Management is a powerful mode of thought and code of conduct in the modern world, closely associated with the American way and a natural extension of economic progress. This is a book about the history of management and the origin of managerial rationality in the United States.

This book is about the social history of the Arab Jews-Jews living in Arab countries-against the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissaries-prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were reproduced upon the arrival of the Arab Jews to Israel. The book also provides a new prism for understanding the intricate relationships between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a link that is usually obscured or omitted by studies that are informed by Zionist historiography. Finally, the book uses the history of the Arab Jews to transcend the assumptions necessitated by the Zionist perspective, and to open the door for a perspective that sheds new light on the basic assumptions upon which Zionism was founded.

Management is a powerful mode of thought and code of conduct in the modern world, closely associated with the American way and a natural extension of economic progress. This is a book about the history and development of management and managerial rationality in the United States in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Through careful analysis of contemporary records in the engineering profession, the author shows how management invented itself and carved its own domain in the face of hostility and resistance from both manufacturers and workers. The book demonstrates how the new language and rhetoric of management emerged, and how it confronted and replaced the language of traditional capitalism: 'system' instead of 'individuals'; 'jobs' instead of 'natural rights'; 'planning' instead of 'free initiatives'. Manufacturing Rationality can be read simultaneously as an historical account of the genesis of modern management, a chapter in the history of American capitalism, a critical analysis of industrial engineering, and as a sociology of (managerial) knowledge.