Vardi and Weitz bring together wide-ranging scholarship to help us understand the roots, effects, and implications of misbehavior in organizations. The book covers key topics that have emerged in scholarly literature in the past decade, such as insidious workplace behavior, bullying and harassment in the workplace, information hiding, cyberbullying, and organizational spirituality. A thorough and up-to-date resource on this crucial and evolving topic in organizational studies, this book provides insights on misbehavior at the individual, position, group, and organizational levels.

The political upheavals, the leadership crisis, and the ideological frustration which the Israeli Labour party went through in the first two decades of the 21st century led it to an unprecedented electoral decline. What happened to the formerly dominant party which established the state? What kind of intrinsic changes did it undergo in the late modernity and due to new sociological generations? What kind of new or old ideological discourses were formed within it? And how can we characterize its renewed ideological discourse? These questions stood at the background of this ethnographic study. The study focuses on young, idealistic activists who joined the Israeli Labour Party during 2006-2009 and asked to promote a social-democratic agenda. The book is based on multi-arena fieldwork and it enables a rare ethnographic reflection on the way macro level political changes take shape and are embodied in interpersonal interactions on the micro level.

The book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad in modern Jewish discourse through an in-depth analysis of the work of Sephardi intellectual network in the turn of the twentieth century Palestine/Land of Israel. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political and social events of that period, and processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions, the book explores the ways in which these Sephardi intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual ideologies and looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. By exploring these contested representations of Sephardi identity and culture the book re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which still accompany us to this day: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab culture and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The book aims to contribute to the growing interest in modern Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish history and to broaden the scope of “Jewish studies” beyond the European Jewish experience.

The book deals with challenges to the identity and stability of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The first part of the book deals with the challenges that arise from all cultural groups in Israeli society: Arabs, migrant workers, religious Zionists, ultra-Orthodox, traditionalists, Olim from the former Soviet Union, Jews of Ethiopian origin, secular Jews. The second section deals with the ideological challenges that arise from the radical left and the religious and secular nationalist right. The third section deals with the significant issues in which there is a conflict between the Jewish and democratic identity of the State of Israel: the minority status of Arab Israeli citizens; Israeli control of Judea and Samaria; religious and state relations in Israel and the possibility of presenting an outline to strengthen Israel's Jewish and democratic identity at the same time.

This book offers a new theoretical approach to the practice of organization consulting. Following Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, the new approach, "habitus-oriented organizational consulting", sees thinking and behavior a result of social dispositions (habitus) which develop in the interaction between practice and social structures such as culture, organizing metaphors, power relations and practical knowledge. The habitus-oriented organizational consulting incorporates the social with the individual through habitus .

The charm of Agnon’s work lies in an inebriating combination of the funny and the serious, in his famous irony that knocks down every unquestionable certainty and even its very self. Agnon’s humor eludes rhetoric borderlines, does not tolerate confines of a genre and disobeys simple interpretative solutions. In his new book, Roman Katsman suggests a new literary-anthropological method to break down Agnon’s complicated ‘laughter code’—a method based upon the cultural and semiotic interpretation of symbols. His reading of a wide selection of Agnon’s works, including his four major novels, reveals an entire world of his laughter symbols—a world of violence and sacredness, tragic bewilderment and eruption of new possibilities. In this world, arks fly, princes disappear, serpents eat their own tails, angels and demons dance, illusion turns into reality, and other foolish and cruel miracles occur. The research looks for a solution to the riddle: should Agnon's stories be considered serious or ironic, religious or secular, scornful or emphatic, archaic or modernist; or perhaps the reader is intended to swell with pathos or burst into laughter—and how come Agnon always has the last laugh?

The idea behind the book After the Bell: The World of Leisure for Children and Teenagers was born following a national case study, which was funded by the Chief Scientist of the Ministry of Education. Reviewing the literature for that study revealed a necessity for a comprehensive picture of children and adolescents' leisure world. This book was written to address this need. The uniqueness of the book lies in the fact that it combines theory, data and research findings from international and local settings related to children and adolescents. This book presents the essence of the literature regarding the nature of leisure, relevant theories, motives and factors that affect leisure choices, and perceptions of incentives and rewards obtained from participating in leisure activities. It concludes with a chapter on leisure education summarizing the knowledge on this topic as well as suggesting methods and means for effective leisure education. This book is intended for educational researchers, educators, student teachers, and school teachers. It is also suitable for decision-makers and educators in general as well as for anyone related to children and teenagers' well-being (e.g., educational counselors, social workers, psychologists, youth mentors, youth movement and community leaders).

Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This book examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. This book undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.

Baruch Kimmerling (1939-2007) was one of Israel's outstanding critical sociologists. In this volume, Israeli and Palestinian scholars of several disciplines and generations offer a series of studies on Israel and Palestine, past and present, in dialogue with the research agenda Kimmerling has advanced. Essays discuss Zionism and militarism, frontier and colonization, social protest and the limits of democracy, the sociology of fear and the politics of home -- and Kimmerling's own trajectory.

The self is one of the most important concepts in Western culture and in philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical literature. This title sheds light on the elusive nature of the concept, addressing it from an interdisciplinary perspective that examines the contribution of various social structures to the human self.

The ‘Jewish mother’ figure is a hallmark of Jewish culture, one which appears in the works of rabbis, artists, poets, and activists across time and place. While depictions of mothers and motherhood abound in Jewish writings, they vary significantly according to social context. These representations therefore offer important insights into the Jewish cultural imagination, and the ways in which writers resort to the figure of the Jewish mother to comprehend and construct their world. The contributors to this volume highlight the complex network of symbols and images associated with Jewish mothers and motherhood as well as the vast array of social, historical, and cultural patterns that characterizations of mothers reflect. Each essay treats the topic from a specific perspective, spanning from mother--daughter relationships in the Talmud to depictions of mothers in twentieth-century American Jewish children’s literature. Collectively, they present a provocative examination of the ways mothers shape and problematize Jewish identity. This volume seeks to give the figure of the mother a new and enhanced place at the heart of Judaism: not only as a central figure in family life, but also as a key agent in the transmission of Jewish religion and culture.