Between Employment and Unemployment: Un(der)employment Experience of University Graduates Working at Chain Stores in Turkey

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2022-9-30

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İnce, Halil Can

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In Turkey, the rapid massification of higher education over the past fifteen years has made university education accessible to a significant portion of the population while relativizing the advantage of education in terms of finding a job. The university education, which is regarded by large portions of society as a means of securing a “white-collar” job and, therefore, “upward mobility,” has largely lost its function. In Turkey, the country with the youngest population in Europe, where one out of every ten people is enrolled in a higher education institution, youth unemployment, especially among university graduates, is one of the country’s most pressing issues. The academy’s “interest” in this rapidly growing problem is also increasing. There has been a growing body of research on the topic of white-collar unemployment in recent years, complementing the numerous macroeconomic studies. While previous research has focused on the white-collar unemployed, this study challenges the restriction of unemployment study to those “outside employment” by analyzing the experiences of university graduates working in store chains. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty two workers in store chains in Ankara and İstanbul who graduated from at least two-year university programs, this study considers this experience, which has been largely ignored under the label “underemployment,” to be a liminal experience between employment and unemployment. Therefore, while viewing the unemployment phenomenon through the eyes of university graduate chain store workers who are formally involved in employment, the study also emphasizes working relations, unionization, precariousness, and other aspects of this experience.

Subject Keywords

unemployment, underemployment, chain stores, higher education

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/99533

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

H. C. İnce, “Between Employment and Unemployment: Un(der)employment Experience of University Graduates Working at Chain Stores in Turkey,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.