Utopia in Zion: The Israeli Experience with Worker Cooperatives

Raymond Russell

feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

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Although less famous than Israel's cooperative agricultural settlements, the kibbutzim and moshavim, Israeli urban worker cooperatives have an equally long and rich history. Well over a thousand such organizations have been established in what is now Israel since early in this century. This book provides a historical, social, and economic analysis of contemporary urban worker cooperatives, focusing on processes affecting their formation and dissolution, their use of nonmember labor, and the evolution of their democratic decision-making practices over time.

Raymond Russell examines these cooperatives for the light they can shed on worker ownerships and worker cooperatives in general, and on Israeli society in particular. Applying a range of sociological and economic theories to examine the dynamics of these organizations over time, he finds that both their formation and their later development have been strongly influenced by the uniquely utopian social and economic conditions that prevailed in Jewish Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Raymond Russell is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Sharing Ownership in the Workplace, also published by SUNY Press.