Co-Opted Biased Social Science: 64 Years of Telling Half Truths about the Kibbutz

Abstract

Critics find that social sciences tend to comply with social domination by power elites, which is often low-moral, but the debate on public expectations of social scientists often misses this. The failed kibbutz research illuminates this problem: while supposedly abiding by such expectations, a dominant functionalist scientific coalition was co-opted by privileged old guard leaders and power elites for dozens of years to the public detriment. This coalition concealed leaders' and power elites' violations of kibbutz radical principles in inter-kibbutz organizations (hereafter I-KOs) by evading their study, and created a faked image of democracy and egalitarianism that enhanced academic success but helped conceal the pernicious conservative oligarchic hegemony of life-long I-KO leaders, harming efforts to overcome it. This eventually led to the demise of the kibbutz radical system, a failure that functionalists have failed to explain. The findings support critics of conformist social sciences while pointing to their Achilles heel, i.e., fallible survey research methods that call for new measures that minimize fallibility and the likelihood of co-opting social scientists by power elites, as well as measures that will maximize chances of exposing such scientific failures.

Prolonged Dysfunction of Ex-Trusting Transformational Leaders and Its Amoral Camouflage by Charismatic Postures

“…Gini's (1997) warning about the delicate nature of leadership combinations is justified as is Mohr's (2013) warning against leaders' deluding facades; researchers' co-optation by the leaders caused evasion of Lewin's (1951) field theory and of I-KOs that served leaders' concealment of empowering I-KO conformist cultures, which helped typify the leaders as charismatic, ignoring their abandoning trusting transformational leaderships quite early, becoming dysfunctional conservatives. With no cultural analysis of the kibbutz field's two contrary hemispheres, kibbutzim and I-KOs, researchers missed leaders' amoral self-perpetuation by conformist autocratic oligarchic I-KO cultures, and how privileged leaders' loyalist conservative pe'ilim became dominant in their kibbutzim, causing degeneration of high-trust innovation-prone kibbutz cultures (Shapira, 2005(Shapira, , 2008(Shapira, , 2016b.…”

“…But with the field's growth and ramification economic I-KOs' CEOs became powerful; their I-KOs' autocratic capitalist-like cultures accorded Movements' conservatism, and their loyalty to the leaders helped their prolonged tenures. "There is nothing more practical in science than a good theory" said Kurt Lewin (1951); without Lewin's field theory and I-KOs' study, researchers missed the impact of the capitalist context on the kibbutz field leaderships (Shapira, 2001(Shapira, , 2015(Shapira, , 2016b. Researchers also lacked clear leadership concepts; without the addition of "trusting" to "transformational leadership" its high morality was not clearly discerned from moral neutrality of charismatic leadership, missing that trusting leaders achieved exceptional successes by empowering followers, and that leaders' later decades were R. Shapira low-moral conservative non-charismatic.…”

“…Prime leaders headed the three Movements which were the largest I-KOs with some 2400 pe'ilim (Near, 1997;Niv & Bar-On, 1992;Shapira, 2005). Hundreds of scholars studied kibbutzim for eight decades but almost all of their 6000 -7000 publications have missed kibbutz uniqueness: Contrary to other successful communal societies, which insulated themselves from society (e.g., Pitzer, 1997), the kibbutzim were highly involved in their surroundings through I-KOs (Near, 1992(Near, , 1997, but I-KOs were conformist autocratic stratified bureaucracies; exposing this could have spoiled the R. Shapira kibbutz image of a progressive egalitarian and democratic society, hence kibbutz leaders co-opted researchers who then avoided the study of I-KOs, ignoring Lewin's (1951) field theory, I-KOs' integrality to kibbutz society, and their cultures negating democratic egalitarianism of kibbutzim (Shapira, 2001(Shapira, , 2005(Shapira, , 2008(Shapira, , 2016b.…”

“…Kibbutz research missed/misunderstood this turnaround, not having studied I-KOs' autocratic hierarchic cultures (Shapira, 2016b). Curbing Movements' democracy in 1933-35 gained them more control of decision-making but contradicted their democracy preaching; it caused distrust and their positions were soon threatened: Tabenkin was threatened from 1935 by Mapai leaders, Ben-Gurion and Katzenelson, who tried to demote him by uniting KM with the Mapai-leaning smaller Movement Hever Hakvutzot, which would have turned Tabenkin's supporters majority of some 60% in the KM into a minority within the united Movement (Kanari, 2003: Ch.…”

“…Analysis of the changing leadership practices of the two leaders of the largest Israeli kibbutz federations called "The Movements," each with more than 80,000 members and supporters at their peak could provide the answers to these questions. I studied them as an inside-outsider (Gioia et al, 2013: p. 19), a kibbutz member ethnographer, after studying other I-KOs (inter-kibbutz organizations), kibbutz factories for the Kibbutz Research Institute, and kibbutzim independently (Shapira, 2008(Shapira, , 2016b.…”