Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
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cognate forms of display and persuasion. In the United Kingdom, lagging some
way behind the United States, ordinary people gained access to hitherto scarce
and even unimagined consumer goods – from toiletries and personal hygiene
products, stylish and fashionable clothing, vacuum cleaners, fitted carpets, refrigerators,
radios and televisions, to motor cars – in the years following on from
1945. Thus by 1970 nine out of ten homes had a television, seven out of ten a
fridge, and over six out of ten a washing machine, while car ownership rose from
2.3 million in 1950 to 11.8 million in 1970, with over half the nation’s households
in possession of a car (Central Statistical Office, 1983, Table 15.4).
Most important, mass consumption relied on working-class people gaining
access to what was offered since it was they, being the overwhelming majority,
who constituted the biggest market for goods. As they achieved entry, so did they
verify the slogan of the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that people ‘had
never had it so good’. Indeed they had not since consumer goods had simply
been unavailable at affordable prices for the mass of the population (major exceptions
of course were ‘beer and baccy’).
More than this, however, mass consumption became an axis of continuous and
stable mass production. That is, during this epoch it became clear that steady and
sustained mass consumption of goods was a requisite of an expanding production
base which in turn ensured full employment. During the Fordist era the
health of the economy was increasingly determined by the strength of consumer
purchases (and by extension borrowing and credit terms), notably in automobiles
and white goods, but extending much further into other less prominent areas. It
became, bluntly, a virtue to consume.
The crucial point is that there was achieved some calibration, some mutual
balance, between mass consumption and mass production. This supplied what
one might think of as a virtuous circuit by which continued growth of consumption
supported full employment and jobs for all boosted consumer expansion.
To ensure that this continued, a whole edifice of marketing and design techniques
was developed – annual model changes in cars, a burgeoning advertising
industry, new layouts of shops, trade-in deals, easy terms for purchase – but most
important was the assurance of full employment and continuous real increases
in income. So long as consumer demand was strong (and the state intervened
frequently to ensure that it was), then could the economy remain vibrant.
Nation state and national oligopolies
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Throughout this period the nation state was the locus of economic activity, and
within this territory sectors were typically dominated by a cluster of national
oligopolies. That is, surveying the industrial scene, one would characteristically
identify three or four dominant companies in any one area, be it electronics,
clothing, retailing or engineering. In line with this, in 1963 the leading five
businesses in British manufacture accounted for almost 60 per cent of all sales
in any trade area (Westergaard and Resler, 1975, p. 152). More generally, the top
one hundred companies achieved one-third of all Britain’s manufacturing output
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