Actors, legal formation and authenticity in Islamic banking and organic agriculture in Turkey

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1620720 (Table of Contents)

This dissertation investigates how new organizational forms with explicit moral claims take shape as various actors make, revise, and evaluate symbolic claims and concrete practices. To this end, I inductively examine Islamic banking and organic agriculture in Turkey throughout their history spanning three decades to understand how Islamic banking and organic agriculture are conceptualized, codified into law, translated into commercial products, and communicated to various audiences. I find that in both industries the question of ‘alignment’ to an ‘ideal’, the ideal being informed by the alternative codes of, Islamic law in the case of Islamic banking, and the rules of Nature in the case of organic agriculture was persistent throughout the history of these industries. Debates over authenticity of practices, definitions and purposes in relation to the ‘ideal’ included deliberate discussions of the sources and the nature of that ‘ideal’ facilitating ever detailed accounts of the ‘ideal’ and influencing the practices and the law and regulations along the way. In explicating the connection between construction of meanings and practices and their relation to authenticity, this dissertation provides insights into how authenticity concerns as conforming to a sacralized ideal play out in the trajectory of new organizational forms with moral claims.