White-Collar Blues - by Mustafa Yavaş

About the Book

White-Collar Blues follows the Turkish members of the global elite workforce as they are selected into, survive within, and opt out of coveted employment at transnational corporations.

Book Synopsis

Consider the lucky few. They studied hard and aced high-stakes tests, survived demanding schooling and extracurriculars, graduated from top colleges and immediately landed high-pay, high-status corporate positions in tall buildings. What happens after this middle-class dream of fast-track careers comes true?

White-Collar Blues follows the Turkish members of the global elite workforce as they are selected into, survive within, and opt out of coveted employment at transnational corporations. State-employed doctors, lawyers, and engineers were long seen as role models until Turkey followed the global tide of neoliberalism and began to embrace freer circulation of capital. As world-renowned corporations transformed Istanbul into a global city, Turkey's best and brightest have increasingly sought employment at brand-name firms. Despite achieving upward mobility within and beyond Turkey, however, many Turkish professionals end up feeling disappointed, burned out, and trapped in their corporate careers.

Drawing from more than one hundred interviews in Istanbul and New York City, Mustafa Yavaş develops a theory of middle-class alienation, explaining how so-called "good jobs" fail elite workers. Yavaş shows how educational investments in an increasingly competitive landscape lead to high hopes, which then clash with poor work-life balance, low intrinsic satisfaction, and a felt lack of meaning from labor in corporate workplaces. Highlighting the trade-off between freedom and financial security, White-Collar Blues reveals the hidden costs of conflating the quest for socioeconomic status with the pursuit of happiness.

Review Quotes

White-Collar Blues asks what happens when ambitious young workers succeed in landing "good jobs" at powerful transnational firms. The result--widespread feelings of exhaustion, frustration, and alienation--reveals a great deal about the reward structure that global corporations have established across so much of the modern world. An indispensable intervention in the debate over the future of work.--Steven Peter Vallas, coauthor of The Sociology of Work: Structures and Inequalities

Based on illuminating fieldwork in New York City and Istanbul, White-Collar Blues tells the stories of the "exhausted and trapped" professional employees of transnational corporations. An astute analysis of elite disappointment as the global market dream turns into a nightmare.--Cihan Tuğal, author of The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism

Nationally specific but globally relevant, White-Collar Blues shows what happens when an occupational prestige system spreads worldwide. Yavaş's theoretically ambitious and beautifully executed study of the transnational Turkish middle class is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how young professional-managerial employees become ensnared in soul-sucking career sectors and what it takes to get out.--Amy J. Binder, coauthor of The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today

Rejecting the static structures of classical social theory, White-Collar Blues reframes social class as a product of organizational practices and relationships. Class is not a position but a relational accomplishment, and ironically the "winners" in the transnational middle class find themselves disappointed, exhausted, and trapped, toiling for firms that exploit their ambitions in jobs they find meaningless.--Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, coauthor of Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach

About the Author

Mustafa Yavaş is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Economy and Society at SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.