Conflict-situated cooperation: how Israeli and Palestinian IT professionals give meaning to cooperating under ethnonational conflict

Despite persisting ethnonational conflict in Israel and Palestine, professionals in the information technology (IT) sector keep working together. They engage in professional cooperation by jointly developing software while embedded in societal narratives that cast the other as the enemy. We ask how individuals give meaning to their work when cooperating with their societal adversaries in such a context. Drawing on a qualitative case study that combines interviews, observations, and documents, we find that individuals use two main tactics to cope with the conflict context: depoliticizing and politicizing cooperation. We specify these individual-level tactics and show when they are used: depoliticizing in situations “at work” and politicizing in situations “about work.” We also show that these tactics are at times misplaced and hinder cooperation. Additionally, we find that physical and social interference can disrupt cooperation and thus set guardrails for it. Abstracting from our findings, we theorize a model that explains how individuals engage in what we term conflict-situated cooperation. We offer two main contributions to management research: We introduce the concept of conflict-situated cooperation to capture the distinct nature of professional cooperation in the context of ethnonational conflict, and we explain how individuals use and situate (de)politicizing coping tactics to give meaning to their professional cooperation.