Organization and Ideology: Kibbutzim and Hired Labor, 1951-1965

Abstract

The authors' contributions were equal, and their names are listed in random order. Haim Barkai helped us obtain and understand the data file used here. We are grateful to David DeVries, Yitchak Haberfeld, Ron Ophir, Keith Poole, Anat Rafaeli, Raymond Russell, Mark Mizruchi, and three anonymous ASQ reviewers, as well as seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon University and the Australian Graduate School of Management for helpful comments on earlier drafts. In this paper, we examine how conflicting ideologies affect organizational practice. We theorize that the basic relationship between ideology and organization is moderated by social pressures and economic incentives that result from differences between the organization and its environment on issues of ideology. Using data from Israeli kibbutzim for 1951-1965, we examine how the ideology of a set of socialist organizations affects the practices they employ and how the influence of socialist ideology is moderated by an environment that is governed by capitalism. We assess the change in the extent to which kibbutzim employed hired labor, a practice that is incompatible with kibbutzim socialist-Zionist ideology. We find that ideological organizing principles are affected by resource dependence pressures, particularly from banks, and economic incentives for organizations to change their form. These external influences combined with internal influences, such as kibbutz size, age, and industrialization, to account for kibbutzim's transition to hired labor. The results indicate how interaction with the environment can lead to the forfeiture of ideological organizing principles.'