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During the 1980s, the Israeli economy suffered near financial collapse and the kibbutz movement and its industry became heavily debt bound. As a result, significant changes in the social and economic organization of the kibbutz were implemented. It is argued here that the changes in economic organization are the more significant. Industry is the critical point of articulation between the kibbutz and the market economy. Ensuring commensurability between market exigencies and the organization and control of the kibbutz labour process is an imperative and yet few substantive data have emerged examining the transformation of the kibbutz labour process. Drawing upon data from a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of a case study kibbutz plant, as well as other secondary material, this paper examines the changes in the management of production, suggesting a formal managerial appropriation of a previously socialized kibbutz labour process with a complementary (quasi-) commodification of labour. Such changes facilitate greater market commensurability but also, importantly, have serious consequences for the reproduction of the kibbutz as a mode of production.

The recent attention paid to corporate culture by managerial gurus has revived interest in the relationship between occupation and community, particularly the influence of social organisation upon work experience. Examination of kibbutz industry supplements these contemporary debates by extending the analysis into a form of work organisation formally devoid of managerial control, instead determined by those informal social relations identified by writers critical of corporate culture. Indeed, kibbutz industrial workers find relative compensations to unpleasant, tedious and demanding work through intense social interaction. Tightly cohesive work groups provide both a defence mechanism against the brutality of the work and, through the creation of group work norms, act as a spur to ensure productivity. Awareness of this dialectical relationship between occupation and community is not new. However, the qualitative analysis presented of the communal socialism of the kibbutz does provide a unique insight into the function of social relationships within the organisation of industrial work beyond that usually examined in either capitalist or state socialist economies.

The articulation of work and life, cast as work-life balance, has become a key feature of much current government, practitioner and academic debate. The main message of this debate is the need for "good work-life balance". However, the debate and subsequent policy are too often based on assumptions about work and life derived from blunt readings of empirical data or misconceptions about employee attitudes to work and life. What is required therefore is analysis that explores the back-story to work-life balance debate as well as the operation of work-life balance policies. Compiling critical re

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