For much of the 1980s, talk about social change in advanced capitalist societies centred around questions of consumption. Governments pursued privatisation policies on the promise that they would increase consumer choice. Marketing men set about mapping style communities based on shared tastes, and academics, reading these signs of the times, declared the arrival of the post-modern age in which appearance eclipsed substance and what you saw was all you got. By the beginning of 1989, the figure of the consumer had come to dominate the imaginary landscape of late capitalism.