Abstract

Recent shifts in the world economy are undercutting today's existing macroenvironments still populated by suburban consumers, which raises prospects for new populists to rethink the institutions of American federalism and corporate capitalism. As corporate downsizing and government cutbacks renege on the social contracts hammered out over the past century as industrial democracy, the new entrepreneurial economy of independent subcontracting, temp workers and structural underemployment, emerging now as post-Fordist informationalism, is forcing many to rethink old communitarian ideas, which were last seriously entertained by the populists. In the transformations being wrought by post-Fordist informationalization, radical changes “can be translated or transcoded into a narrative account in which agents of all sizes and dimensions are at work.”