İşyeri ve hanehalkı kesişiminde ahlak bekçiliği: Denizli'de kadın fabrika işçileri

This thesis examines how women factory workers in Denizli experience and give meaning to their labor through their household and workplace relations. Based on ethnographic research conducted in three factories in Denizli, which has a relatively high rate of female labor force participation in the country, I argue that women factory workers? subjectivities in the workplace are shaped through their religious practices and moral understandings. This research shows how women workers perform various religious practices in the workplace such as praying, wearing headscarves, attending religious meetings through which they give meaning to their labor. Although justifying their work with references to material needs, women workers also try to negotiate a spiritual existence and confirmation of their work on moral and religious grounds. Factory managements seek to control labor via religious and moral practices such as enforcing gender segregation in the workplace, obligation to wear headscarves, intervention in gender relations and a quest to have control over the private lives of women. While the factory management tries to create productive women workers through moral and religious codes and awards, it acts as a moral guardian by penetrating into their households and emotional world. Yet these top-down tactics do not lead to a total subordination. On the contrary, in their search for spiritual fulfillment, women workers, to a certain extent, both consent to and react against these policies through gossiping and creating discourses on being and acting as ?ideal? religious and moral women. And they also use moral guardianism towards management?s practices and towards co-workers at the level of everyday relationships. With this outlook, they actively construct their own moral interpretations and religious models. I analyze how the articulation of all these practices contributes to the shaping of women?s subjectivities at the intersection of the shop floor and the household as breadwinners, responsible mothers, moral and religious persons and workers.Keywords: manufacturing industry, globalization, women‟s labor, household, workplace relations, labor control, subjectivity, moral guardianism, Islam, Denizli, Turkey.