Negotiating moral boundaries through the lens of employers: Syrians in the Turkish informal economy

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to ongoing debates on the multiple dimensions of moral boundary-making processes particularly with respect to the perceptions of dominant groups. Based on ethnographic observations and thirty semi-structured interviews with employers in Adana, Turkey, this paper explores how distinct framing strategies are employed towards Syrian employees in workplaces, and how moral boundaries are negotiated and contested at different stages of employment in the informal market economy. It argues that attachment to morality in the workplace is distinctively (re)constructed by employers at different stages of employment: during the hiring process and then during employment itself. Results suggest that employers’ context-based understanding of morality is heavily concentrated on their moral construction of ‘self’ during hiring processes whereas their focus shifts from the ‘self’ towards the moral construction of the ‘employee’ after having different kinds of work experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Boundary-drawing
• moral boundaries
• employment
• informal market
• Turkey and Syrians refugees

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to the field supervisor, İlke Şanlıer Yüksel, and supervisors, Renee Luthra and Yasemin Soysal, the editors, and the three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. The author gives special thanks to Mert Eşberk for his research assistance during the fieldwork. This paper also benefited from the comments of the participants at the 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Manchester, August 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).