Israel Drori.

Israel Drori. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pres 2000 278 PP $1895 paper.

The Seam Line reports forward an organizational ethnography set in the sewing plants of a large Israeli textile company located in Arab and Druse communities in northern Israel. The work beautifully documents the interplay between the improvement of the local Arab communities and the cultivation of the plants that busy women from those communities. The ethnography reveals the complexus admixture of cultures as they surface in the workplace and points to the way the surrounding improvement shapes, legitimates, and maintains power relations, in this case, between Israeli male managers and Arab female workers.

The work contributes to several literatures. chiefly obviously, the book should be read through organizational ethnographers interested in documenting the complexities of organizational refinement 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 means of thick ethnographic descriptions at multiple on a levels The book should also be of interest to pupils and scholars interested in cross-cultural management and globalization. Here we diocese cultures come alive in the compound lived experience, interactions, and relations of workers. Finally, the work marks an important contribution to theories of inflection for sex and class relations in organizations as it documents the interactions among civilization patriarchy, and class structure (eg Acker, 1990 1999)

Drori organizes the work around four primary empirical chapters in the middle of the part Chapter 4 describes the setting of the ethnography and portrays important aspects of the organization, like as dilemmas in the organization of production, work values, and conflicts throughout 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 characters of the supervisors and managers, respectively. The chapters that encircle these include introductory, methods, and concluding chapters. In addition, chapter 8 nears changes that have taken place since the ethnography was carriageed including some of the changes in the organization of the plants since the plants were relocated to Egypt and Jordan.

The main division asks the very important question, by what mode do local cultural values and the blending of different cultivations shape the organization of production and the social and political relations within a workplace? Drori does a masterful work at jobs of showing how the local Arab cultivation enters into the workplace to shape the nature of social relations, norms, expectations, and values. We behold in this careful ethnography in what manner the Israeli male managers appropriate the patriarchal values of Arab improvement to legitimate their own power and rule over the female workers. Late in the part Drori tells a story of this cultural dynamic taken to an of the rarest kind in which a manager with equal reason thoroughly embraces his patriarchal part that he trespasses into the domain of family and pains a worker's father. Though intending to please the employee and attach her commitment to work, his breach of parts backfires when the father, galled by the manager, forces his daughter to stop working at the plant.

With many stories like this single 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 in succession family in Arab culture is incorporated into the logic of work as flexibility and redundancy, an organizational logic that is understood in this connection as a cultural imperative. This begs the question, wherefore does the family have of that kind organizing clout within this adjoining matter (and not in others)? although the answer to this is simple, I find the implications intriguing. Arab fathers would not hesitate to chance their daughters out of the plants if they failed to befitting their family obligations, leaving the textile plants without seamstresses. The willingness of managers to organize work around the needinesss of families reflects nothing more and nothing les than a strategic reply to a critical dependency. notwithstanding 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 if it were not that rather, a product of Western cultural values and its implementation of capitalism.

I originate most interesting the chapters onward supervisors and managers. In the case of supervisors, Drori explores in what way 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 inflection for sex relations and give meaning to circumstances inside and outside the plant. The nearest chapter shows how the managers, principally of whom are Israeli men use the cultural and political power of patriarchy to direction the female workers, extract work without of them, and maintain their commitment to the plant. a managers also self-consciously create sexual tensions between themselves and the unmarried female workers to stretch out their influence over these workers.