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Villeval, in her paper for Boyer and Salliard’s edited dossier on late regulationist
research, contrasts Group I(Menger, Hayek, new industrial theory, Williamson and
North’s New Institutional Economics) and Group II(old and neo-instutionalism,
regulation theory) institutionalisms on the bases of ‘methodology, principles of
institutional development and the functions of institutions’(2002:293). Group II
theories, unlike Group I, consider institutions as a heuristic category for ‘the analysis
of coherence’; institutions, especially in regulation theory, are thereby explanatory
variables in ‘the reproduction and transformation of a system that is built on
antagonistic social relations, in the process of making the compromises coherent’;
institutions indeed ‘form the basic unit’(ibid.:292-3). Regulation theory however
contrasts not only with Group I institutionalisms but with its counterparts in Group II
in that ‘the learning process ... not only relates to selection through economic
efficiency, it also involves the question of the social compatibility of compromises
that are not immediately institutionalised’(ibid.:294). To that effect, Boyer would
argue ‘institutions matter’, but ‘institutional complementarity matters’ even
more(Amable 2000). Regulation theorists have analysed the structural changes since
the early the 1970s in capitalist economies in terms of the ‘reversal of the hierarchy
among institutional forms’(ibid.:666) or the change from a ‘static hierarchy’ into a
‘dynamic hierarchy’, however, they are once more not at one as to which of the five
institutional forms is the hierarchically superior institutional form. For
Aglietta(1998), the latter would be money; for Bruno Amable and Pascal Petit(1995),
this would be the forms of competition; and for Boyer(1999), the international regime.
Curiously, even for institutionalists, the five institutional forms of the regulation
theory are inchoately inclusive or ‘too large to rule out a certain vagueness in the
institutions taken into account’(Amable 2000:667); theoretical research via the
concepts of institutional complementarity and hierarchy(dynamic and/or static) is still
ex post functionalist despite much ‘theory informed’ empirical research on
‘cumulative changes’. Institutional complementarity and hierarchy are, alas, post
factum and not a priori complementarity and hierarchy of intuitional forms so Boyer
would argue ‘the various institutionalized compromises must manifest a certain
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