Individual vs Collective Forms of Sharing Ownership in Israel

This paper compares the development within Israel of four forms of ownership: the rural commune, or "kibbutz;" the more individualistic rural cooperative, the "moshav;" the worker cooperatives of Israel's cities; and enterprises owned collectively by the trade union federation. These forms of ownership are compared by three criteria: 1) their ability to attract and retain founders, sponsors, and members; 2) how long they survive; and 3) whether organizations that do survive lose their cooperative character as they age. By these criteria, the record of the kibbutzim is generally best, while that of the worker cooperatives is generally viewed as being the worst. These results are largely attributable to the concrete institutional environment in which these organizations were being created. For both ideological and practical reasons, the makers of Israel's labor economy always favored rural cooperatives over urban ones, and preferred more centralized and collective forms of cooperative ownership to more individualistic ones.