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Blaming Others

This is basically my master thesis. I had finished this just before i flew to Houston to start my PhD. In a more traditional sense this is much more ethnographic than my dissertation. When I have a look after so many years, I am really proud of with what I did in this work….I had from time to time felt sorry that this study could not be used properly. Now there is a chance…

I wish the pricing wasn’t like that. Honestly, I wouldn’t pay that much…

I dedicated this book to my father, who is a laborer I know close enough…

An abstract:
The purpose of this study is to find out the sources of agency among a group of unskilled unionised workers. I argue that the lives of workers are situated in two domains, home and work, and family and union membership respectively become the sources of agency coupled with a discourse of blame. The discourse of blame, which is the daily form through which a sense of impotence among workers, is consciously used by unionised workers under the leadership of union representatives. This serves the construction of an imaginary community of workers based on the idea of a society in harmony and balance. The broader historical context in which my study can be situated in Turkey’s post-1980 period. In this period, export oriented industrialism went hand in hand with a kind of de-industrialisation and adoption of flexible production techniques both of which undermined the power of trade unions and the discourse of the welfare state. Thus my study can be understood as an attempt to demonstrate a moment of unionised workers’ responses to these processes.

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Tagged in: trade union, workers