FEATURED AUTHOR

Reuven Shapira

Dr.
Western Galilee Academic College

Dr. Shapira is a retired professor of anthropology and sociology. He has held various executive positions at his kibbutz, Gan Shmuel and its factory, received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University and has lectured at universities and colleges in Israel. His research included kibbutzim, kibbutz industry, inter-kibbutz organizations, trust, leadership, gender and social movements. He has wrote 4 books and numerous articles in Hebrew and English.

Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Business, Management and Accounting, History, Sociology & Social Policy, Work & Organizational Psychology

Biography

Biography
Dr. Shapira’s “Mismanagement, ‘Jumpers,’ and Morality” is his fourth book in which he once again challenges major social sciences conventions concerning the kibbutzim (pl. of kibbutz) and inter-kibbutz cooperatives. As a kibbutz-born and raised member, managerial education and experience led him to acquire a social sciences education and to achieve a breakthrough in management and leadership research, as he does in this book through a vivid close-up view of how the immoral practices employed by “jumpers” are so often a disaster.
Organizational anthropologists mostly lack managerial education and experience, while Dr. Shapira’s early socialization resembled that of the managers he studied. He knew some of them personally prior to his studies, and was familiar with their context, the kibbutz system in which he was active in various authoritative roles ever since completing his military service. He has held various executive positions at his kibbutz, Gan Shmuel, and in its food processing factory, while at the same time acquiring a social science education and earning a Ph.D. in anthropology from Tel Aviv University. Due to this unique background he was able to approach managers and executives as their peer and turn interviews into discussions of common managerial and leadership problems.
The sages of old warned: “Don’t judge others until you have stood in their shoes.” Nearly all organizational anthropologists were not able to “stand” in mangers’ and executives’ shoes and mostly failed to uncover their dark secrets, i.e., those whose very existence was secret. Dr. Shapira exposed these secrets by approaching managers as their peer, using unique semi-native longitudinal anthropology: A native anthropologist studies his/her own people but, being too close, to them may adopt their particularistic views, while outsider ethnographers often miss locals’ sincere views and other decisive insiders’ knowledge and wisdom. Dr. Shapira avoided both by virtue of being an insider-outsider, coming from the outside but knowing interviewees’ kibbutz culture as an insider. Combining this advantage with extensive interviewing of executives, their subordinates, and many ex-subordinates, as well as participant observations and studying organizational histories with free access to their documents, enabled him to stand in managers’ “shoes” and penetrate their dark secrets.
As a retired professor of anthropology and sociology at The Western Galilee Academic College in Acre, Israel, Dr. Shapira has also lectured at other colleges and universities as well as at local and international scientific conferences on kibbutzim, the kibbutz industry, inter-kibbutz organizations, Israeli society, gender, family and kinship, social movements and more. Beside his four books he also authored booklets for managers and numerous scholarly articles in Hebrew and English, both in edited collections and in journals such as Management Decision, Sociological Inquiry, Journal of Anthropological Research, Israel Affairs and others. He is currently engaged in writing additional articles on mismanagement and poor organizational leadership, as exposed in the recent business scandals.

Education

Management college; BA, MA, Ph.D Tel Aviv University, 1984

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Personal Interests

Beside my prime interest in my studies I am interested in Israeli politics, economy and archeology, I like touring Israel and abroad, I read history and biographical literature and I fond of my six grandchildren.

Books

Featured Title

Serendipity in Anthropological Research - 1st Edition book cover

Articles

“Prolonged Dysfunction of Ex-Trusting Transformational Leaders and Its Amoral Camouflage by Charismatic Postures.” Open Journal of Leadership, 7(3), 187-208.

Published: Jul 15, 2019 by Open Journal of Leadership, 7(3), 187-208.
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: History, Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology & Social Policy, Middle East Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Leadership is a delicate combination of elements often typified without alluding to changes over time. Students grasped as charismatic the two half-a-century leaders of the largest Israeli kibbutz movements, but research finds them initially trusting transformational; then their diminishing job-effectiveness curbed members’ trust, competing leaders threatened their power, and they defended it by adopting an extreme ideology, autocracy adopted a self-serving charismatic posture.

Ignorance-exposing Vulnerable Involvement, The Trust-creating Practice that....

Published: Apr 20, 2017 by Journal of Socialomics
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Work & Organizational Psychology

Ignorance-exposing vulnerable involvement in deliberations is required to gain employees’ trust, to learn through know-how and phronesis sharing, and to become job-competent, but this requires jeopardizing one’s authority. A multi-case study of five automatic processing plants by a management experienced semi-native anthropologist untangles that only few of their outsider executives, 4 of 27 studied, chose such involvement and became job-competent.

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

Published: Jun 15, 2016 by Open Journal of Social Sciences
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: History, Sociology & Social Policy, Middle East Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Kibbutz research illuminates the problem of dominant functionalist scientific coalition that was co-opted by privileged old guard leaders for dozens of years to the public detriment, concealing leaders’ violations of kibbutz radical principles by evading the study of interkibbutz organizations and creating a faked image of democracy and egalitarianism that enhanced academic success but helped concealing the pernicious conservative oligarchic hegemony of life-long oligarchic leaders.

Rethinking reverence for Stalinism in the kibbutz movement

Published: Jan 22, 2016 by Israel Affairs
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: History, Middle East Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci

The reverence of Stalinism by the main kibbutz movements, which helped perpetuate leaders who had reached the dysfunction phase, is explained by the suppression of critics by a co-opted functionalist scientifc coalition, by ethnographers missing the impact of inter-kibbutz organizations, and by the diﬀerentiation of disciplines. Multiple ethnographies of kibbutzim and inter-kibbutz organizations and integration of findings by a good theory exposed these failures.

Prevalent concealed ignorance of low-moral careerist managers

Published: Aug 20, 2015 by Management Decision
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, Business, Management and Accounting, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Organizational research missed managerial ignorance concealment (MIC) and the low-moral careerism (L-MC) it served; MIC was not used to explain managerial stupidity. A longitudinal multi-site ethnography of automatic processing plants enabled a Strathernian contextualization of prevalent MIC and L-MC: the oligarchic context encouraged outsider MIC and L-MC, causing stupidity and many failures; a few high-moral vulnerably involved knowledgeable mid-managers prevented total failures.

Dysfunctional Outsider Executives’ Rule, Terra Incognita of Concealed Ignorance

Published: Mar 17, 2015 by Open Journal of Leadership
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Business, Management and Accounting, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Concealed managerial ignorance is a dark secret that protects managerial authority, a terra incognita that evades customary research methods. A longitudinal semi-native ethnography of automatic processing plants and their parent inter-kibbutz cooperatives by a management-educated ex-manager untangled the dysfunctional rule of outsider executives who concealed their ignorance by detachment from knowledgeable employees or/and by seductive-coercive control.

Leaders’ vulnerable involvement: Essential for trust, learning & effectiveness

Published: Jun 03, 2013 by Journal of Co-operative Organization and Management
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, Business, Management and Accounting, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci

A semi-native anthropology of outsiders managed automatic plants and parent inter-kibbutz co-operatives suggests that leaders’ vulnerable involvement in employees’ deliberations is essential for effective leadership. Such involvement creates virtuous trust and learning cycles, for effectiveness and innovation. Outsider executives of inter-kibbutz co-operatives with minimal pertinent expertises mostly avoided it, engendering vicious distrust and ignorance cycles, mistakes and failures.

High-trust culture, decisive & elusive context of shared cooperative leadership

Published: Nov 20, 2012 by New Opportunities For Co-Operatives: New Opportunities For People, Helsinki, 2012
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Business, Management and Accounting, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Expert employees seek fair opportunities to contribute their faculties to problem-solving, but if employee contributions to problem-solving surpass managers’ this may undermine managers’ authority. High-trust cultures mitigate this problem but they are elusive, often transient and under-studied, depend on managers’ servant transformational leadership. This dependency was found by a managerially educated ethnographer in outsider-managed, mostly low-trust factories.

Becoming a Triple Stranger: Autoethnography of Journey to Discover Others' Fault

Published: Apr 30, 2012 by Serendipity in Anthropological Research: The Nomadic Turn. Farnham (UK): Ashgate Press
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Sociology & Social Policy, Middle East Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci

My desire to solve the basic problems of my own society, kibbutz, led me to engage in a ‘long effort applied to oneself which [has converted] …one’s whole view of … the social world’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 16), and this has exposed the extent of kibbutz stratification and how this stratification was missed by all previous students (Shapira, 2005, 2008). This desire retained its primacy for long despite kibbutz social realities frustrating it repeatedly.

Institutional Combination for Co-operative Development: Trustful Cultures and..

Published: Sep 20, 2011 by J. Blanc and D. Colongo (Eds.), Co-operatives Contributuions to a Plural Economy, 2011.
Authors: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: History, Sociology & Social Policy, Middle East Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Financing is often critical for co-operative development, but banks usually avoid financing co-operatives. Israeli kibbutzim (pl. of kibbutz) faced this problem in the late 1950s when economic restructuring was needed. Dysfunctional old-guard leaders did not solve the problem, hence mid-level officials of inter-kibbutz organizations, the government and banks created schemes that solved the problem without compromising co-operative principles.

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Photos

News

17th International Studying Leadership Conference ‘The Power of Leadership?'

By: Reuven Shapira
Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Communication Studies, Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, Environment and Sustainability, Political Science, Politics & International Relations

Last December I have participated in the International Leadership Studies Conference at Lancaster University, UK. In the picture, I present my conclusions concerning high morality and trusting of followers by transformational leaders which lead to organizational transformations.