Tamar Rapoport

The Organizational Context of Individual Efficacy

Efficacy—the individual’s perceived expectancy of obtaining valued outcomes through personal effort—appears to yield a variety of important effects in school organizations. Efficacy has been identified as a social psychological antecedent to many individual-level outcomes, such as student performance and teacher effectiveness. Program implementation and evaluation studies also increasingly point to efficacy as a significant determinant of resistance to, or persistence of, organizational interventions. This paper moves from looking at research on individual efficacy as the antecedent to various school outcomes, to the dependent variable linked to characteristics of organizational structure. First, alternative views of the efficacy construct are reviewed, pertinent to varying interpretations of how the same structural feature may differentially influence alternative forms of efficacy. Second, a distinction is made between organizational and performance efficacy. Then, general images of structural determinants of individual efficacy are outlined from existing organizational theory. The paper concludes with specific propositions related to the pattern of interaction between contiguous structural levels which might guide future research and practice on efficacy in school organizations.

Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case

The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement (Women in Black) and a mixed-gender one (The 21st Year), which protested against the Israeli Occupation in the early 1990s. The comparison reveals reversed patterns of body/knowledge relations, each connoting a different meaning and outcome of the social protest. In the mixed movement, the body served as an instrument in carrying out the political knowledge and thus was left unmarked. In Women in Black, on the other hand, the body was the message, as it produced and articulated political ideology, simultaneously challenging the national security legacy and the gender order in Israel.

Juggling Models of Masculinity: Russian‐Jewish Immigrants in the Israeli Army

The present study addresses the question “What is masculinity?” by exploring how male immigrants interpret local masculinity and the models of masculinity they portray while situating themselves in the male hierarchy of the new society. The study is based on “immigration stories” elicited by in-depth interviews conducted with 43 university students who immigrated to Israel at the beginning of the 1990s from the former Soviet Union. The analysis of the stories reveals that the immigrants employ four major practices (avoidance, mockery, maneuvering, and provocation) that unfasten the takenfor-granted link between masculinity and army service in the Israeli society, thereby resisting the hegemonic, military model of masculinity in Israel. The immigrants render meaning to their resistance of the indigenous model (“The Warrior”) via the harnessing of cultural models that they carry with them from their native home—“The Russian Soldier” and “The Jewish Man”—without seeking to alter gender power relations as such. They discursively juggle between the three contesting and competing models of masculinity that together constitute a fluid and elusive “interpretative field” of masculinity. Via their interpretative work, the Russian male immigrants reconstitute their masculine identity, seeking to assert their distinctiveness and to receive social legitimation for their different conception of masculinity.

REPRODUCING NATION, REDESIGNING POSITIONING: RUSSIAN AND pALESTINIAN STUDENTS INTERPRET UNIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE

This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university—Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women—who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors’ interpretations of knowledge simultaneously are guided by students’ positioning vis-à-vis the dominant collective and also articulate and redesign positioning. The two groups redesign their marginalities vis-à-vis the Israeli-Jewish collective by transforming knowledge to identity. In so doing, these groups reproduce national borders of Israeli social hierarchy, while working to change the meaning of these borders for their groups positioning.

Female subordination in the Arab-Israeli community: the adolescent perspective of social veil

Our research studied the gender-specific perceptions of Arab-Israeli adolescents regarding issues that determine female subordination (e.g., inheritance rights, freedom of movement, and female chastity). The main finding shows that young females oppose the imposition of social constraints upon women significantly more than their male counterparts, while both sexes are in agreement regarding the issues they conceive more or less traditionally; both express the strong conservative attitudes regarding the Islamic code of protecting female honor and chastity. The findings imply that, while females do not oppose the preservation of the cultural code that underlies their subordinate position, they ascribe to it more lenient normative implications.

Ritual impurity and religious discourse on women and nationality

Abstract In Judaism, the ancient laws of impurity in regard to menstruation are known as the laws of niddah , and their realized form as the ritual of impurity, niddah . These laws continue to retain their symbolic power, with a shift in meaning from a state of impurity related to sacrificial rites to a state of impurity related to sexual prohibitions in the private family sphere. This means that, during a period of 14 days, the Jewish woman must avoid any sexual contact with her husband. Based on textual and contextual analysis of manuals which teach and explain to women the practice of niddah , we claim that, with the establishment of the modern state of Israel the meaning of niddah has been expanded to the public national domain. Religious Zionism in Israel has enlisted the experiences of menstrual defilement and purification to the Jewish struggle over national boundaries and collective identity. Women are told that by practicing niddah , they take on responsibility not only for purity of the family, but also for the people of Israel, the Land of Israel, and the preservation of the holy scriptures, the Torah. This rhetorical linkage politicizes both the body of women and the practice of niddah . In fact, the practice has become a discourse of national revival.

Contribution to the Collective by Religious‐Zionist Adolescent Girls

Abstract The act of contribution to the collective raises a major dilemma in contemporary religious Zionism in regard to girls and women: how to maintain their traditional restriction to the domestic sphere while allowing participation in national tasks that demand their presence in the male‐dominated public sphere. From in‐depth interviews conducted with 37 seventeen‐year‐old religious girls studying in a unisex residential boarding high school, we uncover the manner in which these girls, as they proceed to young adulthood, experience the act of contribution in three social arenas: the Bnei Akiva youth movement, national service and the domestic sphere. Our analysis reveals a gradual recruitment to contribution during the passage from girlhood to womanhood, paralleled by the gradual intensification of feminine’ qualities. This process facilitates the girls’ participation in the public sphere without challenging the traditional gender dichotomy. It also constitutes a central practice by means of which rel...

Cultures of womanhood in Israel: Social agencies and gender production

Abstract Feminist academic research in Israel has followed the footsteps of nonfeminist Israeli social research. Both are preoccupied with questions of identity of this new society and its subjects. Yet, as we wish to show, the authors of this issue choose to do so in alternative manners. Their thematic and methodological choices reveal the neglected challenges taken for granted and mark the power and limitations of current feminist research in Israel.

Converting to belong: immigration, education and nationalisation among young ‘Russian’ immigrant women

The paper examines religious conversion to Judaism among young ‘Russian’ immigrant girls in Israel. Looking into the process of conversion in religious boarding schools for girls only (Ulpana) and in the broader context of the Israeli nation‐state, we examine the strategies the educators contrive in inculcating religiosity among the girls, how they legitimise and facilitate their self‐transformation, and mobilise them to desire a religious subjectivity. At the same time, we study the experiences of the Russian girls in the Ulpana, and the meanings they assign to their conversion as depicted in the personal stories they narrated to us. The paper reveals how the Ulpana operates as a major nationalisation agent that cultivates a path for the girls to belong to the national religious camp, thus assuring their affiliation to Israeli‐Jewish society at large.

TWO PATTERNS OF GIRLHOOD: INCONSISTENT SEXUALITY-LADEN EXPERIENCES ACROSS INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIALISATION AND SOCIO-CULTURAL MILIEUX

The home, school and peer setting play a crucial role in processing socio-cultural conceptions of female sexuality (the social meanings attributed to the girls sexual and reproductive capacity). This process is not necessarily consistent across institutions of socialisation; yet, notwithstanding growing scholarly interest in girlhood, little is known about institutional variations in sexuality-laden socialisation practices and experiences. The present research simultaneously examines the home, school and peer group experiences of girls from two different milieux, focussing on convergence or divergence between institutions, within and across groups. First-hand accounts of daily experiences, elicited through interviews of 50 teenage girls (advantaged and disadvantaged) studying in two innovative residential settings, suggest that the three institutions of socialisation generate divergent sexuality-laden practices and experiences, and thus that the profile of socialisation differs for each group of girls. The conservative understandings of sexuality generated by practices in the home and the female peer-group of disadvantaged girls were paralleled by progressive understandings in the innovative school. Conversely, it was the school which perpetuated conservative conceptions among advantaged girls, while their homes and female peers instilled progressive ones. An examination of such inconsistencies in gender socialisation can be expected to enhance the understanding of gender identity formation in adolescence. The revealed divergence between institutions within and across groups points to the limits of theories of social reproduction in explaining socialisation practices and experiences, particularly those related to gender socialisation.