“The New Worker in The New Era”: Entrepreneurship and Labor Regime in Turkey in the 1950s

Abstract

This article examines the close connection between certain models of entrepreneurship and labor control in the 1950s through examining Kemal Seli’s carpet weaving workshops in Turkey. Seli, an entrepreneur who was educated in Germany and in the US in the 1930s, followed different methods of business organization and labor regimes in his workshops. Through paternalist relations he established with the workers, mainly women, on the shop floor, Seli aimed to increase productivity in the workshops and transform the mentality of the work force. The article argues that, by adapting “Human Rationalization” (menschliche Rationalisierung), Seli sought to create new workers and new working-class families that would be more technically, socially, and emotionally suited to the new rationalized work and who will be more politically quiescent. These all-well fit to the economically liberal and conservative-modernist rule of the Democrat Party throughout the 1950s.