ABSTRACT
For two decades following the Second World War, over much of the advanced capitalist world, rapid economic growth, profitable production, rising material living standards and full employment appeared to be simultaneously attainable objectives. The main features of this Fordist regime of accumulation and mode of regulation are well known. Mildly progressive income redistribution encouraged growing private consumption. Growing public expenditure on the welfare state led to rising levels of collective consumption. State involvement along Keynesian lines was seen as central to ensuring macro-economic growth and guaranteeing social justice within a ‘full employment’ economy. ‘Full employment’ was predominantly defined in terms of full-time jobs for life for male workers. The male ‘family wage’ plus the ‘social wage’ delivered via the welfare state, perhaps supplemented by the wages of married women working part-time, was seen as assuring continuing increases in material living standards for nuclear families, regarded as the normal form of household unit. This mass production and consumption economy was unavoidably dependent upon the natural environment in various ways, but this grounding of economy and society in nature was not seen as problematic. There were apparently no ecological limits to growth. There were, however, national variations around the basic themes as Fordism diffused unevenly over space and through time within Europe (see, for example, Albert, 1993; Hudson and Williams, 1995; Lash and Urry, 1987; Lipietz, 1987). This variability reflected – inter alia – the extent to which centre-left or centre-right politics were dominant and the legacies of uneven development. This uneven diffusion had important implications for the trajectory and character of development in different places.
