2024-02-01 00:35:45
by Asaf Darr*
The ongoing and fierce conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is a daily reality in Israel, the country where I reside. As a sociologist of work and economic sociologist, I became increasingly interested in the ways in which the broader conflict is manifested in daily socio-economic encounters on the shop floor between Jewish and Palestinian Arabs citizens of Israel. I was surprised to discover that while the conflict figures prominently in sociological studies of inequality as well as in political and historical research, little attention has been given to the daily manifestations of this ethnonational and interreligious conflict inside the workplace, where people from diverse backgrounds spend many hours together each day. My new book Between Conflict and Collegiality: Palestinian Arabs and Jews in the Israeli Workplace (Cornell University Press, 2023) constitutes the workplace as an important arena for the study of broader ethnonational and religious conflict. The book provides an in-depth look into inter-ethnic relations in Israel, the workplace manifestations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the grassroots coping strategies of Jewish and Palestinian Arab workers. Indeed, economic life and particularly the workplace are often the location where members of opposing ethnonational groups have the most intensive and meaningful encounters. I therefore believe that my book adds a neglected, yet much needed, political and socio-economic perspective to the sociology of work.
This book explores how the fierce ethnonational, religious struggle between Jews and Palestinian Arabs affects the relationships of those working in ethnically mixed work teams in Israeli hospitals, tech companies, and production plants. It documents the types of external political tensions that permeate the workplace and it reveals when such tensions are most likely to threaten the socio-economic fabric of ethnically mixed work environments.
One of the book’s main contributions is the emphasis on the grassroots coping strategies employed by both Jewish and Palestinian-Arab workers in response to the workplace manifestations of the ethnonational, religious conflict. External political tensions permeate the workplace and have an enduring presence on the shop floor, even when management tries to minimize their impact. To cope with tensions that arise on these occasions, workers implement a key grassroots strategy which I termed ‘split ascription’. Through split ascription, workers in mixed teams distinguish between interactions in the immediate work environment and the structural and procedural elements of the employing organization. Even in a context plagued by political divisions and intergroup violence, members of mixed teams who interact regularly attempt to insulate the work environment insofar as possible from the deep ethnic-national-religious cleavages. By contrast, workers of minority groups emphasize those cleavages when they ascribe discrimination and even racism to the structural elements and procedures of their employing organizations. The strategy of split ascription challenges existing theories regarding intergroup encounters as it combines both interactions and structural elements of the employing organization in a dynamic model of coping with the workplace manifestations of political conflicts. Minority group members also try to present their distinct ethnonational identity at work and want to experience a sense of cultural inclusion. Minority group’s use of their native language becomes a symbolic arena for ethnonational displays, as well as a point of contention with majority group members.
The relevance of the book’s findings extends well beyond the Israeli case because such tensions between ethnonational, religious groups that strain workplace relations are not unique to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. In many countries torn by war and political strife, such as Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Turkey, members of opposing ethnonational, religious groups who work together must seek ways to manage political tensions during their daily encounters. Countries such as the United States, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden are also experiencing ethno-religious tensions, which sometimes result in violence. Against the backdrop of these global tensions, this book addresses several questions: How do workers in a conflict-ridden country deal with external ethnonational, religious pressures? Is the broader ethnonational conflict reflected in the career expectations and trajectories of minority group members? What is the role of religion in the daily management of socio-economic relations in diverse work teams? Answers to these and other important questions are at the heart of my book.
The October 7th Hamas massacre and the ensuing war threatens the possibility of maintaining workplace relations among Palestinians and Jews in Israeli workplaces. While the book describes previous periods of political tensions, suicide bombing attacks, and Israeli military operations, it is too early to evaluate the impact of the current and most violent phase of the conflict on shared workspaces where Jews and Palestinians work together.
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* Asaf Darr is Professor of Sociology at the University of Haifa. His research focuses on the intersection of the sociology of occupations and professions and the sociology of markets. He is the author of Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy (Cornell University Press, 2006). Among his many studies, he published with Trevor Pinch “Performing Sales: Material Scripts and the Social Organization of Obligation” in Organization Studies (2013) and with Patrik Aspers “The Social Infrastructure of Online Marketplaces: Trade, Work and the Interplay of Decided and Emergent Orders” in the British Journal of Sociology (2022).
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