Ishak Saporta

Offering a Job: Meritocracy and Social Networks.

This study focuses on the impact of sex, race, and social networks, to analyze the hiring process in a midsized high‐technology organization, using information on all 35,229 applicants in a 10‐year period (1985–94). For gender, the process is entirely meritocratic: age and education account for all sex differences. But even without taking into account the two meritocratic variables, there are small if no differences between men and women at all stages in the hiring process. For ethnic minorities, the process is partly meritocratic but partly reliant upon social networks. Once referral method is taken into account, all race effects disappear. In hiring, ethnic minorities are thus disadvantaged in the processes that take place before the organization is contacted. They lack access to or utilize less well the social networks that lead to high success in getting hired.

The opportunity structure for discrimination

Gender disparities in wages and attainment caused by employer discrimination can come about by three very different processes: allocative discrimination, within‐job wage discrimination, and valuative discrimination. For the United States, it has been established that within‐job wage discrimination no longer is a major source of wage differences, while valuative discrimination potentially is. Less known is the role of allocative discrimination, especially in the hiring process, which we identify as the point where discrimination is most feasible. Our analysis uses personnel data on all entrants into a large U.S. service organization in the period 1978–86, focusing on managerial, administrative, and professional employees. We study the placement at initial hire and then follow job levels, wages, promotions, as well as departures, in years subsequent to hire.

Pre‐vocational education: the making of Israel's ethno‐working class

This article deals with pre‐vocational education that was first implemented in Israels educational system in 1955 in 7th and 8th grades of elementary school. The purpose of the article is to examine the role that this education played in making Israels ethno‐working class. This role emerged, we argue, through conflicting dynamics involving two opposite rationales: universalistic and particularistic. On the one hand, pre‐vocational education was perceived as an integral component of both a pedagogic conception and a national worldview that viewed vocational training, respectively, as crucial for the development of every child and for ‘economic equilibrium’ in the country. Yet, on the other hand, from the beginning of the programs implementation the universalistic rationales were abandoned or collapsed as growing importance was attributed to particularistic rationales. In other words, pre‐vocational education came to be seen primarily as a means by which to ensure the ‘integration’ of Mizrahi children (i.e., children of Asian and African background) into Israels social and economic life, thus contributing significantly to creating Israels ethno‐working class. Presenting the dynamics leading to this result, we proceed to offer the reasons that led the particularistic rationales to gain the ascendancy over the universalistic rationales. We argue that these reasons owe to the dynamics characterizing of the nation‐building processes in general. That is, the particularistic rationales are implicitly embedded within the universal and homogenizing logic of these processes, processes that tend to suppress this logic from within. Whereas the inherent internal logic of the modern nation‐state appears to necessitate equality of opportunities, it was that same logic, we argue, that constructed certain groups that are ‘incapable’ of benefiting from that equality, because they are ostensibly unable or unwilling to adopt the basic values of modernity.

The Politics of Lands and Housing in Israel: A Wayward Republican Discourse

Being a settler society — a society dominated by a non-indigenous settler group — Jewish Israel has always been intensely preoccupied with issues of land and housing. These matters have, in consequence, had important ramiecations for the very construction of Israel’s national identity and its deenition of citizenship, alongside the practices of national exclusion and ethnic marginalisation they necessarily entail. The Zionist movement had a penchant for elevating the issue of land and its redemption to mythological heights, to ‘an idyllic process’, transcending other, more earthly, worries and concerns. 1 This is the fertile ground that gave rise to many of the common myths surrounding the implementation of Zionist ideology. Notorious among them is the myth asserting that Zionism emerged at a unique and propitious moment in history when, through sheer luck, a people without a land encountered a land without a people, this latter being a land to which the Jewish people have always yearned to return. Terrestrial matters were always on the mind of Zionism’s early leaders; Yoseph Weiz, who played an essential role in the acquisition of pre-state lands from Palestinians, and who later became Director General of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), gave a succinct expression to their awareness in this regard: What was clear to us since the inception of Zionism is that without land no state can endure, even not for one hour. Our existence, our life and our struggle are entirely grounded in this principle: the land that is under [our] feet. (1950, p. 54)

Management systems, strikes and the coverage of “labor unrest” in the engineering literature during the Progressive era

This article provides first‐hand, empirical data to demonstrate that during the Progressive period, mechanical engineers used labor unrest as a rhetorical device to increase public interest in management systems. This political strategy was necessary, given the objection of manufacturers to the installation of management systems in industrial firms. The study is based on systematic analysis of two magazines in which the study of management was first codified and crystallized: the Engineering Magazine, and the American Machinist.

The Wavering Luck of Girls: Gender and Pre-vocational Education in Israel

This research study is a development of our previous study about the pre-vocational training program introduced to the Israeli education system in the 1950s. However, while in the previous study we examined the role this program played in making Israels ethno-working class, in the present work we examine this programs gender implications. In addition to the role it played in the emergence of the ethno-working class, the program significantly contributed to the reproduction and reinforcement of a gender-based division of labor in Israeli society. This double-edge discrimination (against Mizrahim in general and against Mizrahi girls in particular) presents a special case of exclusionary social practices in the context of the Middle East. It owes its motivating and legitimizing force to social constructions exhibiting a unique reproduction of the dichotomy between the first world (Jews of European origins) and the third world (Jews of Middle Eastern origins). That is, the social categories in which girls and boys are captured, allowing ethnic and gender discrimination of Mizrahim in Israeli society, are grounded in a European symbolic repertoire that traditionally facilitated distorted representation and oppression of the East. However, we argue that although ethnic discrimination in this context was not gender-free, it may have [End Page 71] nonetheless promoted the interests of Mizrahi girls, who belonged to the oppressed group. That is, we argue that the very stereotypical conceptions concerning Mizrahi women in Israeli society may have benefited, paradoxically, Mizrahi girls in an educational system characterized by a discriminatory tracking system.