1999). The state withdrew not only from intervening in the workings of the market but also from ownership of The Commanding Heights of the economy through privatization (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998). The state also withdrew from the funding and operation of many welfare mechanisms that were put in place in order to provide a buffer zone between individuals and the market (Piven and Cloward 1997). More and more spheres of social life are administered by the free market or were modeled after a market-like rationale (Somers and Block 2005). There has been a trend toward privatization by way of shifting risks and responsibility from the state to individuals, and there has also been a process of privatization in the world of work, where a class compact has been substituted by individual contracts. The decline in market regulation and income redistribution (or in fact the rise of upward redistribution [Duggan 2003]) has also led to an increase in class inequality within national boundaries and between nation states (Milanovic 2007; Harvey 2005, 2009).
The second trend characteristic of the disembeddedness of markets in post-Fordism is disorganization. Disorganization (Lash and Urry 1987; Offe 1984b)—partially a consequence of the marketization of society—refers to a process whereby markets, the economy, and social life in general have become more liquid (Bauman 2000), more chaotic, and more complex (Urry 2003). The globalization of financial markets has made capital more mobile, leaving local markets more volatile and unstable as a result (Sassen 1999; Sennet 2006; Harvey 2005). Production has become more flexible, constantly adapting to changing markets’ demands; production and consumption cycles have been accelerating (Harvey 1989; Agger 2004; Rosa 2003). Companies have shifted their organization from a vertical model of a top-down, hierarchized bureaucracy to a horizontal, dehierarchized, and decentralized network (Castells 1996; Sennet 2006). Flexible, lean, just-intime production has made work life more “mean” (Harrison 1997), and increasingly more precarious, unstable, and unpredictable (Bauman 2001). Tenured workers have been replaced by part-timers and flextimers, working on ad hoc projects rather than developing a linear career path (Castells 1996; Sennet 2000). Economic risks (as well as spoils) have been individualized (Bauman 1998, 2001; Beck 1992, 2000).
These two dynamics were brought about not only as a result of the structural constrains of capitalism but also by the force of an ideological and political struggle between Keynesianism, welfarism, embedded liberalism, and social democracy, on the one hand, and market fundamentalism and neoliberalism, on the other (Somers and Block 2005; Duggan 2003). One of the staples of Keynesianism involved tighter state regulation of its macroeconomic indicators. This meant that while markets remained essentially free, they were further embedded in society (Polanyi 2001). This had given us a period of four decades of embedded liberalism (Harvey 2005), or “traditional mixed economy” (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998, 127). Diminishing state revenues in the 1970s mark the beginning of increasing skepticism of that constellation. A new model appeared that undermined the central tenets of Keynesianism and sought to solve the inherent contradictions of the welfare state (Offe 1984a).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age