This study concerns how olive oil producers and local bureaucrats in western Turkey use geographical indications (GIs) as a localist strategy to strengthen their position in global markets by challenging conventional agricultural practices. The study employs the disarticulation approach of global commodity chain analysis in order to understand which factors delink people and places from conventional commodity chains/industrial chains and link them instead to GI chains. The results of the study indicate that regional disadvantages—e.g., high production costs due to land characteristics—are the main factor delinking local actors from the conventional olive oil commodity chain. Furthermore, certain dynamic rent opportunities that are related to characteristics of territorial quality and to local cultural characteristics also contribute to the linking of the region and producers to GI chains.

This article provides an analysis of Turkish trade deficits from the perspective of technology, with particular focus on the period that began with the new millennium. It draws special attention to the technological structure of Turkish exports vis-à-vis Turkey’s major trade partners and illustrates how Turkish trade deficits are primarily structural in nature and essentially caused by weak technology as compared with Turkey’s partners. Turkish products lack competitiveness, particularly in the case of relatively higher technology goods. The future prospects for Turkey are discussed in relation to the present level of the country’s technology infrastructure, and it is emphasized that, if Turkey is to achieve a better trade balance and a prominent share of world exports in the future, merely increasing its business sector’s weak R&D expenditures will not be sufficient, as the country needs also to provide a sufficient number of researchers in order to increase its technological capacity. Moreover, in the case of both R&D expenditures and researchers, quality as well as quantity is required, with the number and quality of the latter in particular being crucial both for innovating and for absorbing foreign technology.

This article explores how mothers in Turkey respond to the current atmosphere of food fear and the neoliberal rhetoric of the individualization of risks, as well as interrogating the class dimension of the varying ways in which mothers experience pressures regarding feeding their children in an organic manner. The article primarily suggests that mothers adopt different organic food strategies across class divisions—particularly through class-specific definitions of “organic”—so as to deal in stratified ways with the challenges organic feeding brings. It indicates that organic mothering practices have been incorporated into the lifestyle and cultural distinctions of middle-class families and reinforced by rural nostalgia. Contrary to this, ideas about “the organic” and rural nostalgia are mostly translated as “home-made” for lower-class families. Relying on sixteen in-depth interviews with mothers in İstanbul and on an analysis of posts and comments found on a mothering blog, this article offers empirical findings on analyses of organic mothering and risk from a standpoint and location that have been largely ignored in the existing literature. It also contributes to analyses about neoliberal transformations in the Turkish food market and the growing literature on family and neoliberalism under the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) by bringing a research-based view on the subjective experiences of mothers into a discourse that is rather political in nature as well as into policy research discussions.

This article aims to consider how Turkey has been classified in the welfare regime literature, and on what basis it has been classified. This will then form the basis for exploring whether there appears to be any variation between approaches and methods and/or between the “position” (e.g., location or language) of the authors. Studies of Turkey’s welfare regime exhibit a significant degree of variation in terms of both approaches and conclusions, resulting in little in the way of consensus. Among Turkish-language studies (and some, but not all, Turkish scholars writing in English), there does seem to be a broad consensus that Turkey may be classified as part of the Southern European welfare model, which squares with the modal conclusion of the English-language studies on the topic. However, some “regional” studies conclude that Turkey is part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, while many of the cluster analyses suggest a wide variety of clusters that are not geographically contiguous.