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(2011) A social and economic theory of consumption, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Towards the end of the twentieth century the world witnessed a sea change in economic policy thinking. The Reagan Administration in the United States and Margaret Thatcher's Cabinets in the United Kingdom began to champion a new kind of thinking that effectively put an end to some of the key principles of Keynesian economic policy (Julkunen 2001, 22). "Private enterprise" was the magic word used to justify clampdowns on trade unions, to dismantle welfare-state mechanisms and to unload responsibilities onto private citizens in cases where the markets were not working as intended and where initially cyclical unemployment and then structural unemployment threatened to marginalize large portions of the wage-earning population. It was not the state that was supposed to solve these problems, but the markets. In fact many state-owned companies were to be privatized in the name of global competition. On the promise of increased efficiency, the grand scheme was to introduce market principles into public administration and to privatize public services. These views and measures formed an integral part of neo-liberal economic policy.
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Ilmonen, K. (2011). Markets and the neo-liberal utopia of omnipotent markets, in A social and economic theory of consumption, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 10-34.
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