Overseas Foreign Workers in Israel: Policy Aims and Labor Market Outcomes1

The declared aim of the Israeli government, since 1996, was to reduce radically the presence in Israel of foreign overseas workers within five years. This aim has not been achieved due to a counteracting policy: yielding to strong political pressure, the government introduced regulations that virtually indentured legal overseas foreign workers indefinitely to their employers. This depressed their wages and transformed their employment into a source of easy gains, greatly increasing the demand for them and encouraging legal workers to turn illegal. As a result, their numbers have not declined significantly, even though the Israeli economy has been on a downtrend, most of the time, since 1997.     

Organizing migrant care workers in Israel: Industrial citizenship and the trade union option

The authors examine the feasibility of trade unionism for migrant care workers, based on a recent organizing drive in Israel. Distinguishing between trade unions and other civil society organizations, they re‐examine the concept of workers' collective action, looking at what constitutes a trade union and to what extent unions can address the specific concerns of migrant care workers. They conclude that, despite the numerous problems involved in organizing migrant care workers, and the vulnerabilities intrinsic to migration processes, gendered work and the occupation of care, trade unions play an important role in establishing industrial citizenship and forming political agency.     

Client satisfaction with live-in and live-out home care workers in Israel

In an era of globalization where the migration of longterm care workers is common, foreign live-in home care workers can compensate for the unavailability of family members and, perhaps, even substitute for institutional care in the provision of long-term care services to disabled older persons. This study examines differences in home care satisfaction between disabled older persons in Israel with "live-in" home care workers and those with "live-out" workers, and explores some differences in sociodemographic and personal characteristics between these two groups. Face-to-face interviews were held with a random sample of 93 older persons in Beer-Sheva. Older persons with live-in home care workers were more satisfied with their home care service than those with live-out workers. Those with live-in workers were more severely disabled, tended not to have any children living in close proximity, although an adult child was available as an informal caregiver. Communication difficulties between the elderly persons and their home care workers were found not to affect negatively the satisfaction with the service.     

Foreign workers in Kuwait: implications for the Kuwaiti labor force

An analysis of the foreign population in Kuwait shows that foreign nationals make up 60 percent of the population and 78 percent of the labor force in Kuwait. The implications of these figures for the Kuwaiti labor force are discussed by analyzing the occupational structures of Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis. "Structural analysis of the labor force indicates that 62 percent of Kuwaiti males are concentrated in administrative and service occupations while their percentage in sales and production work has declined during 1970-80. This demonstrates the need for reorienting educational/training programs and changing Kuwaiti attitudes towards manual work to ensure the realization of the 'Kuwaitization' process, and balance the nationals with foreign nationals." mortality has stabilized at relatively high levels and there is resistance to family planning. The author concludes that the main cause of the stalling of the demographic transition process is to be found in the role of the state and the dynamics of the social structure and that "demographic trends will depend more on the changes in social structure, land reforms, and response of the formal governing system to the needs of the underprivileged sections of the society, rather than on the health and family planning policies."     

Making a living at the interface of legality and illegality: Chinese migrant workers in Israel1

Since the late 1990s, Israel has become a new destination for Chinese migrant workers. In the view of many studies conducted in Israel, the Chinese migrant workers are often a neglected and almost invisible group. The purpose of this paper is to explore the initiation of this migration trend and its social consequences. The major discussion of this study focuses on how the whole process of migration is carried out at the interface between legality and illegality. Research in the sending area suggests that the urgent need for manual labour in Israel provides possibilities to attract both documented and undocumented migrant workers and therefore turns labour transportation into a profitable business. Although no one agrees that undocumented working activities should continue, all of the factors interact and result in a permissive situation allowing this particular combination of the illegal but licit to persist in transnational labour migration. More than anything else, this micro‐level study attempts to find the true story from the individual voices of local people.     

The state of things: state history and theory reconfigured

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not.     

Career choice in the context of political conflict: the case of Palestinians social workers in Israel

The helping professions in general and social work in particular pose particular challenges and opportunities for national minority group members. This article adds to the present knowledge in the literature concerning the interaction between career choice in the welfare professions and minority status, by looking at the voices of Palestinian Israeli social workers. The article is based on data gathered through in-depth interviews with 32 Palestinian Israeli social workers, describes the motivations, the process of choosing social work as a profession and the barriers that Palestinian Israeli professionals face in the context of the political, social and economic factors shaping their lives as belonging to a national minority in Israel.     

Popular culture 1978: history,theory, politics

The history of US universities is both an expansion of governmentality, in the sense of research undertaken for the public weal and teaching undertaken to train the populace in self-regulation; and an expansion of commodification, as research becomes more driven by corporate needs, students are increasingly addressed as consumers of education, and paymasters and administrators accrete authority over academics.     

Spinoza in the history of cultural psychology and activity theory

ABSTRACT

This review of the place of Spinoza in the history of cultural-historical activity theory begins with a synopsis of Ilyenkov’s influential essay “Spinoza—Thought as an Attribute of Substance” and adds further points. I go on to look at the historical context of Spinoza’s work, the mixed character of his legacy, and the need to see Spinoza as one moment in an entire historical development.     

German Maquiladora? Foreign workers in the process of regional economic restructuring

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the German Federal government signed a number of bilateral agreements providing the framework for the recruitment of workers from Central and East European countries. This article analyzes the goals, instruments and (planned as well as unintended) implications of these policies. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that this is—far from a radical reappraisal—just a conservative modernization of the German migration regime. The new regulations combine piecemeal reactions to the global political changes with provisions intended to support the growth of the German economy. Methodologically the paper combines official employment statistics with information from exploratory interviews conducted with commuters in the German‐Czech border region.     

Childhood abuse history,secondary traumatic stress,and child welfare workers

Social workers are exposed to trauma vicariously through the trauma of their clients. This phenomenon, called secondary traumatic stress, vicarious traumatization, or compassion fatigue, presents a risk of negative personal psychological consequences. Based on a sample of 166 child welfare workers and using standardized measures, the study findings document the link between a personal history of primary trauma, childhood abuse or neglect, and the heightened risk for secondary traumatic stress in child welfare workers.     

Worlds come apart: Systems theory versus critical theory. Drama in the history of sociology in the twentieth century

This article places an episode in the history of sociological theory into intellectual history in the twentieth century. The perspective is chronological as well as contextual. The themes are two theoretical approaches, both embedded in both American and German history, Parsonian Systems Theory and “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory. The chronology shown spanned mainly from the 1940s to the 1960s. The context of the two theories is a period that is crucial in twentieth century history. The protagonists of the two approaches were, in the 1940s, Americans and Germans exiled in the United States. In the 1950s, both approaches were affected by McCarthyism in different ways. The 1960s, however, were the culmination. The dynamics of the two approaches led into a schism which came into the open on the occasion of the 1964 German Sociology Conference in Heidelberg celebrating Max Weber. The article shows the stages in the evolution of the schism, emulating three acts in a drama. The final split was over whether Weber or Marx should be the classic whose oeuvre was to influence sociological thinking today. My aim is to exemplify how these two authoritative approaches in sociological theory, far from escaping the vagaries and vicissitudes of their times, were embedded in twentieth-century history.     

The recent history and the emerging reality of American sociological theory: A metatheoretical interpretation

This paper has several objectives. First, it demonstrates the utility of employing an array of metatheoretical tools (paradigm, paradigm bridging, micro-macro, integrated paradigm, theoretical syntheses) to analyze the recent history of mainstream American sociological theory. Second, it shows that we have moved through three rather well-defined epochs in sociological theory over the last three decades and are entering a fourth. Third, it demonstrates that the trend in recent years has been away from theoretical separatism and exclusivity, and toward theoretical synthesis and integration. Finally, and relatedly, the integrated sociological paradigm that I sketched a decade ago, or at least something very much like it, it shown to be now much closer to being a reality, perhaps even a defining reality, in sociological theory.