Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Sociology in Post-1990 Turkey

Abstract

This study explores the spatio-temporal conditions of producing sociological knowledge at universities at a time of transformation in post-1990 (1990–2017) Turkey. Through a content analysis of the sociology PhD theses submitted in this period, it investigates the questions of where, when, and how sociological knowledge is institutionalized in Turkey. The study has two main findings. First, spatial distribution of sociology PhD theses highlights the ensuing centre–periphery relationships inside Turkey, a country itself located in the periphery. Endowed with better resources, the centre (mainly Ankara and Istanbul) focuses on macro solutions to the problems faced by Turkey and other countries, whereas the rest of the country produces knowledge about their immediate surroundings, that is, particular regions/cities/towns of Turkey. This difference illustrates the degrees to which sociological research in post-1990 Turkey is territorially limited by (Turkish) national borders. Second, temporally speaking, the sociological interest in domestic issues revolves mainly around ‘politics’ and ‘economy’, insofar as they relate to the economic crises, neoliberalism, globalization, and democratization attempts Turkey experienced in the post-1990 period. A closer reading of this spatio-temporality may suggest that Turkish sociology is susceptible to methodological nationalism that downplays the impact of nationalism, conforms to the nation-state and nations, and territorially limits the unit of analysis. Despite the transformations brought about by the period and the spatial differences in knowledge production between the centre and the periphery, sociology in Turkey is bound by the national territorial and ideational boundaries, reproducing the ethnic, political, cultural, and social foundations of Turkish nationalism. This study argues that although Turkish sociology stands on the periphery within the non-Western context, it is nonetheless formalized around its own centre–periphery relationship within the country itself, and that its spatio-temporal institutionalization in the post-1990 period has reproduced an implicit methodological nationalism that relies on Turkish nationalism.

Keywords

centre–periphery relationship methodological nationalism sociological knowledge production spatio-temporal dynamics Turkey

Introduction

Sociological self-reflexivity is bound by the ‘two major axes’: time and space (Therborn, 2000: 38). The temporal dimension refers to ‘our placement in the history of social time’ (Therborn, 2000), while space refers to the institutional space we are located in, the space where we practice sociology, and the space of investigation (Therborn, 2000: 44). Growing inequalities and the ‘material divide’ (Burawoy, 2009: 39) between the privileged West/North (centre) and the rest of the world (periphery) constitute the spatio-temporality of scholarly knowledge production in sociology (Burawoy, 2009: 38; Crothers, 2011; Kuhn and Weidemann, 2010b: 16). Being embedded in modern spatio-temporalities, sociologists sometimes loosely take the nation-state, its territorial boundaries, and narrative for granted, a practice known as ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). Although commonly discussed within the scope of migration studies, methodological nationalism extends to all aspects of sociological imagination. While theories of modernity ignore nationalism (Chernilo, 2006), scholars of nationalism take nations for granted and therefore reproduce the ideology they seek to study (Billig, 1995). Wimmer and Schiller (2002) identified three ways in which social scientists commit to methodological nationalism: (1) ‘ignoring the national framing of modernity’ (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002: 304); (2) naturalizing nationalism, the nation-state, and its ideology; and (3) territorial limitation of the unit of analysis to that of the nation-state (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002: 308). In other words, methodological nationalism includes the territorial and ideational limitation of sociological research to the nation, nation-state, and its ideology at the expense of transnational networks/communities/ties (Beck, 2007: 287).

Methodological nationalism is partly informed by a centre–periphery relationship between Western/Northern and Eastern/Southern epistemologies (De Sousa Santos, 2014) in sociology. Nations and nationalism have become so naturalized that their impact in the West is undermined, as evident in the distinction between ‘good’ nationalism, as a form of patriotism, in the (West/North) centre, and ‘bad’ nationalism, marked by violence, religion, and extremism, in the periphery (Billig, 1995). The scholarly literature sought to ‘provincialize’ such centralized epistemologies of the West/North (Bhambra and De Sousa Santos, 2017: 4) and bring voice to experiences and sociologies of the Global South. The post-1990 period witnessed a simultaneous process of universalization and particularization/localization in social sciences, in line with neoliberalism, globalization, and the post-modern turn that resulted in the ‘disintegration and disarray’ (Crothers, 2011) of meta-narratives. Knowledge production has increasingly moved beyond national borders partly due to the increasing funding opportunities offered by transnational organizations, such as the European Union (Kuhn and Weidemann, 2010a). However, research agendas, theoretical frameworks, and the extent of funding are still determined by the materially advantaged West/North, while the East/South is conceived as a pool of data (Burawoy, 2009: 40).

This study explores the internal spatio-temporal conditions of producing sociological knowledge at universities in post-1990 Turkey, a country itself located in the periphery. From its inception, Turkish sociology has been situated within a dependency structure, that is, ‘the centre-periphery relationship between Turkish and Western sociologies’ (Kasapoğlu et al., 2009). Similar to other vernacular sociologies on the periphery, Turkish sociology uses Western concepts/theories/measurement tools to understand domestic social changes and to reproduce/justify/challenge the official ideology of the Turkish nation-state that has been drawn from modernization/Westernization (Berkes, 1936; Gündüz, 2012; Kasapoğlu et al., 2009). Situated on the periphery, Turkish sociology was also established around an inner centre–periphery structure. The centre was materialized in Istanbul and Ankara as hosts to the first two sociology departments in Turkey, while the periphery was formalized with the increasing number of sociology departments established all around Turkey especially in the post-1990 period (Ercan, 2013). The focus on the spatial and temporal dynamics of Turkish sociology highlights the inner centre–periphery relationships in sociologies on the periphery. It reflects on the different degrees to which sociologies are enveloped within ideational and territorial boundaries of both the North/West and the official nation-state ideologies in the Global South/East.

Following Turkey’s initial experience with neoliberalism in the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état (Boratav et al., 2000), in the post-1990 period, Turkey has experienced a heightened politics of identity, neo-Ottomanism,¹ a widening scope of neoliberalism, globalization, attempts at democratization after recurrent military interventions, European Union accession procedures, and political and cultural polarization between Islamists and secularists (İnsel, 2013; Kadıoğlu and Keyman, 2011). These experiences were reflected on the diversification of research areas in Turkish sociology (Durakbaşa, 2002; Kasapoğlu, 2005; Navaro-Yashin, 1998; Öncü, 1997). Besides, an increasing number of Turkish translations of Western post-modern theories, along with the effects of globalization in Turkey, led to a critique of official state ideology, its militarism, and Kemalism (Mücen et al., 2016). The ‘internationalization of social sciences’ (Kuhn and Weidemann, 2010a) was useful in importing Western theories to provincialize the founding principles of the Turkish nation-state and to solve its problems.

Through a content analysis of the sociology PhD theses in post-1990 Turkey, this study addresses where, when, and how sociological knowledge is institutionalized. It focuses on sociological research at the doctoral level, the primary level where sociological knowledge is institutionalized under the supervision of the university and the Turkish Higher Education Council (THEC).² This study has two main findings. First, spatial distribution of sociology PhD theses in post-1990 Turkey highlights the ensuing centre–periphery relationship inside Turkish sociology. It is still concentrated in the economically prosperous Western Anatolia (mainly Ankara), and to a lesser degree in Istanbul. Endowed with better resources, the centre (Ankara and Istanbul) focuses on macro solutions to the problems faced by Turkey and other countries, whereas the rest of the country produces knowledge and solutions for their immediate surroundings. This difference illustrates the degrees to which sociological research in post-1990 Turkey is territorially enveloped within (Turkish) national borders. Second, temporally speaking, the sociological interest in domestic issues and local environs revolves around the two most studied themes of ‘politics’ and ‘economy’, insofar as they relate to the economic crises, neoliberalism, globalization, and democratization attempts Turkey experienced in this period. A closer reading of this spatio-temporality may suggest that Turkish sociology is susceptible to methodological nationalism that downplays the impact of nationalism, conforms to the nation-state and nations, and territorially limits the unit of analysis. Despite the transformations brought about by the period and the spatial differences in knowledge production between the centre and the periphery, sociology in Turkey is bound by the national territorial and ideational boundaries, reproducing the ethnic, political, cultural, and social foundations of Turkish nationalism. This study argues that although Turkish sociology stands on the periphery within the non-Western context, it is nonetheless formalized around its own centre–periphery relationship within the country itself, and that its spatio-temporal institutionalization in the post-1990 period has reproduced an implicit methodological nationalism that relies on Turkish nationalism.

Sociology in Turkey

The field of sociology at universities in Turkey has been influential in the reproduction of Turkish official state ideology since the early-Republican period (1920–1930) (Gündüz, 2012; Navaro-Yashin, 1998; Öncü, 1997). Ziya Gökalp, a pioneering figure in Turkish sociology, established the first sociology department at Istanbul University in 1914. Informed by the European school of thought, he used Durkheim’s ideas on culture and civilization in the construction of Turkish national identity as a synthesis of Western materialism and Eastern spirituality (Kadıoğlu, 1996: 183). With the establishment of the second sociology department at Ankara University in 1939, Turkish sociology moved towards more empirically oriented research to provide solutions to the problems of Turkey (Öncü, 1997). The period between 1930 and 1950 witnessed the blossoming of debates in rural sociology in line with attempts to modernize and develop rural areas and agricultural production at that time. The period up to 1960 was a period of ‘stagnation’ (Kasapoğlu, 2005: 539) in Turkish sociology, whereas the following period of the 1970s saw new sociology departments in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. These new sociology departments at Middle East Technical University, Boğaziçi University, and Ege University signalled the development of the American school of thought, which stood in contrast with the Istanbul University’s European legacy (Ünal and Binay, 2016: 336). The institutionalization of sociology in different regions at different universities diversified sociological knowledge production in the 1970–1980 period, but this was later halted by the 1980 coup d’état.

The 1990s inherited the neoliberalism and rising visibility of Islam that were endorsed and controlled by the first government after the 1980 coup (Bora, 2011: 73). The 1990s saw the ‘relative democratization’ (Ünal and Binay, 2016: 339), increasing visibility of Islam, politics of identity (Göle, 1997), neo-Ottomanism as a remedy to ethnic claims during the period (Çolak, 2006), the effects of post-modernism, and globalization. This was reflected on a sociological interest in the study of ethnic and religious identities, politics, citizenship, urban studies, cultural studies, gender, technology, and the nation-state. In this period, social scientists’ main motives were to control the socio-cultural change (Kadıoğlu, 1999: 201) and manage the ‘ontological insecurity’ (Keyman, 2010: 6) that arose in Turkey out of neoliberalism, post-Fordism, and globalization. The scholarly literature on sociology in the 1990s’ Turkey was dominated by publications focusing on political sociology, including globalization, capitalism, religion and secularism, social movements, citizenship, political culture, nationalism, and identity politics (Durakbaşa, 2002: 128–129).

The 2000s brought a twist for Turkey with the ‘neo-Islamist’ (Keyder, 2004) and neo-liberal Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) coming to power as a single-party government. It overturned the secularist-Kemalist foundations that had characterized the state and reconstructed neo-Ottomanism as a part of official state ideology (İnsel, 2013; Kadıoğlu and Keyman, 2011). The post-Kemalist paradigm, which flourished in the 1990s, became more evident with its critique of official historiography, Atatürk’s cult, and Kemalism/secularism/Westernism for not being able to come to terms with the diverse ethnic/gender/religious identities that had become visible with globalization (Aytürk, 2015). This critique ‘provincialized’ (Bhambra, 2010) the central knowledge production of the secular Republic and went hand in hand with political reforms and legal re-structuring led by the JDP government (Keyman, 2010). Within this context, the most published subjects in Turkish sociology in the 2000s are those related to gender, women, crime, politics of identity, and deviance (Kasapoğlu, 2005). These research trends have been defined by personal/global research interests, access to data/data collection tools/money, political concerns, supervisors (Şahinoğlu et al., 2016), the growth of higher education, increasing number of sociology departments,³ and doctoral research (Ünal and Binay, 2016: 336) and their internationalization through academic exchange programmes, funding opportunities, and international collaborations (Ayata and Erdemir, 2010: 274). Above all, contributing to ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2004), Turkish sociology has been ‘driven by the urge to diagnose “lived” events and to propose solutions’ (Öncü, 1997: 113) to fluctuating domestic politics, economic crises, and socio-cultural events.

Methods

Through a content analysis, the study investigates spatio-temporal⁴ dynamics of Turkish sociology in terms of what sociological themes are covered, and where, when, and how these are studied. It used quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the large population of sociology PhD theses submitted between 1990 and 2017 (N = 646) and to capture detailed snapshots of them. Basic descriptive statistical methods were employed to identify the frequencies of research subjects and to explore the spatial-temporal distribution of their associated codes. Qualitative content analysis (Berelson, 1952; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008; Mayring, 2014) was employed to facilitate a more detailed reading of the sociology PhD theses using their keywords, titles, and abstracts, where available. Data were collected using the THEC database, which is the most systematic record available for all PhD theses registered in Turkey. This database includes information, such as PhD theses’ titles, abstracts, keywords, and years of publication as well as their authors, supervisors, and universities.⁵ The data were coded in terms of (1) the year of publication, (2) theme, (3) keywords, (4) location of the university, (5) research location, and (6) mode of the study (empirical/historical/theoretical).

The general tendency in the scholarly literature is to divide the post-1990 Turkey in eras (1990s and 2000s; See Kasapoğlu et al., 2009; Parin and Demirci, 2014). However, this periodization runs the risk of missing out on the changing, recurring, and developing research areas (Köktürk, 2017). Therefore, the year of publication was coded by dividing the post-1990 period into four parts (1990–1996, 1997–2003, 2004–2010, and 2011–2017⁶). Each of the four deductively designated periods is defined in terms of the development of Turkish sociology and politics of the time (Hançer, 2004). The 1990–1996 period witnessed the height of a new age in identity politics, globalization, and neoliberalism that had emerged with the post-modern turn and the diminishing effects of the 1980 coup d’état (Cizre-Sakallıoğlu and Yeldan, 2000). The 1997–2003 period was marked by the 1997 military intervention against the rising Islamist identity politics, the events of 9/11, a global economic crisis that also hit Turkey (Öniş, 2003), and the beginning of the still on-going single-party government rule of the ‘neo-Islamist’ JDP in 2002 (Keyder, 2004; Şen, 2010). The 2004–2010 period saw democratization process in the quest for European Union membership (Keyman and Gumuscu, 2014) and the culminating polarization between Islamists and secularists in Turkey (Kadıoğlu and Keyman, 2011), while the 2011–2017 period carried the remnants of the 2009 global economic crisis.

Blurring boundaries between disciplines and arbitrarily defined sociology topics (Bourdieu, 1992: 237) make it difficult to identify sociological research areas (Ünal and Binay, 2016: 541). Therefore, major sociological associations’ (British Sociological Association and American Sociological Association) websites were reviewed as guidelines in constructing the research themes. The categories presented in Table 1 were constructed after carefully reviewing the database, the categories identified by these associations, and the scholarly literature on Turkish sociology (Gündüz, 2012; Kasapoğlu, 2005). The scopes of these categories were retrieved from the relevant associations’ websites. This reconstruction includes categories that are too skewed or too broad. However, contextualizing each theme in its spatio-temporality and looking at the keywords identified by authors show the changing trends in sociological knowledge production. All sociology doctoral theses were coded accordingly by looking at their titles, keywords, and abstracts. Using the open coding system (Emerson et al., 2011: 175), keywords were explored to understand how each theme was conceptualized at that particular spatio-temporality. The arguments presented in PhD theses, however, cannot be deduced from keywords alone. Keywords work as signifiers of sociologists’ spatio-temporalities and facilitate the institutionalization of sociological knowledge. A more detailed reading was possible through thesis abstracts, where available. Moreover, data were coded in terms of university and research locations according to the Turkish Statistical Institute’s (2014) categorization of regions in Turkey.

Table 1.

Distribution of sociology PhD theses by theme (1990–2017).

Themes	Total (%)
Politics	11.76
Economy, market, work, and consumption	10.53
Culture	8.36
Gender	8.36
Race, ethnicity, and nationalism	6.50
Theory and knowledge	5.88
Crime, law, and deviance	5.73
Migration	5.73
Place and environment	5.57
Social change	4.80
Family and life course	4.49
Biology, medicine, and health	4.49
Inequalities and stratification	4.33
Religion and spirituality	4.18
Technology and communication	3.41
Education	2.79
Globalization	2.32
Social psychology	0.77
Total	100.00

There were three limitations in this study. First, this study focused only on doctoral-level research (see Ercan, 2013; Kasapoğlu, 2005; Ünal and Binay, 2016 for analyses of other sociology publications in Turkey). Knowledge is not confined within the boundaries of universities alone (Mutman, 2001: 301; Mücen et al., 2016), yet focusing on doctoral research yields an understanding of institutionalized knowledge in the spatio-temporal environment of the university. Second, this study was confined to only PhD theses submitted to sociology departments and programmes in Turkey. Research carried out in other fields of social sciences may draw on sociological theories/models/concepts. Such connections cannot be detected by looking at the registration details of doctoral theses. Third, the study is limited by the THEC’s database. While there are many Turkish PhD students overseas who have completed their PhD theses abroad, the collected data were limited to sociology PhD theses submitted at universities in Turkey. Although such data could be valuable for investigating sociology outside of Turkey and its role in shaping Turkish sociology, the registration details of doctoral research submitted by overseas Turkish students are not systematically entered on the database. Moreover, not all entries provide abstracts and full documents of the theses. Some of the abstracts are poorly written with no indication of theoretical framework, methodology, or main findings (Özgen, 2007: 10). Therefore, the qualitative aspects of this study are limited to the PhD titles and keywords, which provide the framework for sociological research. Abstracts, only some of which are available on the database and present the argument of the thesis, were used for a more detailed reading.

An internal centre–periphery relationship in post-1990 Turkish sociology

Spatial divergences (see Dündar and Lewis, 1999: 349–350 for regional disparities in Turkish Higher Education) between the economically well-off Western (Istanbul, Aegean, Western Anatolia, and East Marmara) regions and the disadvantaged Eastern (Central, Central Eastern, and North Eastern Anatolia) regions of Turkey (Doğruel and Doğruel, 2003) are reflected on the content, theoretical framework, and field site of sociological research. Turkey’s first two sociology departments were established in Istanbul (1914) and Ankara (in Western Anatolia) (1939), the spatial centres of sociology. Although the majority of universities in Turkey are currently concentrated in Istanbul, which has always boasted the highest number of doctoral students (THEC, 2018), Western Anatolia has consistently held dominance over Istanbul and other regions of Turkey in terms of sociological research at the doctoral level (Figure 1).⁷ Among all sociology PhD theses of the post-1990 period (N = 646), 39% were submitted in Western Anatolia (Figure 2). Since 1990, in every 7-year interval, Western Anatolia has had the highest number of PhD theses in sociology (Table 2). Therefore, the findings from this study highlight the ensuing impact of Western Anatolia (mainly Ankara) and, to a lesser degree, Istanbul, as the spatial centres of sociology in Turkey.

Figure 1.

Weight of sociology PhD theses to the number of universities (1990–2017).

Figure 2.

Spatial distribution of PhD theses in sociology (1990–2017).

Table 2.

Temporal distribution of sociology PhD theses relative to regions.

Years	Aegean (%)	Central Anatolia (%)	Central Eastern Anatolia (%)	East Marmara (%)	Istanbul (%)	Mediterranean (%)	North Eastern Anatolia (%)	Western Anatolia (%)	Total (%)
1990–1996	21.43	0.00	14.29	0.00	25.00	0.00	0.00	39.29	100.00
1997–2003	9.23	1.54	15.38	20.00	16.92	0.00	0.00	36.92	100.00
2004–2010	12.38	5.24	10.00	10.48	24.29	0.00	3.81	33.81	100.00
2011–2017	9.04	3.50	7.58	9.33	18.66	5.54	2.92	43.44	100.00
Total	10.68	3.72	9.44	10.37	20.59	2.94	2.79	39.47	100.00

Istanbul and Ankara are also important in terms of the schools they follow. Ankara has followed the American school of sociology, whereas Istanbul (with the exception of Boğaziçi) has followed the traditional European school of sociology, under the heavy influence of Durkheim and Comte (Gündüz, 2012: 77–78). These differences were reflected in the topics each school studied in the 1990s, when sociological issues started to diversify. While the Ankara school mostly dwelt on gender, rural–urban, and cultural studies, as well as political sociology, Istanbul concentrated on theoretical studies and the history of Turkish thought (Gündüz, 2012: 80). According to this study, in Western Anatolia (mainly Ankara), the most studied sociological issue has been gender (12.94%), followed by economics, the market, work, and consumption (12.16%). In Istanbul, theory and knowledge (12.7%) constituted the most studied theme. Evidently, the different traditions in sociology employed in Istanbul and Ankara are still reflected on the subjects covered in sociology PhD theses in the post-1990 period.

Like Istanbul, in North Eastern Anatolia (Erzurum), the most studied theme is theory and knowledge. In Istanbul, Western sociologists like Adorno, Max Weber, Habermas, and Said are studied, while in North Eastern Anatolia, all sociology PhD theses that fall under the theme of theory and knowledge focus on the history of Turkish thought. In this sense, Istanbul has retained its founding sociological tradition, while North Eastern Anatolia drew on Istanbul’s focus on the history of Turkish thought. The reasons for such trends may vary. The teaching fellows supervising PhD students in North Eastern Anatolia may be graduates of Istanbul University and therefore possibly having an influence on their students’ selection of the history of Turkish thought as the subject matter of their doctoral research (Özgen, 2007: 10; Şahinoğlu et al., 2016). Moreover, PhD candidates may have restricted access to libraries and databases for a review of scholarly debates outside of Turkey, or they may have insufficient fluency in English and limited access to material resources to carry out empirical research involving a field work. Thus, the persistent spatial dominance of Western Anatolia and Istanbul points to a centre–periphery relationship within Turkish sociology, where the centre influences the theoretical orientation and the research topic explored in PhD research on the periphery.

This relationship is also evident in the choice of places of study. A majority of the sociology PhD theses written in the post-1990 period are empirical studies (73.5%), carried out in (1) the same city/town/village of the university, (2) a different city in Turkey, (3) Turkey in general, or (4) abroad. Of all these empirical studies (N = 475), the cases/field sites of 33.05% are in the same city as the university, while 30.32% had a field site/case in another city of Turkey. The rate of those whose unit of analysis was Turkey is 26.95%, while this rate is 9.68% for those who focused on another country. Here, the evident tendency is to focus on immediate surroundings. On the regional level, Istanbul (45.59%) and Western Anatolia (30.43%) boast the highest rates of empirical PhD theses focusing on Turkey. Regions that could be considered as the periphery produce sociological knowledge about other cities outside the location of the university, while the centre (Istanbul and Western Anatolia) dominate sociological knowledge on Turkey in general. In other words, the centre has the ability to produce sociological knowledge generalizable to the entire country or abroad, while the periphery offers micro sociological knowledge that is applicable to smaller cities or regions.

Notwithstanding these spatial variances in sociological knowledge production, there is an overarching focus on Turkey as a nation-state and smaller cities/regions of Turkey (90.31%) in the empirical PhD research in post-1990 Turkey (N = 475). This inward-looking approach is spatially distributed to all regions of Turkey. Within this context, studies whose focus of research is abroad are limited to only 9.68%, and these are spatially concentrated at the centre (54.3%), Western Anatolia and Istanbul. On the periphery, located adjacent to the centre, Eastern Marmara has the greatest number of PhD theses focusing abroad. Being closer to the centre may mean better access to intellectual resources and funding, which in turn entails the ability to study other cases/field sites outside Turkey. Especially, peripheral regions closer to the centre are able to move beyond their immediate surroundings. Therefore, the centre–periphery relationship displays the different degrees to which sociological research in post-1990 Turkey is enveloped within the territorial boundaries of the (Turkish) nation-state. This territorial limitation is evident in the theme of ‘migration’ (5.73%). Under this theme, the majority of doctoral theses focus on migration and refugees in Turkey (43.2%) and diaspora communities (40.5%), while a few studies focus on rural–urban migration (16.2%). Turkish sociology’s concentration on urban migration during the 1980s (Ercan, 2013: 185) has now been replaced by a focus on transnational and international migration (83.7%). Of the theses on migration, 32.2% study Turks living abroad (mainly in European countries), while the rest focus on refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants in Turkey from neighbouring countries, such as Syria, Iran, Georgia, and Bulgaria. In Turkey, sociological research does not move beyond the boundaries of nation-states and national societies. When it does, standing on the periphery, it tends to study its immediate surroundings in and around Turkey.

Recurring trends at changing times: an implicit methodological nationalism

Beyond parochialism, sociological knowledge production in post-1990 Turkey has been ‘contained’ (Beck, 2000) within the ideational and territorial boundaries of the (Turkish) nation-state and has mainly revolved around the topics ‘politics’ and ‘economy, market, work, and consumption’ (Table 3). Of the sociology PhD theses submitted in the 1990–1996 period (N = 28), the most studied theme was politics (21.43%). The theme was framed by keywords such as political participation, modernization, liberalism, and the nation-state. The conception of politics in terms of political participation was reflected on the discussions around re-establishing democracy, liberalization, and neoliberalism after the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey (Cizre-Sakallıoğlu and Yeldan, 2000; Öniş, 2010: 48–49). Politics was also conceived in relation to modernization and the nation-state. For example, a PhD thesis titled ‘Religion, culture and politics in Turkish modernization’ shows that the author historically traced the early-Republican political reforms that downplayed religion and, in its place, imposed secularism and modernization (Avcı, 1996: 253–263). This is reflected on the post-Kemalist paradigm’s criticism that sought to provincialize the Turkish nation-state and modernization (Aytürk, 2015).

Table 3.

Temporal distribution of sociology PhD theses (1990–2017).

Themes	Relative to year totals (1990–2017) (%)
Themes	1990–1996	1997–2003	2004–2010	2011–2017	Total
Politics	21.43	9.23	14.29	9.91	11.76
Economy, market, work, and consumption	7.14	13.85	10.48	10.20	10.53
Culture	7.14	10.77	7.62	8.45	8.36
Gender	3.57	9.23	9.52	7.87	8.36
Race, ethnicity, and nationalism	3.57	12.31	6.19	5.83	6.50
Theory and knowledge	0.00	3.08	6.19	6.71	5.88
Crime, law, and deviance	10.71	4.62	4.29	6.41	5.73
Migration	7.14	1.54	4.29	7.29	5.73
Place and environment	3.57	0.00	4.76	7.29	5.57
Social change	0.00	4.62	5.24	4.96	4.80
Family and life course	7.14	3.08	3.33	5.25	4.49
Biology, medicine, and health	3.57	3.08	1.90	6.41	4.49
Inequalities and stratification	7.14	1.54	3.81	4.96	4.33
Religion and spirituality	7.14	4.62	7.14	2.04	4.18
Technology and communication	3.57	7.69	2.86	2.92	3.41
Education	3.57	1.54	3.33	2.62	2.79
Globalization	0.00	7.69	3.81	0.58	2.32
Social psychology	3.57	1.54	0.95	0.29	0.77
Total	100.00	100.00	100.00	100.00	100.00

The most studied theme during the period 1997–2003 (N = 65) was ‘economy, work, and markets’ (13.85%). Here, consumption, entrepreneurship, flexible production, and Fordism were the most repeated keywords. PhD candidates, who submitted their theses during this period (1997–2003), may have not yet experienced the economic crisis in 2001 at the time of selecting/writing their research topics. They rather studied economy in terms of the global economic transformation and its wider reflections on production, consumption, and neoliberalism in Turkey (Cizre-Sakallıoğlu and Yeldan, 2000). The second most studied theme in this period was ‘race, ethnicity, and nationalism’ (12.31%). Against the background of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, new nationalisms and nation-states (Brock, 1999; Brubaker, 1996), and the increasing scholarly attention to globalization, the keywords related to this research theme included nation-state formation, globalization, and the European Union. Here, of the eight theses that fall under the theme, three of the PhD studies concentrated on the formation/construction of Turkic identities and new nationalisms in Central Asia. When research themes are explored outside of Turkey, they are mostly related to Turkey and Turkish national identity and globalization in new the Turkic nation-states of Central Asia (Tabak, 2016). At a time when the Islamic and multi-ethnic Ottoman past of Turkishness is revived with neo-Ottomanism (Çolak, 2006), this meant the rediscovery of Turkic identities, the ‘primordial’ and pre-Islamic roots of Turkishness as stated by the official state ideology (Mersin Alıcı, 1996). This may point to a variant of methodological nationalism whereby the unit of analysis is only conceivable within the territorial and ideational boundaries of the Turkish nation-state.

This theme, ‘race, ethnicity, and nationalism’, also illustrates the tendency to ignore, and therefore reproduce, the potency of Turkish nationalism. It is the fourth most studied theme in the entire post-1990 period (6.50%), following politics, economics, culture, and gender (Table 3). Among PhD studies that fall in this theme (N = 42), 66.6% focus on Turkey but only four of them use the keyword ‘Turkish nationalism’. Only two dwell on minorities (one on Kurds and the other on Gypsies), and there is no study that uses ‘race’ or ‘racism’ as a keyword. Official Turkish nationalism assumes that Turkishness does not rely on any predestined race and ethnicity. It claims to be a ‘good’/Western nationalism that defines nationhood in terms of citizenship. It rejects racist practices, such as the violence against minorities in the early periods of the Republic (Kadıoğlu, 1996; Yıldız, 2001). Just like the West, in Turkish academia, racism is associated with ‘bad’ nationalism that belongs to ‘others’ (Billig, 1995) and ‘as a force foreign to the history’ (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002: 307) of Turkey. Here, another implicit form of methodological nationalism can be detected. Ignoring the power of nationalism, Turkish sociology in this period could be seen to reproduce official Turkish nationalism’s normative claim to be a ‘good’ form of nationalism.

Although ‘globalization’ is considered as a separate theme in this study, during the 1997–2003 period, it was mostly studied as a historical/contextual phenomenon for understanding the changing forms of (Turkish) nationalism. One of the PhD theses analysed ‘Turkish nationalism in the process of globalization’ (Akça, 2003). The author claims that ‘conceiving globalization as a natural process’ (Akça, 2003: 1) damages national identities and nation-states, which exist naturally, all around the world.

He takes the existence of nations and the territoriality of the nation-state as givens, while seeing globalization as a socially constructed phenomenon. Another thesis critically approaches the juxtaposition of nationalism and globalization. The author argues that ‘claims regarding the dissolution of nationalisms are not scientific, rather ideologically founded allegations’ (Atasoy, 2003). Here, in line with the scholarly literature in the 1990s, globalization is regarded as an ‘ontological insecurity’ (Keyman, 2010: 6) undermining the significance of nations and nationalisms (Arnason, 1990; Brubaker, 1996; Gellner, 1983; Kaldor, 2004). Both theses’ arguments rely on a similar assumption to that of methodological nationalism. They ‘take for granted a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation-states [and] see nation-state building and global interconnections as contradictory’ (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002: 301).

Like the 1990–1996 period, in the 2004–2010 period (N = 210), the most researched theme was ‘politics’ (14.29%). Both periods carry the imprints of military coups (in 1980 and 1997), and they point to sociological efforts to understand politics anew. PhD theses submitted between 2004 and 2010 witnessed the ‘post-modern coup’ (1997), whereby the rise of the public visibility of Islam was halted by the military and through a set of legal decisions, such as the ban of the Islamist Welfare Party (Öktem, 2011). In this period, politics was framed by the following keywords: democracy, religion, Westernization and modernization, and citizenship. ‘Democracy’ stands out as the most repeated keyword. In the post-1990 period, it was first used as a keyword in relation to political participation and election methods (Sarıkoca, 2005; Özkul, 2005) in 2005, when the neo-Islamist JDP overturned the Kemalist legacy of the state through its consecutive victories in general and local elections in Turkey since 2002 (Heper, 2005: 220; Keyman and İçduygu, 2005: 11; Koyuncu, 2014).

Similar to the 1997–2003 period, the years 2011–2017 (N = 343) returned to the theme of ‘economy, work, and market’ (10.2%). However, unlike the 1997–2003 period, this theme was largely framed by the keyword ‘class’, which described the experiences of ‘white collar workers’, their ‘consumption’ behaviours, work environments/organizations, and the use/formation of flexible labour. These highlight the formation of new interdisciplinary research areas, such as organizational sociology (Kasapoğlu, 2005: 84) as well as with the ensuing effects of the economic crises in 2001 and 2009, which were marked by an increase in job insecurity and worsened working conditions in Turkey (Öniş, 2003). This was followed by the theme of ‘politics’ (9.91%), which was studied in terms of democracy, political participation, political parties, and voting behaviour. Like the previous period, democracy is the most frequently used keyword and it is still studied mainly in terms of election methods and voting practices rather than rights, transparency, and participation in governance, which are also indispensable to the concept of democracy. Of the 34 PhD theses that fall under this theme in the 2011–2017 period, only one thesis focuses on democracy in relation to freedom of expression (Yaşar, 2015). Under the theme of culture (8.45%), literature, art, museums, and daily life were investigated through sociological concepts such as subjectivity, social memory, and social class. This finding gives a hint about the wider sociological research trends in cultural studies in Turkey (Pultar, 2013). The last theme, ‘gender’ (7.87%), is also the third most studied subject in the entire post-1990 period. It is primarily explored using the keyword ‘women’ (75% of theses on gender). The recent global interest in masculinities and the growing attention given to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in gender studies (Durgun and Kalaycıoğlu, 2014; Yılmaz and Göçmen, 2016) have not been reflected on the sociological research at the doctoral level in Turkey. ‘Masculinity’ is used as a keyword four times, while there is no mention of LGBT communities/identities. Instead, as imagined by official Turkish nationalism (Kandiyoti, 1991), women are primarily conceived in relation to family, as evidenced through keywords such as divorce, marriage, and family roles, and in relation to politics, as evidenced through the keywords of public sphere, religion, and secularism. Embedded in this spatio-temporality, sociological research at universities in post-1990 Turkey adopts the assumptions of official Turkish state ideology through an implicit methodological nationalism that territorially limits the scope of the study within the boundaries of the (Turkish) nation-state, undermines the impact of (Turkish) nationalism, and conforms to the (Turkish) nation, nation-state, and its ideology.

Conclusion

This study explored the spatio-temporal conditions of sociological knowledge production in post-1990 Turkey. The spatial centre of sociology (mainly Ankara and Istanbul) is better equipped in terms of material, institutional, and intellectual resources to carry out research that is applicable in and outside of Turkey, whereas the less privileged periphery focuses on micro sociological issues within their immediate surroundings. Notwithstanding regional differences, a great majority of the sociology PhD research studies in question are solely focused on Turkey. Therefore, Turkish sociology is not only caught between the West and the East but is also in an internal centre–periphery relationship that highlights the degrees to which sociological research is territorially limited to (Turkish) national borders and its own methodological nationalism. Temporally, throughout the post-1990 period, Turkish sociology is institutionalized around the issues of politics and economy, followed by the themes of race, ethnicity and nationalism, globalization, gender, and migration. How these themes were studied reflect on the changing domestic/global political/economic turmoil of the period. For example, while late 1990s understood economy in terms of labour and economic crises, early 2000s studied economy in relation to class and consumption behaviour. Likewise, in the early 1990s, politics was understood in terms of political participation and a critique of modernization within the context of the post-Kemalist paradigm, whereas in the 2000s, politics has been defined particularly in terms of ‘democracy’, a previously absent keyword, to understand voting behaviour that led to the JDP’s success in consecutive elections in Turkey.

Within this changing spatio-temporality, sociology in post-1990 Turkey at the doctoral level is enveloped within the ideational and territorial boundaries of the Turkish nation-state, and as such, it normalizes the ethnic, gender-based, racial, cultural, political, and social foundations of Turkish official ideology. It downplays the potency of Turkish nationalism. This methodological nationalism can be detected in the territorial limitation of sociological research, and reproduction and underestimation of Turkish nationalism. Thus, the study concludes that while Turkish sociology stands on the periphery in a non-Western context, within Turkey itself, it is formalized within its own centre–periphery relationship, and that its spatio-temporal institutionalization in the post-1990 period reproduces an implicit methodological nationalism that relies on Turkish official ideology.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. She would also like to extend her thanks to Dr Burhan Can Karahasan for his feedback on the earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Canan Neşe Kınıkoğlu is a Lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University. She received her PhD degree in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh in 2015. Her current research interests include cultural and political aspects of nationalism, ethnography of the state, and higher education.

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