The Seam Line: Arab Workers and Jewish Managers in the Israeli Textile Industry

by Israel Drori

Overview

Many Arab communities in Israel’s Galilee region are home to export-oriented textile factories, owned by multinational corporations, whose Jewish managers employ local Arab and Druse women as seamstresses and low-level work supervisors. Based on five years of ethnographic research, this book explores how these managers and workers negotiate the terms and meanings of factory work, integrating work culture with the norms and values of the host towns in order for employment arrangements to succeed.

The entrance of industrial corporations into developing areas of the world, particularly in those industries employing primarily women, has generated tension between traditional familial and social roles and the demands of industrial working life. In Israel these tensions are further complicated by the social and political dynamics of Arab-Jewish conflict, as well as the strictly demarcated roles of women and men in traditional Arab society. The resolution of these tensions on the shop floor shapes the social relations of production, the factories’ management systems, family life in the industrial towns, and individual status and autonomy. The negotiation involves unequal power relations, manifested in a dual patriarchal structure: the Arab cultural practice of male domination of women as well as the formal management system of the textile concern, which dictates the nature of relationships between Jewish managers and Arab women workers.

To meet their business goals, the managers must cooperate with the community that provides their workforce, adapting its norms and appropriating its worldview. The managers are constrained by the strict social rules of Arab and Druse society, and respond by attempting to harness and manipulate local family values to foster personal commitment, furthering production goals through paternal control. The consequence of this paternalism is a workforce that relates to the organization as family, identifies with its goals, and internalizes feelings of loyalty. However, the workforce also uses the plant as the arena for developing self-awareness and enhancing personal independence and status within the family. The seamstresses emerge as active shapers of the organizational culture, forcing the managers to adapt to and comply with their personal needs and perceptions of work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804737852
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2000
Edition description:	1
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Israel Drori is Lecturer in Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Arab Industrialization in Israel: Ethnic Entrepreneurship in the Periphery (with Y. Schnell and M. Sofer).

Table of Contents

	Figures and Tables	viii
1.	Introduction	1
2.	Methods: Reflections on the Field	20
3.	On Factory Daughters and the Culture of the Workplace	34
4.	The Sewing Plants: Scenes from the Social Arena	51
5.	The Seamstresses: In Motion Toward Reconstructing Work and Life	97
6.	The Supervisors: Go-Betweens	133
7.	The Managers: Embodying a Double System	166
8.	Out with the Old and In with the Hi-Tex	203
9.	Conclusion	219
	Notes	233
	References	253
	Index	271

Editorial Reviews

Based on five years of ethnographic research, this book examines how Jewish managers and local (primarily female) Arab and Druse seamstresses negotiate the terms of factory work, integrating work culture with the norms of local communities to allow these employment arrangements to succeed. Drori (public policy, Tel Aviv U.) explores the demands of working life, including the strains on family and social roles, and the ways that managers have co-opted Arab values to paternalize control of the manufacturing plants. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"A significant contribution to the literature in organizational ethnography."—Work and Occupations

"Drori's book is a useful addition to the literature of a largely neglected, but important subject."—Journal of Palestine Studies

"The book beautifully documents the interplay between the culture of the local Arab communities and the culture of the plants that employ women from those communities. . . . Drori does a masterful job of showing how the local Arab culture enters into the workplace to shape the nature of social relations, norms, expectations, and values. . . . The Seam Line is a wonderful ethnography situated in a rich setting."—Administrative Science Quarterly

From the Publisher

"A significant contribution to the literature in organizational ethnography."

Work and Occupations

"Drori's book is a useful addition to the literature of a largely neglected, but important subject."

Journal of Palestine Studies

"The book beautifully documents the interplay between the culture of the local Arab communities and the culture of the plants that employ women from those communities. . . . Drori does a masterful job of showing how the local Arab culture enters into the workplace to shape the nature of social relations, norms, expectations, and values. . . . The Seam Line is a wonderful ethnography situated in a rich setting."

Administrative Science Quarterly