TITLE:
Co-Opted Biased Social Science: 64 Years of Telling Half Truths about the Kibbutz
AUTHORS:
Reuven Shapira
KEYWORDS:
Biased Social Research, Functionalist Research, Academic Freedom, Co-Opted Scientists, Inter-Kibbutz Organizations
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.4 No.6,
June
3,
2016
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.