ABSTRACT
First, the author summarises the thesis of the post-industrial (PI) society and refers to some of the evidence. Second, the author shows that although modern Western societies are indeed changing in quite spectacular ways, the specific PI society is insufficiently precise and glosses over some exceptionally important aspects of recent change. Finally, the author returns to the future, so to speak, and consider whether there may be developing some current changes of time and space which are setting the ground for supposedly postmodern experiences. There is moreover plenty of empirical evidence to support elements of this thesis in modern Britain. Government policy is not the end of the matter though. One undoubted difficulty in the PI thesis is that there is considerable ambiguity in the very idea of a service itself. Culturally we live in a society where nostalgia, the vernacular and tradition mingle in a kind of pastiche with play, spectacle and transgression.
