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

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 2002  by Debra Meyerson

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Israel Drori. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 278 PP. $18.95, paper.

The Seam Line reports on an organizational ethnography set in the sewing plants of a large Israeli textile company located in Arab and Druse communities in northern Israel. 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. The ethnography reveals the complex admixture of cultures as they surface in the workplace and points to the way the surrounding culture shapes, legitimates, and maintains power relations, in this case, between Israeli male managers and Arab female workers.

The book contributes to several literatures. Most obviously, the book should be read by organizational ethnographers interested in documenting the complexities of organizational culture, particularly the cultural production of meanings, identities, and social relations at work. Not since Kunda's (1992) ethnography have I been this drawn in by thick ethnographic descriptions at multiple levels. The book should also be of interest to students and scholars interested in cross-cultural management and globalization. Here we see cultures come alive in the concrete lived experience, interactions, and relations of workers. Finally, the book marks an important contribution to theories of gender and class relations in organizations as it documents the interactions among culture, patriarchy, and class structure (e.g., Acker, 1990, 1999).

Drori organizes the book around four primary empirical chapters in the middle of the book. Chapter 4 describes the setting of the ethnography and portrays important aspects of the organization, such as dilemmas in the organization of production, work values, and conflicts over interpersonal and working relationships in the plant. Chapter 5 documents the experiences and expectations of the entry-level worker-the seamstress, all of whom are Arab and Druse women from the local communities. It examines the relationships among seamstresses and between them and their supervisors and managers. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the roles of the supervisors and managers, respectively. The chapters that surround these include introductory, methods, and concluding chapters. In addition, chapter 8 presents changes that have taken place since the ethnography was conducted, including some of the changes in the organization of the plants since the plants were relocated to Egypt and Jordan.

The book asks the very important question, How do local cultural values and the blending of different cultures shape the organization of production and the social and political relations within a workplace? 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. We see in this careful ethnography how the Israeli male managers appropriate the patriarchal values of Arab culture to legitimate their own power and control over the female workers. Late in the book, Drori tells a story of this cultural dynamic taken to an extreme, in which a manager so thoroughly embraces his patriarchal role that he trespasses into the domain of family and offends a worker's father. Though intending to please the employee and cement her commitment to work, his breach of roles backfires when the father, offended by the manager, forces his daughter to stop working at the plant.

With many stories like this one, Drori reveals the blurring of boundaries between work and family life as a cultural requirement of workplaces situated within these Arab communities. The value placed on family in Arab culture is incorporated into the logic of work as flexibility and redundancy, an organizational logic that is understood in this context as a cultural imperative. This begs the question, Why does the family have such organizing clout within this context (and not in others)? Though the answer to this is simple, I find the implications intriguing. Arab fathers would not hesitate to pull their daughters out of the plants if they failed to meet their family obligations, leaving the textile plants without seamstresses. The willingness of managers to organize work around the needs of families reflects nothing more and nothing less than a strategic response to a critical dependency. Yet this response--the blurring of boundaries between work and family--suggests that the division between public and priv ate is not an inevitable condition of industrial capitalism but, rather, a product of Western cultural values and its implementation of capitalism.

I found most interesting the chapters on supervisors and managers. In the case of supervisors, Drori explores how supervisors--Arab women promoted from the rank and file--act as political and cultural mediators between managers and workers. In the course of their daily actions and interactions, supervisors mediate class relations and gender relations and give meaning to events inside and outside the plant. The next chapter shows how the managers, most of whom are Israeli men, use the cultural and political power of patriarchy to control the female workers, extract work out of them, and maintain their commitment to the plant. Some managers also self-consciously create sexual tensions between themselves and the unmarried female workers to extend their influence over these workers.