UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY
2nd International Conference on Economic and Social History
"Markets" and Politics
Private interests and public authority (18th-20th centuries)
Volos, 10-12 February 2012
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Abstracts
- Orly C. Meron Ethnic professionals and public utilities: Jewish engineers in Greece between the wars
Already in 1960, Noble prizewinner Simon Kuznets argued that minorities preferred to work in the private, competitive sector as opposed to the public sector in an attempt to avoid discrimination. Since then, theories dealing with ethnic entrepreneurship have demonstrated a link between the structure of opportunities and the activity of ethnic entrepreneurs. They also argued in particular that entrepreneurial opportunities in the public sector tend to be blocked to minorities.
Based on un-published Jewish archival documents, this paper will attempt to make an inter-ethnic comparison between the activities of Jewish and Greek engineers, mainly in reference to public utilities. The proposed paper will explore the hypothesis that Jews involved in professions that require intensive investments of human capital (e.g. engineering) rarely undertook contracts for public infrastructure projects initiated by the Greek government—starting from the mid-1920s, following the transfer, and especially during the 1930s. Lacking connections and networks of communication with the Greek administration, when government intervention increased during the 1930s, the Jewish engineer-contractors adopted new, special entrepreneurial strategies to gain entrance to the public infrastructure tender process, especially in Macedonia.
