Between a rock and a hard place: corporate elites in the context of religion and secularism in Turkey

Abstract

Drawing on discourse analyses of 36 in-depth interviews with elite business people from Turkey, the study identifies the networking patterns of new and established business elites in the context of economic liberalization and socio-religious transformation of the country. Through a comparative analysis of the so-called secular and religious elite networks, we demonstrate the role of institutional actors such as the government, and identity networks, based on religion and place of birth in shaping the form and content of social networks among business elites in Turkey. In order to achieve this, we operationalise Bourdieu’s notion of theory of practice and Granovetter’s theory of social networks, illustrating the utility of combing these approaches in explicating the form and content of social networks in their situated contexts, in which power and divergent interests are negotiated.