This book is written for people who want to understand the experience of their fellow Australians. Everyone agrees that Australia has been profoundly changed by a twenty-year program of economic ‘reform’, ‘structural adjustment’, or ‘globalisation’ – all these terms mean the same thing. Yet we do not really know how economic reform has redefined the lived experience of families, workplaces, and communities. Has it reshaped our dispositions and orientations towards others? We need to understand how it challenges our practical moralities, our trust in others, our time horizons, our coping strategies, and our sense of where we fit in the larger society. In the wake of twenty years of reform how do we now construe our mutual obligations to others? And how do we make sense of our engagements with intimates, strangers, citizens and leaders? It's the resonances, the meanings and the social significance of the lived experience that matter here. And it's from this viewpoint, and with the reports of 400 randomly selected middle Australians in five capital cities, that this book explores the impact of economic reform on the experience of middle Australia.

A great scholar once said to me that all learning and all scholarship in every branch of the humanities and social sciences is always led by inner motives.