Introduction

The long decade of the 1980s was framed by parallel political events. It began in 1979 with the victory of the Conservatives in Britain, marking clearly a shift to the right in Western political regimes. The concept of the Market has had a long history in the West, and has been particularly important in the United States, with its fascination with free enterprise and starting own business. However, the concern to understand and the attempt to counter or emulate Japanese success produced a similar result, for it also led people to unpack the abstract notion of the Market into specific sorts of institutions and practices, and subject them to scrutiny and debate. Economists generally use 'the market' as a model in the technical sense of a simplification of a more complex whole that aids prediction and thus is not concerned with what Weber calls interpretative understanding.