Introduction
There is an interplay between workforce diversity and national and institutional systems of values, dominance and hegemony at work (Özbilgin & Tatli, Reference Özbilgin and Tatli2011; Özbilgin & Slutskaya, Reference Özbilgin and Slutskaya2017; Tatli, Vassilopoulou, Ariss, & Özbilgin, Reference Tatli, Vassilopoulou, Ariss and Özbilgin2012). Workforce diversity, based on demography, is often framed as having a complicated relationship with meritocracy, a system that privileges education, knowledge, skills and experience. Meritocracy, on the one hand, is supposed to provide a level playing field (Gündemir, Homan, Usova, & Galinsky, Reference Gündemir, Homan, Usova and Galinsky2017) and, on the other, it is imbued with biases against merits of the individuals from diverse backgrounds (Castilla & Bernard Reference Castilla and Bernard2010; Liu, Reference Liu2011; Scully & Blake-Beard, Reference Scully and Blake-Beard2006). Yet, there is the commonly held assumption of complementarity between workforce diversity and meritocracy at work. This assumption is questioned by social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, Reference Sidanius and Pratto2001), which posits that there are two distinct ideologies through which status beliefs and social dominance are legitimated: hierarchy enhancing ideologies such as meritocracy, foster a hierarchical order by individual merit, allowing a hierarchical comparison between individuals based on capabilities and performance. Hierarchy attenuating ideologies, such as workforce diversity, however, promote coexistence in equal terms at work (Özbilgin, Tatli, & Jonsen, Reference Özbilgin, Tatli and Jonsen2015). Thus the social dominance theory locates diversity and meritocracy as two poles in relation to hierarchy, the former of which attenuates and the latter one of which enhances it. In this paper, we explore the consequences of meritocracy and subservience in a national context where there is no legal support for diversity and equality, e.g., Turkey (Syed, Özbilgin, Torunoglu, & Ali, Reference Syed, Özbilgin, Torunoglu and Ali2009). In the absence of hierarchy attenuating means such as legal and organisational measures to protect workforce diversity in Turkey, we examine how the two competing hierarchy enhancing ideologies, i.e., subservience and meritocracy, serve to tarnish workforce diversity. In order to achieve this we use the career stories of journalists in Turkey. Our findings highlight the significance of workforce diversity and the importance of using voluntary and coercive measures to protect workforce diversity in order to negate the clasp of hierarchy enhancing ideologies such as subservience and meritocracy, which serve little to support ideals of humanisation of work or workplace democracy.
Nation-branding is the way in which the image of a country is crafted across domains of social and economic life within and beyond its borders (Kotler & Gertner, Reference Kotler and Gertner2002; Quelch & Jocz, Reference Quelch and Jocz2004; Van Ham, Reference Van Ham2001). There is a fixed quality to nation branding as countries seek to ascertain values, images and artefacts that distinguish them from others and present this through the use of communication. Journalism therefore is a significant sight for nation building practices (Anholt, Reference Anholt2007, Reference Anholt2009). As such nation branding is an agentic process which involves intent, deployment of resources and negotiation of agreed definitions and terms of a nation's identity.
In this paper, we examine careers in journalism, which has become the main target of the Turkish state power, as sites of nation branding, which is a hierarchy enhancing practice that privileges dominant religious and ethnic cliques. The literature on careers also recognises the connection between nation branding and career crafting. For example, since the late 1980s, scholars have been questioning the role of informal structures and interest networks on career prospects of individuals in the case of western countries (Pfeffer, Reference Pfeffer, Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989), and familial and network ties such as Guanxi and Wasta networks (Barnett, Yandle, & Naufal, Reference Barnett, Yandle and Naufal2013; Wei, Liu, Chen, & Wu, Reference Wei, Liu, Chen and Wu2010) on careers of individuals in the eastern world, and how these career structures have become synonymous with nation building and nation branding exercises. Yet, the implications of nation branding in narrow ways on workforce diversity is not fully explored.
Although there is extensive literature on nation branding, there has been little attention, on subservience as a nation building mechanism through which the state distributes to individuals, who align their careers with state interests, exceptional forms of hegemonic dividend. Turkey provides a fertile ground in which to study subservience as a mechanism of nation branding, often against and in contradiction to popular discourses and widely acknowledged practices of merit, skill, education, knowledge and experience, that are supposed to inform career advancement decisions. Drawing on the case of careers in the media, we illustrate how ‘biat’, Turkish (originally Arabic) notion of institutionalised form of subservience operates, as a shadow mechanism to competence and merit, which shape career outcomes of individuals. Although at first sight biat appears to be an emic career advancement path, under close inspection, the role of the state and the deliberate attempts of the Turkish state to build a new nation brand, which remains at odds with the modern Turkey's brand image, becomes visible.
The official positioning of brand Turkey has traditionally been that of a nation in the crossroads, possessing both the qualities of the West and the East (Ahiska, Reference Ahiska2010; Dominian, Reference Dominian1916). This positioning presupposes that many institutions operate based on Western driven career notions such as merit, talent and equality of opportunity. However, Turkey also retained a different religio-cultural character despite its so-called secular stance. Yet in recent years, the resurrection of the Eastern traditions of biat has started competing with the Western approaches to career advancement. This has widened the gap between the nation brand identity and the nation-brand image of Turkey. Given the high-international publicity in the aftermath of recent events such as the persecution and imprisonment of journalists (Franklin, Reference Franklin2013), the nation brand image has further deteriorated in the West and improved in some Middle Eastern countries with theocratic regimes (BBC, 2017; Yalkin, Reference Yalkin2018). With few exceptions (Edwards & Ramamurthy, Reference Edwards and Ramamurthy2016; Kaneva, Reference Kaneva2011; Kerrigan, Shivanandan, & Hede, Reference Kerrigan, Shivanandan and Hede2012), nation branding frameworks and applications dominantly view diversity as either a resource in building a brand, or as something that must be managed to not tarnish the nation brand identity in question (see Dinnie, Reference Dinnie2014). Thus the shift towards a biat system, too, necessitates the playing down of or managing the Western driven career notions such as merit, talent, equality and opportunity. As such, these practices, and people who seek to advance their careers through these mechanisms, remain as noise to be managed – they exist, but increasingly do not contribute to career movements in the biat system.
As Puccetti (Reference Puccetti1972) illustrated in the case of Singaporean academic system, authoritarian state introduces subservience as a shadow system to manage careers in tandem with a merit-based system. In this paper we explore the intricate relationship between state authoritarianism and careers in media, illustrating how the co-existence of merit and biat obfuscate the true power of state level politics in shaping careers. The situation is similar in the sense that the Turkish state deliberately introduced biat as a system for career management in journalism to entrench its authoritarian control over the media. Yet, this attempt is deteriorating the already fragile international brand image of Turkey.
In this paper, we first introduce the notion of biat and its religio-social significance in a context where secularism is challenged and eroded, and how these in turn shape the nation branding of Turkey. Then, we introduce cases of prominent news journalists and columnists in Turkey to illustrate how biat operates in their careers. As such we show the antecedents of biat, including the leadership ethos, resource allocation systems, legal and educational structures that render biat a more viable option for enhancing state control over media. Then, correlates of biat are discussed in terms of the overt and covert mechanisms that shape biat. Finally, we discuss the consequences of biat as a self-affirming system which creates a viscous cycle that pushes careers away from merit and align them with the politics of the powerful. Overall, we illustrate how the brand image of Turkey is reshaped as a monovocal, autocratic, propaganda state with the introduction of biat in its national media careers (See Table 1 later in this paper).
Process-relational assessment of biat in the journalism field (list of key actors).
In order to theorise biat, we turn to Bourdieu and Gramsci. We introduce the relevant repertoire of concepts from both authors including the notions of the field, habitus, capitals, hegemony and consent. The conceptual framework allows us to have a critical reading of biat as a system in competition with a merit-based system and how the dual system of biat and competence renders biat invisible, as the system still allows for exceptionally talented individuals to progress with much sacrifice. As a result, we show how biat can become a nation branding tool in the hands of an ambitious state that seeks to control media.
We explain our multi-case approach and operationalise nation branding with Bourdieusian and Gramscian concepts of the field, habitus, capitals, illusio, hegemony and consent in the context of journalism in Turkey with illustrative examples. Our analysis shows that introduction of biat deteriorates merit-based approaches to career advancement, and creates a dual system which further obfuscates the relevance of merit. We also show that introduction of biat creates divisions of earned and unearned privileges, potentially deteriorating the fabric of social and economic relations in a profession, through unjust redistribution of resources, and symbolic power. Furthermore, biat has a discriminatory effect which relegates earned privileges through processes such as education, performance, experience and potentiality to secondary status.
Biat as nation branding: institutional subservience and fealty as nation branding
Biat is a Turkish word, with origins from Arabic term bay'a, which is an important religio-cultural construct that informs social and economic relationships of fealty in the context of contemporary Turkey (Guercio, Reference Guercio2017). Biat is explored as a cultural construct by historians (Ergul, Reference Ergul2012), theologians (Yönem, Reference Yönem2014) and political scientists (Gumuscu & Sert, Reference Gumuscu and Sert2009), who trace the roots of biat in pre-Islamic Arab culture, highlight its significance in organising socio-economic relations in the Ottoman context and reintroduction and relegitimation of biat in the last two decades as a significant state control mechanism in contemporary Turkey. Yet, the consequences of biat on careers of individuals have not been explored to date.
For the purposes of this paper, we define biat as an institutional or systemic form of subservience and fealty, in which individuals accept, consent to and align their interests with the systems and institutions of hegemonic control. The notion of biat is embedded in the pre-Islamic culture and is widely recognised as a system which required the display of loyalty to institutions and individuals in the context of Ottoman imperial system. In the Ottoman imperial regime biat is widely recognised as a nation branding practice, as subservience to imperial power was demanded and legitimated as a common means through which career advancement can be achieved across professions.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in the new Turkish republic a new vision of democracy was introduced in the 1920s. There was a long period of deliberate efforts by the state to change the brand image of Turkey as an aspiring modern European country. As part of overarching reforms in the 1920s and the 1930s, biat was rejected, alongside other religiously and historically specific phenomenon that was associated with the Ottoman state apparatus and the Ottoman nation brand. With reformations in the early days of Turkish republic, modern notions of nation branding were introduced by the state, such as careers based on seniority and merit, which challenged the Ottoman career systems, which were based on inheritance of professions and elite reproduction in the state sector. Introduction of merit and seniority based systems of state employment in the modern Turkish republic challenged the system of biat that shaped the route ways into careers and jobs in the state sector in the Ottoman Empire. As such biat was delegitimated in the process of reformation of the Turkish republic, as it resonated with religiously inspired ways of managing careers in the imperial past and thus did not correspond to the new nation-brand identity.
Despite this historical backdrop that officially delegitimated biat and introduced modern ways of managing the nation brand in Turkey, biat continued as a subdued shadow system of career management of the now secular republic of Turkey. Yet in the last three decades, the secular system in Turkey has deteriorated. As a result, we have seen the upsurge of biat as a legitimate display of loyalty initially in the public sector and more recently across all sectors of work and economy. Biat now features across all social, economic and political spheres of life in Turkey and it is seen as one of the pillars of the new nation brand.
If we approach biat from a process-relational perspective (Kyriakidou & Ozbilgin, Reference Kyriakidou and Ozbilgin2006), we see that biat has a number of antecedents, correlates and consequences and that it can exist in a specific context where secularism is incapacitated, merit-based systems are challenged and hegemonic domination remains uncontested. We note that the neo-liberal turn in the 1980s in Turkey under the leadership of the late Prime Minister Turgut Ozal prepared fertile ground for biat tradition to reflourish in Turkey and to penetrate into its nation brand. Political leadership ethos of Ozal was of particular import in legitimating biat. Notably in response to a question about rampant cases of bribery and corruption in the liberalising economic system of Turkey, Ozal said that ‘his civil servants know what to do’, suggesting that bribery and corruption are fine, provided that the civil servants supported him. The united neo-liberal front portrayed in this quote has grown to a full blown epidemic in the last two decades. The last two decades took the neoliberal turn to its peak by reintroducing religious stricture into the vernacular of Turkish republic, eradicating its two fundamental principles of statism and secularism. Biat was reborn and supported as a shadow system in this political context.
Now, biat operates alongside merit-based career systems in Turkey. If we compare merit and biat-based systems, there are similarities as well as differences. For example, biat also needs a system of rewards and punishments. It is likely to operate more in a system which rewards unquestioning loyalty to institutions. Therefore, lack of unionisation, collective bargaining and freedom of expression can help create consent in which biat can operate. Biat also operates with rewards. In this paper we term these rewards as hegemonic dividend.
Biat at the most basic level operates at the point of definitions. Defining social and economic processes are political acts. Biat means that democratic and collective interests of individuals are not allowed in defining key processes, terms and ideas of work. Instead, the powerful are allowed to shape these. Consent for the key concerns to be defined in terms of the significance of finances, economic issues above and beyond social welfare is only possible in a system of biat without worker resistance. Biat also shapes common processes of career advancement from recruitment, selection to promotion and retirement. It operates a side system where individuals displaying biat are allowed to get on the fast track route for career advancement and dissent is silenced through mechanisms of punishment and career penalty. In some cases such career penalty may remain covert, where individuals who don't show biat are considered to be unfit for positions of power and influenced or they are marked as risky choices. Lists of names may be presented for promotion in other more overt cases where biat becomes entrenched and legitimised.
Biat generates dual outcomes for individuals who display it. Individuals who show biat are rewarded with economic and symbolic dividends. Economic dividends can come in the form of fast track upward career moves and lateral moves to better paid and sought after positions in more prestigious sections of work. Symbolic dividends can be similarly important as individuals who show biat are also praised, socially accepted, presented frequently as role models, rewarded with unearned recognition and social clout.
Reading biat with Bourdieu and Gramsci
Bourdieu and Gramsci provide us with a conceptual repertoire to explore biat from a more critical perspective, allowing us to see biat in the web of relations of power in the context of a profession. Rather than to consider biat as a mere cultural construct, reading it with Bourdieu and Gramsci makes it possible for us to demonstrate how biat rots the core of merit and renders it dysfunctional and how the dual system of merit and biat again both sustains an illusio of a legitimate career system based on competences. We use the concepts of the field, habitus, illusio from Bourdieu and hegemony and consent from Gramsci.
For Bourdieu routines and daily practices are internalised and normalised in time. The outcome of the process in which intersubjective realities are internalised is called habitus by Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977). Habitus is like water to fish, unobservable to the self (Maton, Reference Maton and Grenfell2014). Individuals do not often realise that their reality is temporally specific and a mere outcome of their routines. It is uncommon for individuals to challenge their own habitus as they often accept it as fixed. With the reintroduction of biat in the vernacular of the Turkish career systems, there has been a change in organisational habitus in public and private sectors. As biat was rejected by the secular state, the concept is introduced as a legitimate way of showing loyalty to organisations with the support of the religiously inspired political parties that came to power. Currently, biat is part and parcel of the habitus of Turkish career systems across all sectors, and resistance to these religiously rooted practices is becoming frail.
The concept of the field denotes the web of relations in terms of choices, chances and resource allocations (capitals) among a group of actors, such as professionals. Actors with the same volume of resources and similar tastes make similar choices as they cluster in a field. For example, social science scholars in industrialised countries tend to be left leaning in terms of their ideologies (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1988). This is partly due to the dominance of left wing theorisation in the social science field. The logic of the field can change through changes in habitus and changes to elites. As a result, although the field is not static, it appears to be static at any certain time, unless there are radical shifts in opinion and values in that specific society. In terms of biat, we see that the logic of the economic and social field has shifted in the last three decades in Turkey to make room for and allow consent for biat. Although biat was originally rejected by secular and more enlightened segments of society and economy in Turkey, recent years have seen the emergence of more overt forms of biat going unchallenged (Figure 1).
Clusters of biat by volume of cultural and symbolic capital endowments in the field of news journalism in Turkey.
Illusio is the concept through which Bourdieu makes a distinction between appearance and essence. Societies and groups of actors may hold certain beliefs, practices and routines as real, legitimate and dear to themselves in terms of their vested interests and ideological leanings (Bourdieu & Wacquant, Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992). When the field and habitus changes in a context, we see that illusio takes place to reshape the reality and legitimacy. This was the case for biat in Turkey. Now it is widely known that if your political ideology, daily practices, life choices and confessional beliefs are aligned with the ruling elite, you will have higher chances of advancing through the career ladder and therefore may command more economic and social capital as a result.
Gramsci (Reference Gramsci2000) defines hegemony as a process by which an elite controls and shapes the consent of a group of followers. The usual exercise of hegemony requires that it appear as based on consent. Key to manufacturing this kind of consent is to mobilise the press and to a certain extent the intelligentsia (Gramsci, Reference Gramsci2009). This form of mobilisation is rendered easier where biat is a commonly practiced career advancement tool. The simple opinion pieces are not mere opinion pieces, as they serve to either manufacture dissent or consent. Consent can be defined as acceptance of the norms of the hegemony. The economic and symbolic capital accrued through biat is in turn employed to modify public opinion to align with the ruling elite's interests. Therefore, once created, consent entrenches the changes in habitus in line with the hegemonic group's interests, leading to changes in the field, resource allocation systems and the collective illusio. In the case of biat in Turkey, consent is created through coercive as well as subtle pressures exerted by the new religiously inspired political elite which has gained hold on political stricture in Turkey starting with the 1980s coup.
Multi-Case method via netnography
Our paper is based on multiple case studies of news journalists from Turkey. We have selected illustrative examples from different groups of journalists from across ideological spectrum and in terms of their proximity to state apparatus. We have drawn solely on biographic material for our data. In the context of current uncertainty and turbulence in the Turkish political context, it would be unviable to collect empirical data from these journalists. Yet, to our advantage, most of the biographical material is verifiable, uncontested across the political field and they are publicly available.
In order to construct multiple case studies, we used netnography, which Kozinets (Reference Kozinets2010) suggests as a method for studying image, identity and brand. The netnographic study we conducted involved collating and evaluating career-related news on journalists across the political spectrum of Turkish media. We have also cross checked our findings with self-reports of the journalists in their interviews and social media profiles. Our sampling was inclusive. We tried to include journalists from across mainstream to margins of the Turkish media.
We used the following sources for biopics of selected journalists: personal web-pages, other search engine material such as Wikipedia entries, the journalists' past opinion pieces and their social media content. In order to validate the veracity of our claims, we have collected opinions from four key political scientists through the Delphi method.
Biat in journalism through Bourdieusian and Gramscian lenses
In this section, we explore biat first through a process-relational lens, identifying its key antecedents, correlates and consequences in three distinct systems (biat, dual and merit). In doing so, we provide illustrative biopics of prominent journalists in each system. Our analyses illustrate how the biat system encroaches on the field of journalism, cutting out oxygen for others and disallowing dissent. Second, we place actors across the axis of cultural and symbolic capital, showing elite change in the context of journalism in Turkey. We note that this elite change deepens the biat system, drawing out merit-based appointments, eliminating opposition to hegemonic structures, politicising journalism along religious and hegemonic lines.
In the biat system, there are journalists that fully comply with the expectations of the ruling elite, that comply with the expectations of both the ruling elite and the merit-based organisations, and those that only comply with the demands of the merit-based organisations. The dual system has journalists who use both talent and biat to seek career advancement in Turkey. The merit (nonbiat) system is a shrinking part of the career system in Turkey, where journalists seek career advancement through only merit.
Biat system
Nagehan Alci was born to a secular middle class family. She studied at Bosphorus University and started working for Hurriyet as a reporter. Between 2003 and 2012, she worked as foreign-policy reporter and columnist for Aksam. Since 2012, she has been a columnist with Milliyet. She has been a political commentator on a popular CNN Turk TV show since 2011. Around the time of Ergenekon indictments in 2009, she was disseminating the government viewpoints on the topic in her weekly political debate programme and in her column. For this TV programme, with Nazli Ilicak and Altan Oymen that ran between 2009 and 2014, she was paid a record amount per episode, thus illustrating the dividend of the biat-based career advancement. President Erdogan famously named her twin daughters, and she is famous for having built state-aligned social and economic capital.
Dual system
Nazli Ilicak was born to a family with cultural, economic, social and political capital. Her father was an MP and Minister for the conservative party. She has had a privileged Francophone education at Notre-Dame de Sion High School in Istanbul and at the University of Lausanne. She married Kemal Ilıcak, owner of conservative nationalist newspaper Tercüman, in 1969 and was the contributor-in-chief to the newspaper for 25 years. Their positioning was based on opposing the left, fighting to stop the new Turkish words from being circulated by TDK, and building the case for the consolidation of the right. Thus, she has traditionally aligned herself with the interest of the state and had working social relations with the political elite. Despite her secular elite background, she ran for the parliament as member of neoliberal political Islamist party Fazilet at a time when political Islam was on the rise in Turkey. This critically put her in the circuit of the new and upcoming non-secular political power/elite in Turkey. Featured weekly in TV programmes arguing for the ‘correctness’ of the government's stance in most cases, she continued to influence the secular public sphere. On the other hand, she presented the TV show Pazar Gezmesi (Sunday Visits) on Kanal D, a TV channel then owned by the secular businesspeople. Her liminal standing between the secular and the Islamist benefited the state interest, then run by the Islamist government. She has thus consistently aligned herself with the state interest.
Merit-Based system
Ahmet Şık was born to a middle class Anatolian family with social democratic credentials and studied Journalism at Istanbul University. He worked for several newspapers including Cumhuriyet, Radikal, Evrensel and Yeni Yüzyıl and Reuters News Agency. He was dismissed from Radikal for trade unionist activities. In 2009, he fled the country for a year, fearing officials who had been targets of his reporting would seek vengeance (Franklin, Reference Franklin2013).
Having been imprisoned a few times for his investigative journalism that criticised the state, he has not benefited from the hegemonic dividend as he did not practice biat. Although he won the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize, his career did not advance domestically due to events outlined above. As he did not align himself with institutional support (of the state, the media conglomerates), he did not attain the same economic capital as other journalists in the Dual and Biat systems who aligned their interests with political domination and capital.
Although we suggest that there are three competing methods of career advancement in Turkey. In fact, the biat system is the only remaining system today as the other tracks of career advancement are blocked by media outlets being forced to close down, journalists being made redundant or in more dire cases through prosecutions and imprisonment. Thus the nation brand of Turkey is now tarnished with this image of biat as the only legitimate route for work and careers across a wide array of professions (Table 1).
Conclusion
Workforce diversity is often studied in etic terms (Tatli & Özbilgin, Reference Tatli and Özbilgin2012). Yet our study shows the salience of emic processes of social dominance on workforce diversity. In particular, we investigated what happens when a religiously inspired system of career management is legitimated alongside a merit-based secular system, tarnishing and irreversibly damaging workforce diversity and nation brand of Turkey. Our findings reveal the significance of framing diversity not only in etic terms but in locally embedded emic terms in order to transcend the central focus of workforce diversity activities from training alone (Fujimoto & Härtel, Reference Fujimoto and Härtel2007) to wider engagement with organisational design, and institutional and national contexts.
Drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony and consent, and Bourdieu's conceptual works, we illustrate how in the field of news journalism in Turkey, hegemonic dividend is shared across ideological lines, engendering social dominance of along religious and ethnic lines. Deterioration of secularism, merit-based systems and expansion of religiously inspired hegemonic systems, provide fertile ground to assess what happens to workforce diversity which on the one hand complement universal ideals of merit, competence and cultural capital and on the other differ from them as workforce diversity offers a hierarchy attenuating ideology. Careers in journalism are important indicators of a nation brand as journalism crosses borders via communication and offers strength to or serves as the achilles heel of a nation brand.
Our analyses of the field of journalism demonstrates a level of waning dynamism in terms of hegemony and resistance, where hegemonic dividend is used to draw out resistance, opposition and dissent, and with it various norms of workforce diversity such as gender, ethnic, religious as well as cognitive and neurodiversity are undermined. Our analyses fundamentally challenges the post-secular theorisation, which consider the inroads that religious ideas make as progress and a source of moral energy (Uygur, Spence, Simpson, & Karakas, Reference Uygur, Spence, Simpson and Karakas2017), as we contend that failing to attend to the intersectional tensions and complexities between religious discourses and diversity by gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation as well as other categories of diversity does not bode well for effective promotion of workforce diversity (Kamaşak, Ozbilgin, & Yavuz, Reference Kamaşak, Ozbilgin, Yavuz, King, Roberson and Hebl2019). We clearly show that in the case of Turkish journalism biat as a religiously inspired practice has not only served to deteriorate professionalism in the field of journalism, it has also helped the state apparatus to manufacture consent for homogeneity and hegemony over diversity, and to evacuate the meaning and substance from what was already a weak deliberative democracy, leaving behind ruins of a nation brand and workforce diversity that is in need of repair. We would not like to remove hope for a better future for humanisation and democratisation of work in Turkey. Therefore, future research should explore how organising for workforce diversity (Fujimoto, Rentschler, Le, Edwards, & Härtel, Reference Fujimoto, Rentschler, Le, Edwards and Härtel2014) and better accounting for diversity (Kyriakidou, Kyriacou, Özbilgin, & Dedoulis, Reference Kyriakidou, Kyriacou, Özbilgin and Dedoulis2016) could be mobilised in order to protect diversity gains (Vassilopoulou, April, Da Rocha, Kyriakidou, & Ozbilgin, Reference Vassilopoulou, April, Da Rocha, Kyriakidou and Ozbilgin2016; Reference Vassilopoulou, Kyriakidou, da Rocha, Georgiadou and Mor Barak2018) and to resist deterioration of cultures and institutions which humanise and democratise workplaces.
Author ORCIDs
Mustafa Ozbilgin 0000-0002-8672-9534; Cagri Yalkin 0000-0002-1114-5454.
Mustafa F. Ozbilgin is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Brunel Business School, London. He also holds three international positions: Co-Chaire Management et Diversité at Université Paris Dauphine and Visiting Professor of Management at Koç University in Istanbul and an academic mentor at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul. His research focuses on equality, diversity and inclusion at work from comparative and relational perspectives. He has conducted field studies in the UK and internationally and his work is empirically grounded. His research is supported by international as well as national grants. His work has a focus on changing policy and practice in equality and diversity at work. He is an engaged scholar, driven by values of workplace democracy, equality for all and humanisation of work. He has authored and edited 15 books and published over 200 papers in academic journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning and Education, British Journal of Management, Journal of Vocational Behavior, International Journal of Management Reviews, Human Relations, Human Resource Management, Gender Work and Organization and Social Science and Medicine among others. He served as the editor-in-chief of the European Management Review (EMR), the official journal of the European Academy of Management (EURAM) from 2014 to 2018 and of the British Journal of Management, the official journal of the British Academy of Management, for 4 years from 2010 to 2014.
Cagri Yalkin is a Lecturer in Marketing at Birmingham Business School. She holds a PhD in Marketing from Warwick Business School. Cagri previously held a Lecturer position in Marketing at King's College London, and was an Assistant Professor of Advertising in Istanbul, Turkey. Her research focuses on consumer culture, audience reception and politics, nation-branding and consumer socialisation. To date her research has included consumption and censorship, transnational consumption of TV and nation-branding. Her research has previously been published in European Management Review, New Media & Society, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of International Relations and Development, Journal of Consumer Policy and Advances in Consumer Research. She serves as the associate editor of European Management Review for marketing and as a reviewer for Journal of Marketing Management, Advances in Consumer Research, New Media & Society, Arts and the Market and Journal of Consumer Policy. Her research has been funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme.
