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compatibility after being established ... [this] is fairly improbable when one considers
the five institutional forms put forward by régulation theory, but it is possible, even
frequent, as one gradually breaks down the level of analysis, since structural
constraints are mediated through a whole series of institutions and intermediary
adjustment mechanisms’(2000:287). To that effect, Boyer is still for the ‘inclusive’ as
in the ‘social compatibility of compromises’ but institutional economics outside the
regulation theory is much more the votary of a ‘tight relationship between the analysis
of complementarity and the areas of the economy which are investigated’(Amable
2000:668).
Boyer’s regulation theory is very much a middle-range theory; that is, it is an analysis
of the ongoing ‘cumulative changes’ at the level of the structural forms. Although this
would ‘provide a good reference point for dialogue among different middle-range
theoretical approaches’, regulation theory no longer studies the structural forms as the
‘mode of cohesion of the basic social forms’ which are intrinsically contradictory.
Increasingly implicit in such a middle-range analysis is the argument that crises,
tendencially or otherwise, are the consequence of ‘institutional failure, institutional
mismatch, or ineptitude in institutional learning’(Jessop 2005:37). In contrast, Jessop
argues that a theory of institutional complementarity and hierarchy, either en
régulation or en crisis, must ‘lead back to a more fundamental analysis of forms of the
capital relation and their logic than second- and third-generation regulationist studies
usually provide with their mainly middle-range institutional theorization’(2006:228).
One other dark consequence of this ‘middle-range institutional theorization’, for
Jessop is that regulation theory ‘is equated with the analysis of social embeddedness,
with the social dimensions of MoRs and with the extra-economic dimensions of
capitalism’. That is to say, structural forms are not elusively inclusive but these are
increasingly and single-handedly institutionally inclusive as opposed to integrally
inclusive when ‘subsumed under the category of ‘market’ coordination and attention
is focused on non-market forms of coordination’ as in Boyer’s research on
governance(ibid.:244).
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