What does the Turkish bureaucracy represent? Manifestation of the state-society relationship in the meaning worlds of the bureaucrats

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2006

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Sayın, Çağkan

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This dissertation is an exploratory research that analyzes the representation of the state and its relationship with society in the meaning worlds of the Turkish bureaucrats. Accordingly, the research question of this dissertation has to do with political representation in the mindsets of bureaucratic actors. Regarding this question, we focused on the theory of representative bureaucracy and addressed its inadequacies in analyzing the issue of bureaucratic representation. In our view, representation is a phenomenon related to a particular mode of understanding that creates commonsense. It involves the contextual varieties of taken for granted knowledge that constitutes the basis of one’s social world, which the theory of representative bureaucracy fails to question. In this respect, our research intended to discover how do bureaucrats order and arrange the meaning of state-society relationship in their minds. We conducted our research in the Capital Markets Board of Turkey, the Ministry of Finance, and the Turkish Military Academy. We used the methods of multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis to reveal the latent meaning patterns in the meaning worlds of the bureaucrats. The results of our analysis pointed out two major findings. Our first finding indicated the reductionism of the theory of representative bureaucracy in understanding and interpreting the meaning worlds of the Turkish bureaucrats. Our second finding involved the significant similarities as well as the differences in the meaning worlds of the bureaucratic organizations. These variations demonstrated how the organizations of the same state might differ due to distinct organizational ideologies.

Subject Keywords

Bureaucracy, Political culture

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12607726/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/16523

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

Ç. Sayın, “What does the Turkish bureaucracy represent? Manifestation of the state-society relationship in the meaning worlds of the bureaucrats,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2006.