This article examines working-class entrepreneurialism in Turkey from a comparative perspective. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a working-class neighborhood of İstanbul, the article focuses on the perceptions, aspirations, and entrepreneurial attempts of manual workers employed in formal jobs. It aims to contribute to the understudied literature on working-class entrepreneurialism, which is often overlooked or underestimated by the critical research on labor and the working class. First, the article demonstrates that the level of entrepreneurialism among manual workers is rather high. Alongside revealing the popularity of aspirations for self-employment and the working-class roots of many self-employed individuals, I present an ethnographic account of five workers’ transition from wage work to self-employment. Second, the article finds that a colloquial phrase, “el işi” or “a stranger’s business,” is widely used to refer to wage work. I argue that this phrase perfectly manifests the popular resentment felt toward wage labor in a social milieu where self-employment seems accessible. Finally, by drawing on a review of a scattered set of studies, I claim that entrepreneurialism among working-class men seems to be quite common, especially in peripheral countries.

The doctrine of the atonement is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection, highly diverse interpretations of the doctrine have been proposed. In the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump considers the doctrine afresh with philosophical care in her book Atonement. This article is an overview of the book.

The existence of evil is often held to pose philosophical problems only for theists. I argue that the existence of evil gives rise to a philosophical problem which confronts theist and atheist alike. The problem is constituted by the following claims: (1) Successful human beings (i.e. those meeting their basic prudential interests) are committed to a good-enough world; (2) the actual world is not a good-enough world (i.e. sufficient evil exists). It follows that human beings must either (3a) maintain a state of epistemic ignorance regarding the nature of the actual world or (3b) abandon their basic prudential interests. Theists resolve this problem by rejecting (2), only to confront the problem of evil as it is traditionally understood. Successful atheists also reject (2), but without adequate grounds for doing so.

It is widely held in the public policy and political economy literatures that the Turkish state is weak and cannot adopt a proactive approach in the financial services industry by steering and coordinating the financial policy network. However, it is puzzling that this seemingly “weak” Turkish state, which is often marked by fragmentation, conflict, and a lack of policy coordination within the state apparatus, acted strongly between 2010 and 2016 by taking pre-emptive measures to contain the macrofinancial risks arising from hot money inflows and bank credit expansion. Examining the organizational policy capacity of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, this article argues that proactive policy design and implementation are more likely to complement state capacity when the principal bureaucratic actors have strong organizational policy capacities.

This article studies how the Cihanbeyli tribe became a crucial economic actor for the meat supply of İstanbul, by focusing on a conflict between the tribe’s leader, Alişan Bey, and the Russian trader David Savalan, which lasted from the 1840s to the 1850s in and around the province of Ankara. Two important processes of the early Tanzimat era had an impact on the Cihanbeyli’s role in animal trade. First, as part of the centralization project of the Tanzimat, the Cihanbeyli tribe was sedentarized in the 1840s and 1850s. Second, although the Ottoman state adopted liberal economic policies during the Tanzimat, the provisioning of meat to the imperial capital continued until 1857. Therefore, the article examines the Cihanbeyli’s role in the animal trade in the light of these administrative and economic changes. Our findings support the argument that tribes were an integral part of the imperial economy, politics, and society. The dependence of the Ottoman state on the supply of meat by the Cihanbeyli increased significantly from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This opposes the conventional view that posits tribes as primordial forms hindering economic and social development in the modernization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In managing ethno-cultural diversity, several countries in Central and Eastern Europe refer to the notion of nonterritorial/cultural autonomy in their legislation and policies, and in some of them, namely Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia, registered minority voters are granted the right to create their own representational, consultative, or decision-making bodies by direct or indirect elections. While a growing body of literature has examined the functioning of these elected minority councils/self-governments at various levels, numerous features of their elections have not been addressed. Elections, commonly understood as formal group decision-making processes, may fulfill various functions both in theory and practice, and these are highly context-dependent. In this regard, little is known about the role played by minority elections in intra-community relations, and whether and how these elections can contribute to increasing legitimacy and accountability and strengthening the political weight and influence of the respective minority groups. This article seeks to address these issues. Written from a theoretical perspective, but based on electoral statistics and country experiences, it comparatively explores the main issues related to the special minority elections in the five countries of analysis and assesses whether they can be considered successful forms of diversity management.

In her impressive Atonement, Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittingness of Christ's passion and death is a good enough justification for it, we lose a motivation for adopting the Marian theory over the Thomistic one.

This article provides an historical account and analysis of the repurposing of Ny-Ålesund from Arctic coalmining settlement to Norwegian-administered international research base in Svalbard. Three levels of analysis are employed to explain the settlement’s transformation and its rising geopolitical significance, focusing primarily on the period of rapid internationalisation and expansion of scientific activities starting in the late 1980s. The local level examines Norway’s efforts to maintain effective occupation of greater Kongsfjorden by promoting research, underpinned by the economisation of the area’s near-pristine natural environment as a non-extractive resource for science; the global level applies the concept of telecoupling to consider the role of events and processes at larger spatial scales that facilitated Ny-Ålesund’s transformation; and the “glocal” level explains how the interaction of Norwegian and global actors in the locality of Ny-Ålesund have collectively shaped the community’s institutions over some 30 years. The article also reflects on recent policy changes signalling more assertive Norwegian administration and greater coordination of research in Ny-Ålesund.

This article discusses some of the ways in which ideas about the city influenced the thinking of British Christians from 1840 to the early twentieth century. First, it explores nonconformist conceptions of the city, suggesting that, although the urban environment offered favourable circumstances for nonconformist growth, a desire to return to, or incorporate elements of, rural life was rarely far away. It explores why, when the garden city movement began, it found such fertile soil among Christian thinkers. Secondly, it considers some of the biblical paradigms that shaped late Victorian thinking about the city. Preachers and writers moved seamlessly from their well-stocked religious imaginations to contemplating the practicalities of the city, and back again. It is argued that the Christian evocation of medieval cities, biblical cities and garden cities shaped in important ways the conceptualizations of the urban world.

New cross-cultural approaches to philosophy of religion seek to move it beyond the preoccupations of Christian theology and the abstractions of ‘classical theism’, towards an appreciation of a broader range of religious phenomena. But if the concept of religion is itself the product of extrapolation from modern, Western, Christian understandings, disseminated through colonial encounter, does the new philosophy of religion simply reproduce the deficiencies of the old, under the guise of a universalizing, albeit culturally and historically particular, category? This article argues that it is necessary to interrogate the secular episteme within which religion is thematized as a discrete topos.