Transnational Corporations and the Making of the Transnational Middle Classes in the Global South

Mustafa Yavas, Johns Hopkins University

This article examines how globalization shapes middle-class formation in the Global South through the case of Turkey and proposes an employment-centered conceptualization of transnational middle classes. Through a historically grounded analysis complemented with more than 100 in-depth interviews with Turkish professional-managerial employees of TNCs, the article first highlights that, parallel to many Southern countries, the Turkish economy’s global integration and transition from developmentalism to neoliberalism since the 1980s comprise the essential macro-level processes that undergirded the formation of the transnational Turkish middle class. It then illustrates how TNCs helped alter the local hierarchies of earnings and occupational status in Turkey, how they shaped its high-skill labor market and connected it to the global one, and how they directly participate in the cultural making of this emerging class via selective and homophilous hiring practices. Against the backdrop of the Turkish state’s reversal in its role of being the benefactor of middle classes, TNCs emerged as the primary employer of Turkey’s most educated workforce, marking the rise of a "yuppiedom" vis-à-vis its mostly state-employed, old middle class. In addition to their transnational cultural capital—made up of English language skills, prestigious educational credentials, and cosmopolitan taste, which loom large as conditions of employment at TNCs—the most distinctive features of this ascendant fraction of Turkey’s new middle class consist of consumerism and careerism with aspirations to global upward mobility toward the North. Comparing the Turkish case with other Southern and Northern ones such as Iranian and European transnational middle classes, the article contributes to the scholarship on middle classes by going beyond consumption-centered analyses and casting TNCs as consequential agents of middle-class formation and social change in the Global South.

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 Presented in Session 207. Global Connections of Class