Political scientist Cammett considers the use of positive deviant cases – examples of sustained high performance in a context in which good results are uncommon – to identify and disentangle causal complexity and understand the role of context. Although the consensus view on the role of deviant cases is that they are most useful for exploratory purposes or discovery and theory building, Cammett suggests they can also generate insights into the identification and operation of causal mechanisms. She writes that “analyses of positive deviant cases among a field of otherwise similar cases that operate in the same context … can be a valuable way to identify potential explanatory variables for exceptional performance.” The hypothesized explanatory variables can then be incorporated in subsequent quantitative or qualitative studies in order to evaluate their effects across a broader range of observations. The chapter discusses how to approach selection of positive deviant cases systematically and then works through a real example.

On February 2, 2011, pro-regime loyalists swept into Tahrir Square in central Cairo to attack protesters calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, who had governed Egypt for nearly three decades. In the attacks, government-hired thugs rode horses and camels through the protest camp, attacking demonstrators with whips and other weapons and leaving several dead and wounded. The attack, which came to be as the “Battle of the Camel,” is a violent example of regime-orchestrated contentious action (Kandil, 2012, p. 227; Ketchley, 2017, p. 67). State-mobilized movements (SMMs), however, can take more peaceful forms, such as demonstrations and rallies organized to express support for incumbent authoritarian rulers. Indeed, the Egyptian uprising witnessed multiple episodes of nonviolent, SMMs in which citizens took to the streets to convey their support of the incumbent regime, whether orchestrated by elites from the Mubarak government or from one of his successors in the tumultuous years following his departure.

The structure of the industrial bourgeoisie and pattern of business–government relations that emerged in Morocco's postindependence era influenced how later industrialists would respond to economic opportunities and constraints in the reform period. Many analytical treatments of the private sector, particularly in literature on North African politics, present “business” as a homogeneous class. This study, in contrast, emphasizes the variegated nature of the business class and, more specifically, divisions within the industrial bourgeoisie. In the postindependence era, the rise of a well-connected protectionist elite, organized in multisectoral groups or holding companies, emerged out of two factors: first, their importance in the anticolonial struggle, which enabled them to penetrate the independent state and shape economic policy; and second, the perceived capacity of the domestic market to sustain ISI, at least in the short to medium term. The existence of this privileged elite shaped the institutional and political context within which different business factions maneuvered, spurring reactive mobilization by emergent exporters in the 1990s, almost five decades after independence.

BUSINESS–GOVERNMENT RELATIONS IN POSTINDEPENDENCE MOROCCO

The postindependence structure of the Moroccan industrial bourgeoisie and forms of business–government relations emerged as a result of several factors, including French administration policies during the colonial period, the relationship of economic elites to the colonial administration, and, most importantly, interactions between the monarchy and existing business classes after independence.

The Political System: The Palace, Parties, and Parliament

When the French occupied Morocco and subsequently established the Protectorate in 1912, they implemented a two-track pattern of administration.

The textile and apparel sectors are important sites for examining how integration in globalized manufacturing affects business politics in developing countries. The apparel industry engages almost every country in the world and is at the forefront of globalization processes. Since the 1970s, more and more developing countries have participated in textile and apparel manufacturing chains, and competition for market share is acute. Trends in textile and apparel production and sourcing since the 1980s have created a new global production context, introducing new inducements for producers in developing countries to integrate in global manufacturing chains and to form alliances with local producers. Large multinational retailers and buyers now encourage developing countries to adopt full-package production, a subcontracting arrangement in which manufacturers receive detailed specifications from buyers, acquire all inputs, and coordinate most phases of production (Bair and Gereffi 2001; Scott 2002). In response, developing country officials and producers emphasize their national and regional capacity to carry out full-package production and promote industrial development based on clustering. This chapter traces the evolving global production context of the apparel supply chain to show how it has reshaped the repertoire of industrial development strategies for producers and officials in developing countries such as Morocco and Tunisia. The structure of global apparel manufacturing frames debates about industrial upgrading but does not determine the policies and strategic behavior of actors in developing countries. As chapters 5 and 6 show, producers and business associations in the two countries responded differently to these shared global constraints and opportunities.

DATA COLLECTION

The bulk of the data for this book was collected during 18 months of field research in Morocco and Tunisia conducted in Spring 1998 and 1999–2000. During these extended field visits, I carried out semistructured interviews based on a uniform set of questions in either French or Arabic with over 200 firm owners and managers, business association officials, government officials, labor union leaders and shopfloor representatives, technical support agency representatives, journalists, and academics. Content analysis of these interviews constituted a key source of data. Archival research on documentation from government agencies and ministries, local research centers and libraries, and the economic press in each country also provided crucial sources of information, supplementing and corroborating the data gathered through interviews.

SAMPLING OF INTERVIEWEES

The perceived sensitivity of my research questions at times posed obstacles to the research process and prevented random selection of interviewees. Informants were frequently suspicious of my intentions and unwilling to meet with me without a personal referral from a trusted associate. Access to industrialists was often regulated by governmental and quasi-governmental bodies or producer associations, which tend to direct researchers to more successful firms or relatively uncritical supporters of state policies. By necessity, establishing contacts with informants outside of these channels relied on personal contacts and “snowball sampling,” which led to biases in sampling procedures (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981). In some instances, technical factors, such as poor accounting records, also complicated data collection.

Formal independence from France brought the recognition that industrialization was a crucial factor for national development, and both the Tunisian and Moroccan industrial bourgeoisies trace their origins to the 1960s. But despite these and other commonalities, the Tunisian and Moroccan postindependence industrial classes developed in distinct ways. The varied historical development of business–government relations and class structure is critical to explaining divergent patterns of business mobilization in the two countries in the 1990s. These divergent trajectories can best be explained by two factors that shaped policies regarding business after independence: the distinct social bases of the Tunisian and Moroccan independence movements, later reflected in state economic policies, and the size of their domestic markets, which affected the perceived feasibility of adopting protectionist trade measures.

STATE-BUILDING AND ECONOMIC ELITES IN TUNISIA

The Tunisian industrial class, for the most part, emerged after independence in 1956. The transition from colony to independent state constituted a sharp demarcation in the history of Tunisian business. Following independence, a new economic elite emerged that was only minimally rooted in the previous era. This new class owed its good fortune, if not its very existence, to the state. These parameters shaped business interests as well as the means by which business expressed its demands.

From Colonial Administration to State-Building: The Rise of the Single-Party State

The French occupation of Tunisia was designed to facilitate economic domination.

Although by some accounts trade liberalization threatened to bankrupt one-third to one-half of all local industrial firms, Tunisian industrialists did not formulate coherent interests and mobilize politically to confront this threat; relations between industrialists and the state did not change noticeably with trade reform. The progressive institutionalization of a single-party, authoritarian state has undoubtedly enabled it to retain control over potential sources of disruption and challenges from social groups. But a purely state-centric explanation for the relative absence of business mobilization in Tunisia begs the question of how the state was able to control and manipulate the private sector and dominate economic policymaking so thoroughly. Literature on the Tunisian political economy tends to treat business and labor as undifferentiated wholes, yielding only partial accounts of how groups respond to economic change. By downplaying important variables such as the relatively fragmented structure of social groups and the nature of exchanges between the state and business, analysts give too much credit to state repression and, more broadly, regime type in explaining societal quiescence.

PREFERENCES AND LOBBYING: INTENTIONS VERSUS ACTION

The political behavior of Tunisian manufacturers revealed a disjuncture between their policy preferences, articulated in interviews, and their interests, defined as politically expressed goals. This section compares the preferences and actual behavior of Tunisian textile and apparel industrialists, demonstrating that manufacturers took little, if any, concrete action to pursue their declared policy preferences.