Orly Benjamin

Critical Poverty Knowledge Contesting Othering and Social Distancing

Poverty knowledge has made a long-term contribution to the images and representations of people in poverty. Yet one can find only limited analysis of poverty knowledge and the politics of representation. This article describes current directions in poverty knowledge and analyses the degree of their enhancement or their challenging of Othering towards people who live in poverty. Specifically, the article refers to the hegemonic narrative, which reflects and creates stigmatized and punitive representations of people in poverty, and to three counter-narratives that try to challenge these reductionist images: the structural/contextual counter-narrative, the agency/resistance counter-narrative and the counter-narrative of voice and action. The analysis highlights the critical value of each of the counter-narratives, while pointing to the possibility that specific usages of these stances of investigation carry the risk of themselves producing Othering and social distancing. The article concludes by referring to several approaches to poverty research which encourage a resistance to Othering through combining components of the three counter-narratives.

JOB INSECURITY, STRESS AND GENDER

This study examined the complex relationships between gender, job insecurity and job-related stress. Previous findings have suggested that men experience greater job insecurity than women, and are more vulnerable to job-related stress. The current study tested the hypothesis that the gender ideology of employees moderates the effect of gender on job insecurity and stress. Data were obtained by questionnaires from a sample of 203 married employees. The results showed that traditional men experience greater job insecurity than traditional women. However, as hypothesized, egalitarian men and women exhibited similar degrees of job insecurity. Furthermore, job insecurity in traditional men and in egalitarian men and women was related to loss of control stress, financial stress and stress expressions at home, whereas traditional women were relatively protected from job-related stress. These findings illuminate the important moderating role played by gender ideology in the relationships between gender, job insecurity and stress.

Defining encounters: Who are the women entitled to join the Israeli collective?

Abstract Israeli abortion law informs the action taken by professionals dealing with women who come to define a pregnancy as “unwanted.” In this paper, we examine the discourse produced by such professionals in the light of the feminist suggestion that the complex link between women and the state involves a duality: a duality that simultaneously defines gender as irrelevent to issues of affiliation and acts as a powerful mechanism of exclusion. Secondary analysis of two previous studies in this area show that three distinct female national identities: the normative woman, the marginal, and the other, are embedded in the controlling practices of professionals involved in regulating pregnancy terminations. We show that the Israeli woman is defined as “responsible” (when using contraception); “committed” (when she contributes to the biological reproduction of the collective) and “sensible” (when avoiding the “trouble” of an unwanted pregnancy altogether). Our interviews with social workers and administrators reflect the role of professionals as the gatekeepers of the Israeli collective; only those women obeying the institutional imperatives for reproductive behaviour (i.e., who do not use abortion as a contraceptive) are entitled to admittance, that is, to be defined as an Israeli women and hence escape the labelling as “other.”

THERAPEUTIC DISCOURSE, POWER AND CHANGE: EMOTION AND NEGOTIATION IN MARITAL CONVERSATIONS

Cultural trends shape the experience of marriage by forming expectations, entitlements and obligations. The self-development discourse generated by the therapeutic culture has been suggested as playing a part in such shaping. This paper examines how this particular discourse affects the way women experience their marital conversations and, more specifically, the extent to which they feel able to initiate change-directed negotiation within them. Twenty-eight professional women in England, selected to reflect different occupational exposures to the self-development discourse, were interviewed in order to examine their experiences of the marital conversation and possible changes within it. The analysis shows that specific feeling rules limit the possibility of womens concerns entering the marital conversation, and that the self-development discourse can introduce alternative feeling rules with the potential to overcome such limitations. It is shown that women who are influenced by the ideological messages equating change with relationship improvement contained within this discourse are able to adopt its proposed feeling rules and to use them to introduce negotiation into their marital conversations. These women are able to use this increased negotiability within the marital conversation to become more powerful in shaping their marital experiences.

Rewriting fertilization: Trust, pain, and exit points

Abstract Feminists debate the nature of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and womens choice in relation to it. In this article, we focus on the process of becoming and being an IVF user without questioning womens choices. This process is empirically examined within a feminist body approach. Based on interviews with 22 Israeli Jewish women who went through IVF treatments in two infertility clinics where one of the authors has herself undergone IVF treatment, the article focuses on womens pain. We ask how IVF users learn about, and manage pain, and whether the pain they experience drove them to abandon the treatment. The analysis we present reveals a process, based and shaped by the womens trust in IVF and by an inner struggle. Attempting to cope with pain, the women relied on an image of their bodies as detached from their souls, and they initiated exit points from IVF treatment once their emotional experience became powerful to the extent that such detachment could no longer be sustained.

Learning to negotiate network relations: social support among working mothers living in poverty

This study promotes our understanding of the complex and dynamic role that social support networks play in the everyday life of working mothers living in poverty, by focusing on the processes of negotiation involved in the creation, maintenance and mobilization of social ties. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 12 Israeli-Jewish working mothers who participated in an economic empowerment workshop. Findings indicate that the participants received much social support from relatives, friends and community activists. However, they further reveal the hard hidden work of negotiation and the process of learning involved in obtaining support. Particularly important in this context of poverty was the need to learn how to ask for support by overcoming feelings of shame and concerns about respectability, and to reduce social burdens by, among other things, refusing to participate in the ‘gift economy’ and limiting constraining social relationships. Finally, this study shows how the seemingly divergent interpretations of negotiation in social-exchange theory and symbolic interactionism (reaching an agreement that maximizes benefits versus preserving the relationship) often converge in everyday life situations.

Emotional politics in cleaning work: The case of Israel

Emotional politics instil insecurity and doubt in working-class individuals. Researchers examining social degradation through (bad) employment or other stigma have demonstrated the exclusionary impact of this process. Some suggest that individuals respond to such emotional politics and other types of exclusion by identity-management strategies aiming at a sense of worth, whereas others have found self-isolation to dominate. Here we analyse the emotional politics emerging from women’s responses to exclusion in the socially degraded field of cleaning in three ethno-national contexts in Israel. The sample was composed of Mizrahi women in the southern periphery, immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and Israeli-Palestinian women from Arab settlements in the north. By analysing cleaning employees’ talk, we characterize these women’s struggle to derive a sense of worth from their breadwinning experience within a specific ethno-national context in terms of family, community and workplace. We discuss the similarities and differences among these three groups with regard to the relative weight of each of these circles for negotiation of belonging and inclusion.

“I’ve Got No Choice” Low-Income Mothers’ Emotional Management of Caring Crisis

Many studies have shown how important it is for low-income mothers to sustain their moral identities as both good mothers and reliable workers during times of little social valuing of mothers’ caring work. Discovering how low-income mothers sustain this duality when caring crises preclude employment requires a mapping of their social worlds as reflected in their moral justifications. We used an institutional ethnographic approach that focused on situations wherein mothers decide to exit the labor market and devote themselves to their children’s caring needs. Interviews with 48 Israeli mothers revealed that they maintain their moral fitness both as good mothers and good citizens by engaging in a specific emotion management: expressing emotional devotion to their paid job, whereas child care is presented as a necessity. We argue that emotion management is particularly revealing of how macro-level institutional practices and discourses come to the fore in individuals’ daily lives.

The Illegal as Normative Employment Practices of Cleaning Companies in Israel as Shaped by Subcontractors’ Organizational Networks

This article explores the ways in which employers’ organizational networks, as shaped by the emergence of the “contract state” and related changes in the legal environment, affect employment practices. The classic analysis of the ways in which the legal environment benefits elites has successfully been applied to large organizations. Here, from a microsociological perspective, the authors researched how within an ambivalent legal context small and medium size cleaning companies interact with members of their organizational network. Semistructured interviews with cleaning subcontractors illustrate a specific type of standardization process by which the Finance Ministry’s administrative guidelines encourage cleaning companies to ignore workers’ rights and develop illegal employment practices which are then transferred from contracts with state agencies to contracts with private firms purchasing services. The possibility to interpret this process as a form of state power is discussed.

Low-income mothers in an Israeli welfare-to-work program: Symbolic violence and its limitations

Welfare-to-work (WTW) programs use role modeling rhetoric to re-educate mothers to prioritize paid employment over presence-based childcare. Research has shown that mothers may resist this rhetoric if, historically, policies in their countries shaped their sense of entitlement to be supported as mothers. But under what conditions does such resistance build a critical voice? What other voices emerge in the encounter with the WTW rhetoric? This article uses three ‘voices’ that emerge in the ideological environment of WTW to criticize the common usage of ‘voice’ in discussions of working with those who live in poverty. Based on semi-structured interviews of 62 single mothers participating in a WTW program in Israel, the study shows how participants’ voices convey disentitlement to childcare services. By considering how low-income single mothers experience themselves as respectable individuals when suitable childcare is scarce, the article discusses the conditions under which an emerging ‘voice’ can be considered critical.