Asa Maron is a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Haifa. Previously he held postdoctoral positions at Stanford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a political sociologist specializing in the sociology of the welfare state and neoliberalism, with an emphasis on the transformation of the state, its politics, institutional dynamics, and consequences for statesociety relations. He has published in Law & Society Review, Administration & Society, Social Policy & Administration, and Mediterranean Politics.
Michael Shalev is a political sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting at the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests are in the political economy of Israel and rich democracies generally, focusing on the politics of social and economic policy, social stratification, and the socio-economic underpinnings of political action. He is the author of Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (1992) and editor of The Privatization of Social Policy? (1996). He has published in World Politics, Socio-Economic Review, Social Forces and other journals. His recent research is on the mass protests of 2011 in Israel and Southern Europe.