The Renewal of the Kibbutz: From Reform to Transformation - Softcover

Russell, Raymond; Hanneman, Robert; Getz, Shlomo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813565537 ISBN 13: 9780813565538

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2015

Synopsis

We think of the kibbutz as a place for communal living and working. Members work, reside, and eat together, and share income “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” But in the late 1980s the kibbutzim decided that they needed to change. Reforms—moderate at first—were put in place. Members could work outside of the organization, but wages went to the collective. Apartments could be expanded, but housing remained kibbutz-owned. In 1995, change accelerated. Kibbutzim began to pay salaries based on the market value of a member’s work. As a result of such changes, the “renewed” kibbutz emerged. By 2010, 75 percent of Israel’s 248 nonreligious kibbutzim fit into this new category.

The Renewal of the Kibbutz explores the waves of reforms since 1990. Looking through the lens of organizational theories that predict how open or closed a group will be to change, the authors find that less successful kibbutzim were most receptive to reform, and reforms then spread through imitation from the economically weaker kibbutzim to the strong.

About this title

About the Author

RAYMOND RUSSELL is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Sharing Ownership in the Workplace and Utopia in Zion: The Israeli Experience with Worker Cooperatives.

ROBERT HANNEMAN is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He has authored four books, including State Intervention in Medical Care: Consequences for Britain, France, Sweden, and the United States.

SHLOMO GETZ is a research associate at the Institute for Kibbutz Research at the University of Haifa and a senior lecturer at Emek Yezreel College in Israel. He has authored or coauthored numerous publications, including The Kibbutz in an Era of Changes and The Kibbutz: The Risk of Enduring (both written in Hebrew).

Review

"Providing an environment where early Zionists could live and work in a democratic and collective manner, the kibbutz is fundamental to Israeli society. This carefully researched and informative book will appeal to readers interested in democratic collectivism and Israeli society. Highly recommended."
(Choice)

"Russell, Hanneman, and Getz have written the first evidence-based overview of changes that kibbutzim have gone through in the last thirty years. This will be the book on the kibbutz that gets to the heart of what the kibbutz experiment meant." (Joseph R. Blasi J. Robert Beyster Professor, Rutgers University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0813565537
• ISBN 13: 9780813565538
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 196