Consumer Sovereignty and the Integrity of Practices

Abstract

A central feature of recent attempts to construct an 'enterprise culture' in Britain has been a series of institutional reforms designed to introduce market principles and commercially modelled forms of organization into a wide range of activities previously conducted upon different principles, and 'protected' by means such as public funding or subsidy from the forces operating in a free market economy. These extensions of the market have raised, in an often acute and practical form, an important set of theoretical issues about what kinds of activities are, and are not, appropriately governed by market mechanisms: about how, and upon what basis, the boundaries should be drawn between market and non-market domains.1