ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that “restructuring” has become one of the commonest and most overused terms in social science. It has been widely employed to signal a distinctive break in the progress of many capitalist economies in the 1970s and 1980s, and the ensuing social and political consequences. At the global level, these changes are usually associated with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1978, and the demise of US economic hegemony, which is associated with the inability of the dollar to sustain fixed exchange rates as agreed at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The postwar boom was palpably over: many national economies were beset by high inflation and unemployment rates not seen since the 1930s. The overall rate of growth in the world economy declined substantially during the 1970s, and, just as important, its international pattern was altered. The concomitants were profound: they included the relative decline of manufacturing industry in advanced economies; the emergence of new technologies, ranging from information technology (IT) to biotechnology; the increased globalization of capital movements; and the acquisition of power by neoliberal politicians committed to overturning Keynesian orthodoxies in favour of fiscal rectitude, low inflation and free markets.
