| Sumario: | This article analyses the evaluation of poverty and enrichment by the new middle class members in the symbolic boundary work they operate to situate and distinguish themselves from other social categories. In other words it deals with the relative significance of poverty and affluence in the construction of a certain sense of 'us' and 'them' by the new middle class professionals and managers. In the first section the conceptual framework within which the social representations of poverty and wealth can be related to social classes is presented. It states that as the socio- economic processes underlying the creation and the forms of poverty and wealth are not independent from those that determine the formation of social classes; the definition and the social representations of these phenomena should be considered in relation to social classes. Throughout the second and third sections, the research from which the data is recuperated as well as the social context that has allowed us to attribute a specific importance to new middle class members as the new salaried bourgeoisie and the ideal typical new individual of the neo-liberal discourse is introduced. The data has shown that for the new middle class members, poverty and enrichment do not constitute barriers and boundaries in themselves, but that they are the necessary and insufficient conditions of a distinction strategy. The opposition, when there is one, is neither directly towards poverty nor wealth but they are rather translated into cultural and moral terms. The possession or lack of economic capital is, then, a necessary but insufficient condition for being scaled at the higher strata of the social space. The popular classes, or as called by the respondents, the varoş, are associated with a certain fatalist, traditional and arabesk culture. They are suspected of not being able to adapt themselves to urban life and are supposed to have very different values and ways of life, or habitus, than the respondents. This translation of poverty into cultural terms includes in fact an exclusionary attitude towards the immigrant population.
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