Savunma ve eleştiri arasında alışveriş merkezi: Türkiye bağlamında toplumlaşma formları üzerine kavrayıcı bir araştırma denemesi

Over the past two decades, shopping malls have witnessed a massive proliferation in Turkey: in addition to shopping, these areas encompass various social and cultural activities. The gradual interest that shopping malls attract in the social space is nevertheless followed by a social and scientific criticism more and more enunciated. However, this criticism is based on a fixed representation of shopping mall as the ultimate place of consumption, individualization and deinstitutionalization. Shopping mall is thus considered through a dichotomy: on the one hand, in sociological products, it is seen as a contemporary individual which would be selfish, hedonistic and narcissistic; on the other hand, in the works carried out by the departments of architecture and management, it is perceived as the promoter of the rational individual. This dichotomy leads us to the classical vicious circle between explanation and understanding. Thereby, this work seeks to overcome it by a grounded theory built through the deep interviews conducted with visitors of shopping malls. The divergence between the representation and the experience of shopping mall shows us that these places contribute both to the reproduction of contemporary social norms as responsibility, performance and autonomy and to the inversion of these norms by an alternative invention of self which is deperformatized and deresponsabilized. Thus, this work invites to question our static perception of modern institutions and their influence in the production of social norms.