The shifting class position of lawyers: The example of İstanbul

One of the main titles of the sociology that marked the last century is social stratification. An important subtitle of social stratification is the social mobility. Indeed, the ongoing debate in the second half of the twentieth century was the middle classes, and the proletarianization of the middle classes. The criterion that can be determined in order to state the proletarianization are wage earning, the continuation of the relative decline of the wages, the loss of absolute dominance on the labor process, the shortening of the time that is devoted to the functions of capital, the fragmentation of the labor process into a wide range of parts, which are internally uniformed and the unskillization of labor force.These are also observable for the lawyers. While the social, political and economic developments externally effect the lawyers, who inherintly belong to the middle classes, the legal change or transformation effect the quantity and quality of the lawyers? work internally. Legal output is directly affected by the elements of a modern commercial enterprise. The position of the lawyers, who fulfill this output, is no longer robust, as it was the case before. Legal field is increasingly incorporated into the laws of capitalism, as it is eventually becoming the field of the determination of the accumulation regime of the capital. Therefore, legal services are in a process of commodization. The transformation of the legal office organization and the working procedure accompanies to the commodization of the legal services. In addition, due to the reasons such as, technological developments or the increasing number of paid lawyers, the position of the lawyers in the social structure changes.