The 1980s witnessed major transformations in the nature of post-industrial capitalism, and were characterised by a commensurate ferment in the social theory that was offered to make sense of it. In particular, political economy, urban social theory and contemporary cultural change all boasted of major transformations, epitomised in the debates that described the end of organized capitalism and the advent of post-Fordism', a sustained debate on the essence of the urban and the fevered competitions to write a seminal account of the postmodern'. Yet by the 1990s it is already clear that the incandescence of this spate of innovation could not obscure the repetition of a major omission in subject matter that had impoverished the social theory that the new vogues attempted to succeed. At its crudest the experiences addressed by new social theory remained Eurocentric, bourgeois, masculine, elitist and culturally monolithic. The advent of regimes of flexible accumulation in one part of the world went on at the same time as less affluent Fordist production systems were just taking root.
The salience of the experience of migrant communities in metropolitian economies was rarely considered in frequently exotic portraits of cultural change. In short, issues of racism and race formation appeared fundamental to the urban forms of late capitalism but marginal to the academy's theorisation of it.