Contemporary patterns of labor transformation: Evidence from Turkish tourism industry

This dissertation studies the recent growth of tourism industry in Turkey from labor's point-of-view. As tourism industry grows, it generates a strong trend of labor mobility from traditional agrarian economy into tourism. Since both agriculture and tourism rely on the same resources available in the same geography, they occupy competitive positions towards labor. Labor mobility into tourism implies a number of changes in the workplace which also leads to radical transformations in the social sphere. In the workplace, the novelties of a new labor process, division of labor, and a new time-space nexus have been further complicated by the unique traits of tourism industry, such as its fragmented structure, seasonal operation, labor-intensive nature of tourism services and specific labor requirements including aesthetic value and participation of the producer in the tourism product. The social repercussions of employment in tourism can be observed within the contexts of the workplace and the household, and include changing roles in the household division of labor, material conditions of household members, and emergence of a new mode of thinking among the labor force towards work, economic status, consumption and more.; The theoretical framework of this dissertation is based on working class formation, which can be understood as a multilevel process to explain the movement of workers from traditional sectors to modern industrial sectors, the realization of a common class identity based on the shared experiences and values among workers. Within this framework, labor transformation is conceptualized on the basis of material changes workers experience as they move from agriculture to tourism, from a traditional sector to a modern one. These material changes show themselves in the form of deruralization, detachment from the rural structure, and proletarianization, move into wage labor in its basic understanding. Globalization as a temporal framework is useful in explaining the contemporary challenges to the classical understanding of the working class that dominates studies on labor history. The changes in the global industrial structure, especially with the growth of service industries, fragmentation of the production process and the precipitation of structural inequalities most visible in the bipolar structure of the world economy indicate that full proletarianization in manufacturing industries with a male dominant workforce employed in factories on a full-time basis is no longer a representative form among the working class. In this sense tourism industry exposes the way working class formation takes place in the contemporary global industrial setting. A new working class is being made under new industrial and socio-economic circumstances. Finally, the household as the unit of analysis has provided fertile grounds to explore the complexity of workers' experiences. A household typology is used to evaluate and categorize labor transformation in tourist industry.