Social and Cultural Dynamics

While the positive consequences of social capital and civil society are widely accepted and appreciated, the question of how they originate and can be sustained has received relatively little attention from scholars. In this study, we approach this question from a cross-national and individual-level perspective by exa…

• AIDA JUST

Most groups have social distance norms that differentiate “us” from “them.” Contrary to a widespread assumption in the sociological literature, however, these normative distinctions, even when they are collectively recognized, do not always overlap with the affective orientations of group members in a uniform manner.…

• MEHMET NEDİM KARAKAYALI

Examinations of the moral and ethical dimensions in identity construction are scant in consumer research. This ethnography of a trailer-park neighborhood investigates how different moral dispositions shape low-income, working-class residents' consumption practices and status negotiations. Drawing from Bourdieu's conce…

• BİGE SAATÇİOĞLU

The methodological crisis that resulted from conservative, closed-circle orthodoxy in the field of social sciences has led us to question our toolbox of empirical research methods over the last dec...

In 2014–2015, Aksu Akçaoğlu was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had come to work with Loïc Wacquant on his research on “the conservative habitus” in contemporary Turkey (with the support of the TÜBİTAK Science Program). In this dialogue, he invites…

• AKSU AKÇAOĞLU

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious ruminatio…

• CENGİZ ERİŞEN

Why do some individuals see themselves as world citizens? A significant number of individuals around the world view themselves as world citizens. This is a curious phenomenon that merits attention. Yet despite a growing body of work on cosmopolitanism, the literature lacks a clear explanation of what moves individuals…

Travis Hirschi's social bonding theory has mostly been tested in the West. In this study, the theory is tested on juvenile delinquency in a developing country, Turkey. Data were gathered from 1,710 high school students in Ankara by using two-stage stratified cluster sampling. Factor analysis was employed to determine…

• ÖZDEN ÖZBAY

Political trust is an important indicator of political legitimacy. Hence, seemingly decreasing levels of political trust in Western democracies have stimulated a growing body of research on the causes and consequences of political trust. However, the neglect of potential measurement problems of political trust raises…

• SEDEF TURPER ALIŞIK

Personality approaches to politics are often criticized for not examining the effect that institutional role constraints have on individual beliefs and preferences. When leaders appear to change their stance when they change roles, it is assumed that roles have a determining influence. Modern personality theory and co…

• ÇERAĞ ESRA ÇUHADAR

Individuals’ cultural tendencies of horizontal/vertical individualism and collectivism interact with their dispositional traits and contextual factors to shape social interactions. A key dispositional trait is social value orientation (SVO), a general tendency towards competition (proself) vs. cooperation (prosocial)…

Abstract In contemporary Turkey, a growing interest in Ottoman history represents a change in both the official state discourse and popular culture. This nostalgia appropriates, reinterprets, decontextualizes, and juxtaposes formerly distinct symbols, ideas, objects, and histories in unprecedented ways. In this paper,…

• MURAT ERGİN