Ray Jureidini

Migrant Workers and Xenophobia in the Middle East

Various forms of racism and xenophobia can be found in all societies. Stemming from a fear of strangers, social groupings or cultures are generally based on features of similarity, values and beliefs which determine the binding forces of individual and social identity to the exclusion of the ‘other’ (see Said, 1978; Turner, 1993; Ahmed, 2000). This chapter is concerned with contemporary xenophobic elements relating to foreign migrants in the Arab countries of Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf states in the Middle East, with particular reference to the status of foreign female domestic employees (see Jureidini, 1998).

Life insurance, the medical examination and cultural values.

This paper is concerned with the commodification of the risk of death which occurred with the development of life insurance and with the role of the medical examination in making life insurance a viable commodity. Using British and Australian data, it shows how the medical profession and the medical examination were crucial to nineteenth century life insurance institutions in the calculation of the value of human lives. Life insurance institutions combined a developing ideology of health with the knowledge of health statistics and applied both for a developing institutional finance market. The calculation and preservation of the value of individual human lives by the pooling of risks on selected lives is the service which life insurance sells and which underpins finance capital. The knowledge developed from health and morbidity statistics was a process both of social surveillance and of market-oriented monitoring for economic risk-reduction. At the level of the individual the necessity for life insurance was the dissolution of traditional community and familial support as industrial capitalism developed.

JUST-IN-TIME AND POWER RELATIONS IN THE MANUFACTURING CHAIN

Abstract This paper discusses the impact of JIT on the customer-supplier relationship in the Australian automotive industry. It is argued that the gradual restructuring of the automotive components industry over the past several years is in part an effort to accommodate the introduction of JIT into the five major vehicle assemblers. Further, while the power (of production disruption) of the supplier sector is enhanced in the short term by JIT, structural accommodation results in cooperative and integrative, rather than adversarial, competitive business relations. Five areas are discussed: first, a summary of theoretical issues underlying the study; second, an outline of the structure of the automotive components industry in Australia; third, a brief history of the introduction of JIT principles into the components industry; fourth, the changing business relations between vehicle builders and component suppliers; and fifth, some effects of labour disputation in the components sector on the (core) vehicle a...