ABSTRACT
It was the end of March 2006, when on a rainy day I visited the headquarters of the state-run tobacco monopoly, TEKEL,2 in Istanbul. As I got out of the cab and raised my head, I saw the run-down building through the rain, a black rectangular block with huge dark windows, built as an example of the supposedly modernist architecture from the late 1950s. With its depressing cement floors and clunky old furniture, it reminded me of Kafka’s The Castle, in which serious looking bureaucrats walk among hundreds of piles of dusty folders that are stacked on top of each other and scattered everywhere. The thought that the building itself represented the gradual death of a giant company was ever present, as I forced myself to imagine the good old days, sometime not more than 10 years ago, when the furniture was not entirely worn out, the civil servants were cheerful, and, more importantly, the monopoly was still holding 75 percent of the tobacco market. I asked myself what drastic change had occurred in the tobacco sector so that the state owned monopoly lost 50 percent of its market share in such a short period of time? What had gone wrong with TEKEL’s calculations and marketing policies that it failed to adjust itself to the rules of the competitive market? Was it simply another example of the failure of a state enterprise incapable of keeping pace with the free market system?
