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The purpose of this paper is to focus on a current trend in kibbutz industries, and to examine the numerous changes at Millennium Industries.

A case study was carried out documenting the organizational biography of Millennium Industries. Ethnographic interviews were held with kibbutz members employed by the organization, former CEO’s and with other workers.

The research describes the life cycle of the plant from its beginnings, through its maturity, its growth until its decline. It also explains the organizational failure of the plant, in terms of its background and the difficulties of managing a kibbutz industry in an era of global economy. The causes of its decline stem mainly from a kibbutz-style management based on non-professional involvement of the community in business, and incompatible with the rough competition of capitalistic markets. The plant was finally sold to a private investor, thereby losing its identity as a kibbutz plant.

As a single case-study this research cannot pretend to statistical generalization of the findings but linked to the kibbutz and the organizational literature, findings seem to allow generalization of theoretical propositions concerning evolution of the kibbutz industry (an analytic generalization according to Yin, 2013).

While the kibbutz society and its industry are involved in deep changes for the two last decades, very little research was made on kibbutz industry. This paper should contribute to actualize the social knowledge about these specific and interesting phenomena.

This paper aims to develop a managerial style typology relevant to kibbutz industry analysis and applicable to all cooperative organizations.

This study applied qualitative methods to evaluate the organizational biographies of Factories five factories, using open interviews and document analysis.

The findings show that before privatization took place, these industries were managed according to socialistic democratic principles. Once they became global and capitalistic, some kibbutz industries adopted a business cooperative style that combines features of capitalism and socialism, while others underwent a crisis and opted for a stricter and more bureaucratic managerial style.

This research is based on five case studies; further research is recommended to establish the current typology.

This study shows very clearly that the cooperative business style can be offered for businesses previously operated according to socialistic principles.

This study augments current literature by elucidating the speed with which business activity is conducted according to cooperative principles. It presents a typology relevant to kibbutz industry and cooperative organizations alike, addressing the cooperative managerial, cooperative business and bureaucratic styles, enabling maintenance of normative management that adapts itself to global and capitalistic environments.

This study aims to examine the changes in cooperative community and kibbutz industry that did not undergo privatization.

This research was based on the case study method, combined with ethnographic interviews and document analysis.

The findings showed that the industry was highly successful economically, enabling the management to strengthen its authority without sharing information. The decision-making process, thus, became authoritarian, while the community's democratic mechanism was only nominal. This change was also accomplished by cultural transition from cooperative toward more capitalistic values. Management preferred to hire professional workers from the outside without any preference for kibbutz members, causing ethical dilemmas for certain elderly kibbutz members, who felt that the factory had abandoned socialistic ideas.

This research was conducted only on one kibbutz industry; further research is recommended.

Management at cooperative organizations needs to realize that in a capitalistic environment, adaptation can cause the organization to lose its cooperative features. To prevent a cultural shift toward capitalistic values, managers need to be socialized and workers persuaded of the importance of cooperative values.

The study is innovative for its focus on loss of cooperative community and managerial style that has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature. This research sheds light on organizational conditions that can cause cooperative communities to lose their democratic and socialistic attributes.

This article analyzes a kibbutz factory and seeks to understand its unique hybrid structure following privatization, comparing it with that of other kibbutz industries in Israeli society.

The research used qualitative investigation, including interviews and document analysis practice.

The study describes hybrid model that is based on conflicting logic, as the kibbutz industry contains both communal and familial principles and bureaucratic and business features. This case study succeeded in striking a balance between the two conflicting logics through sound managerial policy adapted for the sake of communal interests.

This typology can be applied to other business organizations that underwent organizational changes as well.

The authors developed an alternative hybrid organization typology capable of describing new trends in kibbutz industry.

The purpose of this paper is to study the loss of solidarity in three kibbutz factories as an outcome of the process of privatization in their kibbutz communities.

The research was a qualitative investigation, including interviews in three factories.

The research found high a sense of vertical and horizontal solidarity before the privatization. The solidarity stemmed from socialistic principles of the kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) and their factories functioned as an extension of the kibbutz clan: close inter-personal relationships, a devotion to collective needs and democratic decision making in the kibbutz general assembly directly influencing the factories. After the privatization, the organizational solidarity decreased because of formal and procedural issues: the factory became hierarchical, work conditions deteriorated and the familiar spirit of the clan vanished.

There are more than 130 kibbutz factories, most of them in privatized kibbutzim. This paper presents only three of those factories, so it can only represent preliminary and partial findings. It is important to extend this research to examine other kibbutz factories.

The research suggests how factories, in kibbutzim and throughout the world, could respond to weak organizational solidarity: to increase trust and cooperation between management, to create flexible working conditions and to achieve higher productivity.

This is the first study to focus on kibbutz enterprises through the sociological lens of the solidarity theory. Previously, most post-privatization research has focussed on economic questions of profitability.

An economic framework for understanding the incidence of less alienating job designs in varying industrial settings is developed. Both the supply and demand sides are discussed, and the approach is illustrated by consideration of the frequency of introduction of alienation‐reducing job designs in Swedish, Japanese, US and Israeli kibbutz industrial enterprises. The competitiveness of product and labour markets, and the set of available methods of attracting workers and eliciting real effort from them, are among the key explanatory factors found to operate in the cases examined.

Organizational research missed managerial ignorance concealment (MIC) and the low-moral careerism (L-MC) it served, leaving a lacuna in managerial stupidity research: MIC serving L-MC was not used to explain this stupidity. The purpose of this paper is to remedy this lacuna.

A semi-native longitudinal multi-site ethnography of automatic processing plants, their parent inter-kibbutz co-operatives (I-KC-Os) and their kibbutz field context enabled a Strathernian ethnography that contextualized the prevalence of MIC and L-MC.

I-KC-Os’ oligarchic context encouraged outsider executives’ MIC and L-MC that caused vicious distrust and ignorance cycles, stupidity and failures. A few high-moral knowledgeable mid-managers prevented total failures by vulnerable involvement that created virtuous trust and learning cycles. This, however, furthered dominance by ignorant ineffective L-MC executives and furthered use of MIC.

As managerial know-how portability is often illusory and causes negative dominance of ignorant outsider executives, new CEO succession norms and new yardsticks for assessing fitness of potential executives are required, proposed in the paper.

Oligarchic contexts encourage MIC and L-MC, hence democratization is called for to counter this negative impact and promote efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

Untangling and linking the neglected topics of MIC and L-MC explains, for the first time, the prevalence of these related phenomena and their unethical facets, particularly among outsider executives and managers, emphasizing the need for their phronetic ethnographying to further explain the resulting mismanagement.

Since 1975, the Kibbutz Industry Association (KIA) has been involved in the initiation of projects aiming to enhance the quality of working life (QWL) within kibbutz‐owned factories. The concept adopted was that of broad experimentation based upon socio‐technical intervention efforts. About 30 plants participated in various ways in this programme during the years 1975–77 (Phase I), and about 80 during the years 1978–84 (Phase II).

The Kibbutz in Israel is a collective settlement in which all means of production and consumption are communally owned. Nevertheless, it should be underscored that there remains much individuality both within the individual Kibbutz and between the settlements. In fact, each collective settlement tends to take on a particular character according to the nature of the members that make up that settlement. The life of the Kibbutz materialises from below (that is, arises from the membership) rather than by resolution or edict from above. In this respect, the Kibbutz is a socio‐economic experiment that takes place in life‐reality, or the everyday experience of living.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors influencing entrepreneurial intensity. More specifically the study addresses the following objectives: propose a way to measure entrepreneurial intensity within the community context in order to determine entrepreneurial activity over a period of ten years, detect the factors influencing the entrepreneurial intensity, and finally locate Kibbutz communities on the entrepreneurial grid.

Kibbutz communities are the level of analysis. Using a comprehensive questionnaire, a sample of 60 Kibbutzim – constituting 22 percent of the population of Kibbutz communities in Israel – was investigated over a period of ten years. The same questionnaire was administered to the same sample Kibbutzim (Kibbutzim is the plural of Kibbutz) in 1994, 1997 and 2004. Collected data include number and types of enterprises, economic strength, organizational size and age, and features of organizational structure and culture.

Quantitative data analysis revealed a significant increase of entrepreneurial activity of Kibbutz communities in terms of frequency, degree and intensity of entrepreneurship. Organizational size and age have an impact on entrepreneurial intensity as well as the existence of an “entrepreneurial vehicle.” On the entrepreneurial grid Kibbutzim are moving from the incremental/periodic cluster towards the dynamic cluster, but few meaningful breakthroughs can be observed.

More research is needed in order to understand the interrelationship between community environments and entrepreneurship. The major research limitation of this paper constitutes the fact that only Kibbutz communities were investigated.

The paper utilizes the concept of the entrepreneurial grid for an empirical analysis of community entrepreneurship.