ABSTRACT
The discourse of the enterprise culture has an elective affinity with what most social scientists would now accept has been a profound 'restructuring' of British society in the 1980s. Predictably, the future within the Thatcherite scheme of things attempts to equate the new enterprise culture with industriousness, regeneration and true work, wealth, and happiness. So far there have been few attempts to understand the affiliation between the realities of the restructuring process as it has, in actuality, implicated the prime moral subjects of the discourse — the petty bourgeoisie — and the wider rhetoric of the enterprise culture. Overall, therefore, economic and demographic factors are likely to have more impact than cultural or political influences on the future of petty capitalism in the 1990s. Assessing the significance of petty capitalism in advanced industrial societies seems to cause all kinds of problems for social scientists.
