An Alternative Approach to Politics of Middle Class Professionals

• In Event: 4366 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Revolution and Social Change

Abstract

Highly educated professionals participated recent protest wave in Global South that influenced sociopolitical transformations in several countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Turkey. Existing scholarship offers crucial insights into different forms of politics, ranging from pro-status quo orientations to anti-status quo tendencies, that middle class professionals are likely to pursue. However, middle class political agency still remains ambiguous in the absence of a theoretical framework that addresses whether professionals would promote pro- or anti-status quo politics in certain sociohistorical contexts or during particular mobilizations. By drawing from theorizations of Pierre Bourdieu and Antonio Gramsci, I argue that middle class professionals simultaneously carry and express strategies of class distinction and class reconciliation and that their balancing between these conflicting tendencies shape their political visions and agendas. In order to study their balancing of class distinction and class reconciliation, I suggest focusing on how everyday experiences, discourses and practices of professionals influence making of middle class subjectivity and politics. This alternative approach also builds on contributions of historical-cultural studies of class formation, which illustrate that classes are shaped by social institutions and cultural practices like workplace relationships, educational experiences, leisure activities, social activism and political participation. My paper indicates that, in contrast to existing theories of middle class politics, middle class location and politics are not predetermined. Rather, middle class professionals form and perform their class subjectivities with their discourses and practices in everyday life as historical processes, class relations, state-society dynamics influence their political agency as a social class.

Author

• Gamze Evcimen