Forms of labor control, consent and resistance in Islamic enterprises :|a study of a factory in Kayseri

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the dialectical relation between forms of labor control and resistance in labor processes in a factory in Kayseri. The fusion between neo liberalism and Islam in Turkey in the 1990s had paved the way for the changes in labor processes, such as introducing several informal labor control strategies, which became more visible in the encounter between labor and capital. Contrary to the ‘labor process’ studies approaching religious-conservatism as either ‘consent’ or ‘obedience’, this thesis suggests that the role of labor control in the labor processes works in a more complex pattern. This thesis aims to figure out how the encounter between experiences of workers and managers indicate the boundaries of consensual control and the possibility of resistance. Focusing on the peculiarity of the dialectical relation between control and resistance, the thesis starts with an investigation of the changing forms of labor control and explores the ways how workers actively participate in the labor process. The main argument of the thesis is that, even if control strategies exist in the labor process in various ways, the ways in which the workers make sense of their daily ‘resistance’ practices and experiences accumulate in a collective movement and become the main dynamics of the labor process.