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.

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9780804737876

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Reviews

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

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

Author Information

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).

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