen
instead seeing others only), and flexibility (prioritizing dialogue and negotiation instead
of idées fixe and stringency).

I believe this research about the group of people of contemporary sales assistants (or,
service sector workers in broader terms) can be a valid departure for a meaningful
analysis of the repercussions of neoliberalism, the impact of globalization, the
consequences of deindustrialization, and the effects of the rise of services in the ever-
developing Global South, and in Istanbul more specifically, where social exclusion,
suffering and poverty significantly persist.

514
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Adkins, Lisa (1995) Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and the Labour Market,
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Ahiska, Meltem (2005) Radyonun Sihirli Kapisi: Garbiyatcilik ve Politik Oznellik,
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APPENDIX: INFORMANTS
(Recorded Interviews Only)

NAME AGE SEX POSITION
LIVING
WITH EDUCATION
Berke 32 M Brand Director partner GD
Deniz 30 F Store Manager husband SC
Gul 30 F Store Manager mother CG
Pinar 29 F Store Manager alone CG
Cigdem 28 F Merchandiser parents CG
Tugba 24 F SA parents HS
Cihan 25 M SA friends CS*
Habibe 22 F SA parents HS
Sanem 23 F SA sister CS
Ozlem 29 F SA parents ES
Burak 22 M SA parents HS
Yildiray 25 M SA parents HS
Alev 24 F SA parents HS
Esra 23 F SA parents HS
Ipek 21 F SA friends CS
Atiye 23 F SA parents HS
Ali 24 M SA parents SC
Ezgi 25 F SA siblings HS
Betul 23 F SA parents HS
Burcu 24 F SA parents SC
Gonul 21 F SA parents CS
Sule 24 F SA parents HS
Onur 24 M SA friends CS
Baris 25 M SA parents HS
Sibel 28 F SA** parents HS
Sevda 25 F SA parents SC
Ayse 22 F SA friends CS
Nalan 20 F SA parents HS
Aysin 27 F SA parents HS
Oray 23 M SA parents HS
Nihal 24 F SA parents HS
Zeliha 20 F SA parents HS
Levent 22 M SA friends CS
537
Serkan 24 M SA parents HS
Pervin 21 M SA parents SC
Saniye 23 F SA parents HS
Kaan 22 M SA parents HS
Tugal 25 M SA friends SC
Gulcan 25 F SA parents HS
Hakan 26 M SA parents CS
Eda 21 F SA siblings HS
Resit 23 M SA parents HS
Sinem 27 F SA friends SC
Yalcin 22 M SA parents HS
Beril 28 F SA husband SC
Yeliz 23 F SA parents HS

* Cihan freezes his education every year since Fall 2007.
** Sibel was a store (boutique) manager when I conducted an interview with her but she
was a cashier at numerous stores for long years.

SA: Sales Assistant (including cashiers)
GD: Post-graduate degree
HS: High school graduate
SC: Some college
CG: College degree
CS: College student
ES: Elementary school

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study examines the conditions and possibility of the emergence of a new working class, or a novel sort of a lower-middle class, alongside other parallel social inequalities in the city of Istanbul. Through participant observation in retail stores and conducting interviews I explore the interplay of individuals (retail workers, store managers and other professional employees of corporations, and customers from different segments of society), transnational capital, and the State in the rapidly neoliberalizing Turkey. I show that the logic behind the creation of “the army of retail workers” can be grasped through the concept of governmentality in which certain populations, problems, tactics, and technologies have been developed in order to present modernity and globality to a particular group of the urbanites. I contend that when the glitzy apparel store, or the shopping mall, is framed as a workplace instead of a non-place of consumption and pleasure, the silence of the army of the retail workers can be broken and the hidden class relations is rendered visible. I demonstrate how a significant aspect of this phenomenon is about constituting subjectivities of workers –i.e. the specific desires, aims, aspirations, fears, and channels of resistance, to push them take up modern, decent, successful, self-improving subject positions and identities. I maintain that gender and sexual relations play a foundational role in the formation of this new class. While a different, alternative sort of masculinity is produced and consolidated in the shopping mall and queerness becomes mostly tolerable and acceptable in apparel stores, new types of femininity are also designated and imposed. Retail workers are seemingly freer than their peers to pick up their own gender and sexual identities and construct who they are in terms of gender and sexual relations.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Ozbay, Cenk (author)

Core Title Retailed lives: governing gender and work in globalizing Istanbul

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Degree Conferral Date 2010-12

Publication Date 09/25/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag gender,Globalization,Istanbul,neoliberalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,retail stores

Place Name Istanbul (city or populated place), Turkey (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Messner, Michael A. (committee chair), Gomez-Barris, Macarena (committee member), Lutkehaus, Nancy (committee member)

Creator Email cenkoz1980@yahoo.com,ozbay@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3477

Unique identifier UC1463122

Identifier etd-OZBAY-4071 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-422153 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3477 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-OZBAY-4071.pdf

Dmrecord 422153

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Ozbay, Cenk

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu