Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

There is a dearth of empirical study about the pattern of change in the class structure of Middle East societies, as their socio-economic structures have undergone some radical transformations in the past fifty years. This study focuses on Iran and Turkey in their socio-economic and political context since the1960s. This was the decade when these two countries, similar to many other developing economies, began their integration into the globalization process, by pursuing a forceful import substitution industrialization, which had become possible only by the accelerated process of internationalization of capital through transnational corporation. We propose to empirically verify the structure and the transformation of class configuration of Iran and Turkey in the past five decades as these countries have weathered some turbulent domestic and international politico-economic crises. In our comparative analysis of class reconfiguration in Iran and Turkey we will examine the development of their economies in terms of the deepening of capitalist relations of production in corresponding periods. The focus of our study is the impact of the discontinuous, turbulent economic development and in these two economies on the configuration of their social classes. The general framework of our class analysis is a structural conception of class influenced by Rosemary Crompton (1993), John Scott (1996), and especially Erik O. Wright (1997, 2001). We rely on the cross classification of data on occupational status-economic activities-occupational groups, collected in decennial national census in Iran and Turkey between 1960 and 2011 for the operationalization of class structures.