Hall’s 1958 essay already predicted post-Fordist consumer culture’s class effects

Evidence

More importantly, I have also been at pains to make clear the strong continuities that run throughout the work over the whole period. Thus, important aspects of Stuart’s later work on the “New (Post-Fordist) Times” of the 1980s can be seen to be foreshadowed in some of his early and prescient observations on consumer culture and its effects on the preexisting class structure and on the traditional labor movement. In “A Sense of Classlessness” (1958) Stuart had already recognized that the decline of the old manufacturing industries was associated with a transformed consumer culture, with a new range of domestic interests—in homemaking and interior decoration, for example—and with a whole host of new spending habits, involving cultural shifts in “attitudes to things and people, whereby possessions such as a new car, a new house[,] … a TV set” acquire quite new symbolic meanings. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 55

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: This 1958 insight is a seed the reader can trace across Hall’s whole career as a contribution to economic thought.

Related

• Deindustrialization transformed consumer culture and the symbolic meaning of possessions decades earlier (similarity 0.89)
• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital (similarity 0.84)
• Postwar affluence marked a transition to post-industrial class structures, not classlessness (similarity 0.81)
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital #corroborates (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 121