This paper offers a critical rereading of Omani work history, one which foregrounds labour, flipping the perspective from the view of industry and capital to the human experience. Because the oil industry is capital rather than labour intensive, the story of work remains at the margins. What unfolds here is the reverse. I begin at the margins, and centre on “living and working.” This exercise reveals the lineages of practice and discourse that have shaped the labour market environment that Omani millennials face today. It provides a crucial backdrop to the labour market segmentations running across economic sectors in the country and Gulf region, and provides a retelling of the story of economic development. Moreover, a historical, labour-centred perspective uncovers how the discourses around the Omani labour market today became accepted and embedded in development plans and polices (written initially by outsiders), and accepted into the developmental consciousness in policy making and private sector business practice. I separate these lineages into three overlapping categories, where each mutually constitute and inform the other. These are the lineages of differentiation and resistance, lineages of preparation and motivation, and lineages of liberalisation and nationalisation. Through process tracing, this mode of analysis corresponds with feminist inquiry’s emphasis on understanding how difference operates in historically contingent situations to shape not only the social but also the economic. Indeed, through a critical and feminist international political economy of labour it becomes apparent how capitalist modes of development and contemporary industry operates across the global economy and “fragments the labour process across space and continually reconfigures the geography of production” (Bair 2010: 205). Practices of recruiting and framing labour alongside the experiences of working have profoundly shaped the growth and organisation of wage labour in Oman and the Gulf.

While sociologists have previously looked at the phenomena of increased female employment in the United States, little is understood about the main mechanisms by which men and women eventually came to work alongside each other in previously male-dominated fields. More recently, the economy of Saudi Arabia has seen a dramatic shift in female labor force participation from 2-20% female employment in the private sector in the last decade. Exploiting this natural setting for understanding organizational change, I analyze the universe of private sector employer-employee matched data from Saudi Arabia from 2009-2016 and find that firms which hired female managers were more likely to continue hiring females than firms that did not hire a female manager. To better understand this finding in the administrative data, I combine two years of qualitative fieldwork to unpack how hiring a first female manager operates as a signal of cultural change to other firms and provides role models for female jobseekers. In addition, I find that commitment from top management explains how firms began hiring females, and that they used a variety of strategies to do so, which I categorize as from within, from without, and rotational strategies. By understanding the phenomena of increased female employment in Saudi Arabia we can bring these insights to organizations in other male-dominated contexts.

In Tunisia, Social Entrepreneurship is one of the political priority to fix the rampant unemployment problem, especially in the poorest and marginalized governorates of the Center – West region. In Sidi Bouzid, the post-revolutionary period called « democratic transition » have highlighted new opportunities for local economic development. Those opportunities appear sometimes as individual strategies in order to improve living conditions of unemployed people. Lingare Sidi Bouzid is an association which takes care of young social entrepreneurs in tier project creation process. The association helps them to know how to start their own entreprise, to organize their plan and to know what « social » means. One of these steps is to obtain fundings. Several options are available : banks (Banque Tunisienne de Solidarité), personal funds (but most of those young people are economically disadvantaged) or competitions. Associations of funders organize meetings where young social entrepreneurs can promote thier project. The most convincing ones win grants in order to finalize the project. But these kind of competition oblige social entrepreneurs to conform their project to the requirements of different juries in terms of values, social goals, means, etc. To be as competitive as they could be, social entrepreneurs need to adopt some codes, in these particulars situations. Because fundings is key, people who don’t obtain grants put their project aside or give them up. This paper will examine how values or means are shaped by 1) the association (Lingare) in their workshops, and 2) by the competition on a causal relations between what entrepreneurs want (grants) and what they have to do for. For this paper, we will base our work on six fieldworks in Sidi Bouzid, during which we conducted semi-structured interviews with young social entrepreneurs, leaders of Lingare Sidi Bouzid, politicians, unionists, activists in civil society, and so on. We worked on a strong analysis framework : the first part was about the childhood and adolescence of these actors (school, family, …), the second part dealt with firsts political and economical sociabilization through political parties, associations, strikes, demonstrations, or the revolution. Finally, the last part of the interviews analyzed their professional careers and how social entrepreneurship works in Sidi Bouzid. We completed our study with several participant observation in Lingare Sidi Bouzid. We will also use statistics from the National Institute of Statistics.

Morocco, similar to other countries in the MENA region, is witnessing its largest cohort of young people in its history. In conjunction, the nation is experiencing high levels of unemployment, comprising up to forty percent of its urban youth population. In my field study, I focus on the agential practices and challenges young individuals from urban underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco confront in the realm of work as they describe their everyday paths to becoming. In this paper, I argue that disadvantaged youth are not passive in the face of their relative work precariousness and unemployment. They daily negotiate their contexts entangled with their agential possibility. In analyzing this dynamic, I present the various tactics and strategies young people deploy to pursue and navigate the workspace. In doing so, I employ a critical realist approach to avoid traditional arguments concerning youth agency as a synonym to empowerment, resistance and self fulfillement. Instead, I explore other dimensions of youth expression of agency that can be found in acts of deliberate personal disempowerment or endurance, as well as in other practices that do not always challenge existing work structures. In this paper, I aim to contribute to a deeper empirical understanding of the exercise of bounded agency among youth from underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco as they confront the realities of the job market and as they learn to forge their professional identities. Hopefully, too, this paper can provide a more leavened depiction as to how agency, structure, and work concur in these young people's lives.

Investigations of the impact of sanctions in the Middle East mostly examine their logistical and economic ramifications (Esfandiary and Fitzpatrick, 2011; Katzman, 2015; Van de Graaf, 2013). Studies have also highlighted the individual experiences of marginalized groups, such as women and cancer patients, as well as the overall effect of sanctions on the quality of people’s lives (Al-Ali, 2005; Hakimian, 2019; Shahabi, 2015). In this paper, we explore the impact of sanctions on the everyday lives of Iranians as well as the creative forms of resistance that they have employed from the ground-up. Aside from journalistic accounts, there has been little empirically driven research on this topic. What challenges have sanctions created for non-elites during everyday life? How are doctors, patients, publishers, business owners, single mothers, and the youth responding to the effect of sanctions? What strategies are used at different levels of society for survival? Who is seen as the enemy? How do people continue to entertain and enjoy life during this new phase of sanctions? Literature on sanctions and the international system explore its effectiveness for governance (Fatas, Melendez-Jimenez, Solaz, 2019; Giumelli, 2016; Mararike, 2019). This paper connects the Iranian people’s creativity in responding to the effects of sanctions during everyday life to new imaginings of the international system, and other processes that unfold at the international level. How are notions of national and international solidarity evolving in this context? How do memories of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war influence people’s thinking regarding the current situation? How do the Iranian people see themselves as international actors? How influential is the state in engendering people’s survival strategies? What lessons does the Iranian experience hold for other nations enduring economic sanctions? This study is grounded in fieldwork and extensive interviews carried out in Tehran in 2020. The different populations impacted most intensely by the sanctions were interviewed. We also use archival research to understand how sanctions are contextualized and discussed by the Iranian people. This paper is part of a larger book project on the remaking of international hierarchies in the Middle East.