Leadership in Migration Systems: The Case of Israel

The goal of this study is to depict the control processes in migration systems. In this article, a territorial migration system is understood to be a complex of migration streams related to a specific geographic region, embedded into a wider socio-economic system in its natural environment, and densely interacting with flows of information and matter passing through the area. The research has been done by using qualitative methods for examining relevant information from special and fiction literature, mass media, and Internet sources. The theoretical framework of this article is based on a systemic approach to analyze social phenomena. The analysis shows that a self-organized leadership system is responsible for running a large part of the control processes in a migration system. The leadership system in a migration system is a bricolage of diverse social apparatuses that perforce cooperate in the directing of the migrants’ activities. The bricolage form of leadership of a migration system is not the only possibility, but it is well suited to the unstable nature of migration systems, and therefore seemingly is the most plausible one. Leadership is the strongest shaping constituent in the Israeli migration system because it controls migration streams and ethnic and economic structures of the country, and so it must be extensively researched. The theoretical novelty of this study is in delineating of role and structure of the leadership system in the territorial migration system and of its impact on the wider social system