Abstract
Organizational scholars have long been interested in how social identity and demographic dissimilarity impact intergroup relations in the workplace. As the implications of such differences can often be subtle and difficult to capture, when scholars attempt to generate theory about the workplace dynamics generated by such dissimilarity and their meaning to those living these dynamics, it can be useful to explore extreme cases (Bamberger and Pratt, 2010). In Between Conflict and Collegiality, Darr does just that. Reflecting the extreme case of Palestinian Arabs and their Jewish coworkers in Israel, Darr’s data suggest that conventional theories of social identity, intergroup relations, and workplace diversity offer inadequate explanations for how parties to active and violent ethno-national and interreligious conflict cope with inherent distrust and discrimination, collaborate, and even (albeit more rarely) develop close friendships at work.
Darr strives to achieve four main objectives in his analysis. First, he seeks to shed light on the extent to which workplace relations can be decoupled from the troubled sociocultural turmoil surrounding such relations and, to the extent that they cannot, on how external violent ethno-religious conflict impacts employment and intergroup relations in multi-ethnic workplaces. Second, he attempts to understand how, in the context of a violent conflict that has been raging for over 100 years, Jews and Palestinian Arabs develop strategies of workplace collaboration, dependence, and trust. Third, he endeavors to explore the applicability of conventional theories of intergroup relations, for example diversity management theory (Nishii et al., 2018) and contact theory (Allport, 1954), to such contexts, and through his data to develop an alternative and potentially better-fitting theoretical explanation for the observed dynamics. Finally, striving to identify boundary conditions, Darr’s analysis aims to assess the extent to which this emergent theory of intergroup relations in a high-conflict context manifests differently in different occupations and employment sectors.
With an impressive dataset and an analytical approach driven by focus on disconfirmation and boundary testing, Darr easily achieves all four aims. Together with his multi-ethnic research team, over the course of seven years (2011–2018) Darr curated over 100 in-depth interviews with Jews and Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel working together in three main sectors: information technologies, manufacturing, and health care. (Although Palestinian Arabs account for only 20 percent of Israelis, they represent over one-third of all physicians entering the health care system in Israel.) Carefully contrasting how relations play out in these different contexts, the analysis highlights that patterns clearly dominant in one sector (for example, close relationships and debates over religion among Jewish and Palestinian Arab production workers) often diverge in other contexts (e.g., engineers in information technologies) and that macro events such as the eruption of war can disrupt what would otherwise appear to be stable patterns.
These analyses offer an impressive and important set of grounded insights well deserving of further study. For example, the data suggest that while contact theory (Allport, 1954) can explain how intergroup encounters may offer a mechanism for overcoming homophily in many organizations (cf., Bacharach, Bamberger, and Vashdi, 2005), such encounters can sometimes be counterproductive in war-torn conflict zones. Moreover, the data in this book suggest that such encounters do little to address the more structural aspects of discrimination limiting the ability of Palestinian Arabs in certain sectors (e.g., manufacturing) to access the opportunities available to their Jewish coworkers. Indeed, the field data consistently highlight that while work-based interdependence may facilitate collegial (and even tight) relations between Jews and Arabs at work, these encounters not only fail to reduce perceptions of prejudice and discrimination but often reinforce them. In this context, Darr proposes the concept of “split ascription,” defined as “the conceptual separation that members of minority groups create between their direct work environment, composed of personal social ties with team members, and the structural elements of the employing organization, including (potentially discriminatory) hiring and promotion procedures and decisions” (p. 43). Darr uses this concept to highlight (a) how the workplace serves as a venue for overcoming intergroup differences and facilitating inter-ethnic collaboration and trust while simultaneously reinforcing structural norms and practices that reflect and intensify the conflict, and (b) the way in which minority group members, in this case Palestinian Arabs, manage this duality.
Darr’s inquiry is structured around five main analyses. The first analysis explores this concept of split ascription as a bottom-up coping device that allows both Jews and Arabs to collaborate and develop cordial and even close relations in the context of institutions and implicit norms that place the latter at a structural disadvantage. A second analysis focuses on how occupational and employment sector differences condition the impact of ethno-national background on careers and vocational opportunities. Two additional analyses focus on (a) language and (b) religion as implicit but paradoxical arenas for both inter-ethnic tension and understanding at work. The final analysis explores how, at least in certain employment contexts in Israel, the workplace may offer a sign of hope by leading Jews and Palestinians toward better understanding of each other and by driving initiatives to address some of the most explicit structural barriers to integration.
For readers interested in understanding how the Israeli–Palestinian Arab conflict plays out on a daily basis in the Israeli workplace, this book offers an important and timely message, namely that while Jews and Palestinian Arabs often live separately, with many of the latter group continuing to experience both subtle and explicit structural discrimination, increasingly the workplace also provides opportunities for breaking barriers and building bridges. But the book is also a must-read for diversity scholars and organizational theorists seeking to understand how macro-level events and phenomena impact day-to-day micro-processes in organizations. Indeed, the high-intensity tensions explored by Darr in this volume sadly resonate to all too many regions in which violent ethno-national conflicts are part of recent history or remain a daily affair, be it in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the countries of the former USSR, Africa, or southern Asia. Moreover, with rising political and ethnic polarization in many Western countries, the dynamics captured by Darr may also be relevant for western European and North American workplaces, particularly following macro-level events such as the election of an extremist politician or a police shooting of a minority or immigrant youth.
Many of the patterns and relations uncovered in this volume are context-specific to Israel and the unique nature of the Palestinian Arab–Israeli conflict. Moreover, particularly in the context of the Israel–Hamas war that began in October 2023, one can’t help but also question the possible temporal specificity of the findings. Nevertheless, applying an approach grounded in the sociology of work practice, Darr’s data and analyses offer important insights into how, from the bottom up, ethnically dissimilar workers may collaboratively execute toward common goals and even establish and maintain close social ties while the communities with which they identify continue to engage in violent conflict. Given the state of the world today, these insights are (unfortunately) likely to have increasing relevance for organizations and those studying them.
