Discriminatory Job Loss, Consequences, Coping Resources, and Overcoming Strategies of Turkish Academicians

This study enables us to understand discriminatory job loss (DJL) as an unfair, unequal and involuntary separation and layoff process, prompted by political and governmental policies and attitudes. The main question of the research is to investigate outcomes, coping strategies, and sources for a discriminatory job loss of academics. The study was conducted by remote interviews with 36 academics who are hard-to-reach participants because of having previously been detained, imprisoned, or threatened. We find that this type of DJL has legal exclusion and social and network isolation outcomes that differ from ordinary discriminatory job loss cases. In addition to economic, social, and professional coping strategies, which were mostly mentioned in the literature, academics use mindset/action-based and individual/interactional strategies. Individual-mind set based strategies to stem from religion, cognition, and values, interactionalmind-set strategies from social capital, individual-action based strategies from the economy, seeking relief, and interactional-action based strategies from organizations and profession.