The Kibbutz Industry: Cultural, Structural and Business Strategy Design

This book examines the changes in many kibbutz factories which have recently transformed from socialist entities, with egalitarian and cooperative relationships, to hierarchical and market-driven structures.

Focusing on five case studies from an ethnographic perspective, the book explores the reasons for this organizational change and examines its ideological, social, and economic causes. Ranging from organizational culture as a tool for economic success to the cooperative clan lifestyle and its organizational experience for improving human life and economic production, the author uncovers and investigates various hidden layers of the organizational culture in the kibbutz, revealing that cultural change in the factories was intended as a way of coping with a changing competitive environment. Adding new typologies for familial business types, demonstrating how hybrid organizational structures have promoted economic success, and examining the lesser-studied communal perspective, it shows how social development can be used to provide a deeper analysis of the kibbutz industry as a microcosm of the changes in communal lifestyle that have recently shifted toward materialism and capitalism. As such, The Kibbutz Industry will appeal to scholars and students with interests in the sociology of organization, business studies, human resource management, and organizational behavior.

Yaffa Moskovich is Professor in the School of Management and Behavioral Science at Zefat Academic College, Israel, where she was also heads the Department of Behavioral Sciences. She is also a member of the Institute for Kibbutz Research and the Cooperative Idea at Haifa University. Her expertise is in the field of organizational sociology and her research interests cover organizational change, the kibbutz industry, business strategy, leadership in political parties, unions, NGOs, and multi-cultural group relationships. She is the author of Disunity in Unity: Power Struggle in the Likud Party.