While the Church in Wales still adheres to the pre-disestablishment historic formularies, its doctrine has changed much since 1920. During the first half of the century, it was catholic and conservative. However, when a Doctrinal Commission was established in 1969 there were enough Welsh Anglican theologians to staff it. This impacted on doctrinal development, as did the resurgence of evangelicalism in the 1960s, a decade which also saw the rise of modern theology, new patterns of behaviour, and new attitudes to gender. By the end of the century, new attitudes to sexuality were also evident. These changes were a challenge to the conservative, catholic inheritance of the Church in Wales, and to the evangelical tradition. While controversies about ordaining women are now largely in the past, doctrinal controversy about sexuality shows no sign of abating. The work of the Doctrinal Commission has been welcomed for its comments on ecumenical texts, though in other areas its work has had a mixed history, particularly its relationship with the Bench of Bishops.

In this introduction, the central thesis of the book is laid out. This is that the market world has created the modern society in which our lives are lived, whether as citizens of a European democracy or of an Asian, newly emerging nation. The focus in this book is overwhelmingly on Europe, and it explores the relation of a theology of justice to that of human identity in this market world. It is not, therefore, a work of business ethics, nor one simply of Christian social ethics in its ultimate questioning. It is shaped by the tradition of Anglican social ethics in England, within which I write and continue to work: the tradition of Hooker, Coleridge, Lux Mundi, Temple, Preston and Atherton. The concern of the book, however, is with human nature and the question of justice, or, as it is called by theologians, theological anthropology and ethics. The paradox is simple to state, but difficult to resolve. As our society becomes more industrialized, market driven and pluralist, human identity becomes more problematic. The resolution of human identity is made, for those who have the freedom to choose, through their self-expression in employment, consumption and the human relations which sustain them. Less and less is it made through religious faith, or the implications which flow from that faith, such as the Protestant Work Ethic. However, it is not clear that paid employment, or consumption, can provide the satisfactory definition of that identity which is sought.

Consumerism is a central phenomenon of modern society. It can be explained by a hedonistic theory of social action, which is fundamentally different from utilitarian-based perspectives found in contemporary economic theory. Consumerism was a feature of late eighteenth-century English society, and has persisted until the present day. As the central study on this subject, by McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, has argued: ‘It will be one of the major burdens of this book to show that consumer behaviour was so rampant and the acceptance of commercial attitudes so pervasive that no one in the future should doubt that the first of the world's consumer societies had unmistakably emerged by 1800.’ Consumerism is a product of a romantic ethic, and thus can be traced back through the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Colin Campbell has provided a fascinating study of this period which traces the emergence of consumerism from the reaction to Calvinist orthodoxy in the late sixteenth century. The intellectual movements of the Cambridge Platonists, Latitudinarian theology, sentimentalism, Romanticism and the final emergence of aestheticism in the late nineteenth century all show that the relation between moral idealism and hedonism is not straightforward. Yet out of this tension there emerges the moral and social justification for consumerism. It is true that consumerism can simply be equated with a ‘soulless’ utilitarianism, but this ignores the subtle interplay of intellectual thought and popular taste in the preceding two centuries.

In November 1986, the American Roman Catholic Bishops issued the final draft of their pastoral letter entitled Economic Justice for All, which was their text on the morality of the United States economy. It is worth examining this text in detail as an example of how a church responded to issues of work and consumerism of work. What is significant about this report is that it represented a process, in which the publication of the report was only one stage. Before the publication there were hearings, and, in the case of the American report, there were also draft versions of it. After the publication, in each case, there were conferences and discussions with government.

All of this is an attempt to educate Christians about some of the basic realities of their lives: conditions at work, consumerism and the relations set up by the market. If Habermas' work represents a philosophical overview of the nature of social existence in contemporary western culture, the response of the churches represents the attempt to integrate the conditions of social life into the life of faith. The work of Habermas, and the response of the churches, frame this book's discussion of the realities of economic life. What these responses suggest is that it matters that there is an ecclesial response and not simply an individual one to economic life.

What did the Catholic Bishops say? They set out their report in five chapters, and built a cumulative case.

The question of human identity as being at the heart of modernity is one posed a century ago by Max Weber. Weber studied the Protestant Work Ethic as the fundamental force which shaped large portions of European civilization, and eventually spread world-wide through the expansion of European imperial power. Out of this power came the identity of the European industrial worker, who creates the self-alienating world of modern consciousness. This is a seamless argument, but we will pick it up, not chronologically, but in terms of a thematic approach, following the approach set out in the Introduction. The question of the Protestant Work Ethic, and its survival in the present day, is taken up in chapter 3, and the transformation of this ethic into an ethic of consumerism is argued historically in chapter 2. In chapter 1, a philosophical overview of the marketing identity and rationality is given. Those who would prefer to move into the substantive issues of consumerism and work can begin this study at chapter 2, ignoring the philosophical argument. Nevertheless, the philosophical grounding encapsulates the entire book.

What is important at this point is to notice how central Weber's formulation of the Protestant Work Ethic is to Jürgen Habermas, who is the pre-eminent German philosopher of social relations at the present time. This is because Habermas uses Weber's theory as a way into the question of human identity.

This chapter considers the preceding two chapters, on consumption and the work ethic in the context of globalization. Habermas provides the conceptual analysis for examining the impact of capitalism and the world economic system on modernity. That is why he is considered first in this book. Nevertheless, he is not intrinsically concerned with globalization and particularity, especially not in his writings up to the mid 1980s when globalization was not a central political and philosophical concept. Instead, he concentrates on human beings as consumers, workers, political citizens and participants in the market. Hence this book progressed through a consideration of consumption and work. It is now time to examine how globalization has affected all of these concepts. The argument will be that it has done so profoundly. Human identity is increasingly constructed as consumer, worker and participator in the market, including the health-care and educational market. That is the argument so far. However, if globalization also affects our culture by its pattern both of consumption and of its impact on local culture, then human identity will be reshaped again. If the twentieth century has seen in the West the gradual dominance of the activities of consumption and work, in the context of the market, then what we now appear to be evolving into is a global society where consumption, culture and work are reshaped yet again.

Three observations come to mind at the end of this book about the speed of change, the differences in theology and the involvement of the churches. The speed of change is perhaps the most striking. Reich's book, The Work of Nations, read likes an epic novel, or like ‘The Twilight of the Gods: Götterdämmerung’. In the early chapters of his book, he describes how American and European industry gradually grew out of craft industries into the mighty giants of the early twentieth century, aided by imperialism and protectionism. By the mid twentieth century, such industry employed hundreds of thousands, with corporate headquarters as grand as government buildings. They had a close relationship with government, harmonious labour relations (at least in America), a world-wide span and enormous wealth. By the end of the twentieth century, technology, world-wide competition and changing cultural tastes had reduced this mass employment to ruins. The enormous growth in unemployment in the last three decades of this century in America and Europe was not like the 1930s, for factories did not close for a while but were demolished. Those who have worked, or ministered pastorally and in Industrial Mission, in such areas in recent years know in the depths of their being what this has meant for the former industrial worker. In its place there has come the use of the service industries, global competition, new consumerism and a transformed attitude to paid employment.