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.