State Formation, Ideological Competition, and the Ecology of Israeli Workers' Cooperatives, 1920-1992 - Statistical Data Included

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 2000  by Paul Ingram,  Tal Simons

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Attention to the role of the state in providing exchange-regulating institutions also facilitates the recognition that non-state federations, like the Histadrut, can fill this role. A theory of institutional constraint of organizations can encompass both the state and federations as providers of institutions. For organizational theorists, this may provide a new lens for interpreting the increasingly common observation that organizations form groups and that these groups affect the performance of their members. Thus, we foresee a theoretical apparatus that could account for the benefits of federations as diverse as Japanese trade associations (Schaede, 1998) and coalitions of traders in the eleventh-century Mediterranean (Greif, 1994). Efforts to explain the contribution of federations to political order would be welcomed by neocorporatists such as Streeck and Schmitter (1985: 3), who attributed the late recognition of the role of organizations in the provision of order to a failure of organizational theory.

The moderating effect of the establishment of the state on the advantage of Histadrut membership suggests something previously unrecognized about the relationship between organizations and the state. While organizations, and federations of organizations, may serve the state by providing order, there is a limit to this role. At some point, order-providing organizations move from the role of agents to that of rivals. Realizing this is important for two reasons. First, conflict between the state and organizations over the provision of order has occurred in other times and places, for example, the Catholic church in Europe before the reformation, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the British East India Company. Current instances of organizations that appear to rival their states are Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and perhaps even the mafia in Russia. In the future, multinational corporations may threaten the autonomy of the states that host them, and probably do so already. Our argumen ts and evidence suggest that these eclectic examples may be understood as instances of a type of organizational competition for political power, which is amenable to theory and systematic analysis of its antecedents and outcomes.

The rivalry between the state and the Histadrut is also valuable because it contributes to a theory of the state. The response of the Israeli state to the Histadrut supports our conceptualization of the state as a set of organizations that pursues power and autonomy to govern--simultaneously serving as an actor and an institutional system. The view of the state as a particular organizational actor, with interests and capabilities, facilitates its inclusion in a theoretical system and makes it possible to consider why and when the state will act to affect organizations. We have shown the state competing to maintain power and autonomy. Others emphasize the state as an intermediary between competing populations that struggle to capture its coercive capacity for their own economic and ideological purposes (Haveman and Rao, 1997; Wade, Swaminathan, and Saxon, 1998). These positions and others are compatible, but they all require a concept of what the state is and why it does what it does. Such a concept is missing from current organizational theory, in which the common practice is to recognize that prohibitions and endorsements of the state affect organizations, without considering the causes and timing of those acts (Carroll and Teo, 1998).