eBook

Managing the Economy, Managing the People

Tomlinson, Jim

2017

Overview

The volume provides a distinctive new account of British economic life since the Second World War, focusing upon the ways in which successive governments, in seeking to manage the economy, have sought simultaneously to ‘manage the people’: to try and manage popular understanding of economic issues. In doing so, governments have sought not only to shape expectations for electoral purposes but to construct broader narratives about how ‘the economy’ should be understood. The starting point is to ask what goals have been focused upon; how these have been constructed to appeal to the population; and how far the population has accepted these narratives. In its first part, the volume analyses the development of the major narratives from the 1940s onwards. This part covers the notion of ‘austerity’ and its particular meaning in the 1940s; the rise of a narrative of ‘economic decline’ from the late 1950s, and the subsequent attempts to ‘modernize’ the economy; the attempts to ‘roll back the state’ from the 1970s; the impact of ideas of ‘globalization’ in the 1980s and 1990s; and, finally, the way the crisis of 2008/9 onwards was constructed as a problem of ‘debts and deficits’. The second part of the volume then focuses in on four key issues in attempts to ‘manage the people’: productivity, the balance of payments, inflation, and unemployment. It shows how in each case governments have sought to get the populace to understand these issues in a particular light, and have shaped strategies to that end.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: 1945-1964 / 1945-2015 / 1964-1979 / 1979-1997 / 1997 / 20th century / Economic conditions / Economic History / Economic policy / Great Britain / Großbritannien / Modern History (1700 to 1945) / Wirtschaftslage
• ISBN: 0198786093, 9780198786092