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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how mistrust shifts from a disciplinary mood embedded in craft transmission to a generalized atmosphere shaped by poly-crisis in an industrial zone in Istanbul, showing how this transformation reconfigures relations of labor, authority, and knowledge under prolonged uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Mistrust is often framed as the absence of trust, social cohesion, or productive relations (Mühlfried 2018). Ethnographic fieldwork in IMES, an industrial zone in Istanbul, challenges this view, showing that mistrust has historically functioned as a constitutive mood within craft transmission. In workshops founded during the 1970s and 1980s, masters disciplined apprentices through distance, silence, and occasional punitive acts. Embedded in everyday practice, mistrust prevented errors, tested commitment, and shaped future masters. Harsh and hierarchical, it remained relational and productive.

Today, many masters refrain from teaching, while younger workers increasingly experience this as a withdrawal of knowledge. This raises the question: why do masters no longer wish to teach apprentices?

This paper examines the transformation of mistrust within workplace hierarchies, generational relations, and state-led vocational programs. Under structural pressures and economic crisis, mistrust has shifted from a craft-based, disciplinary mood to a generalized atmosphere. Masters mistrust employers who penalize minor errors; employers mistrust young workers who may leave once skilled; and apprentices mistrust vocational programs that promise stability but deliver precarity. Detached from craft transmission, mistrust now targets institutions, economic conditions, and the state, shaping everyday strategies, behaviors, and survival tactics in precarious work environments.

By tracing this shift, the paper illuminates how ongoing crises reorganize relations of labor, authority, and knowledge in contemporary industrial zones, highlighting the affective dimensions of work, learning, and generational negotiation.