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their journal Economies et Sociétés) and Paul Boccara and his fellow communist
economits’ workshop at PCF.
This said, regulation theory has truly been an industrious and seminal political
economic paradigm. Especially through later state-theoretical and space-theoretical
regulationist studies, one can peer into the ever-changing threshold of future research
and steal a backward peek at the large extent of already finalised collective research
within that paradigm. However, regulation theory contrasts, so to speak, with its
counterparts that has likewise been profusely avant-garde in that ‘[w]e must speak of
an approach rather than a theory. What has gained acceptance is not a body of fully
refined concepts but a research programme’(Aglietta 1998:42). This ‘endogenous
process of cumulative research’(Vidal 2001:45) design of regulation theory is all too
well, but it, on the other hand, ulteriorly sabotages any ardent effort toward putting
regulation theory in its place. Some thirty-year long passage of collective as well as
solitary soul-searching within that scientific study with very substantial makeovers
and not-so-provisional discontinuities, to some extent, has most likely extirpated the
basis for a latent or otherwise selfness of regulation theory. ‘Indeed, the variations are
sufficiently different and numerous to support viewing Regulation Theory not as a
single approach but as a cluster of approaches unified by “family resemblances” but
no core’(Albritton 1995:201). The really unpleasant circumstance here is more than
the fact that regulation theory is increasingly a misnomer for the disorderliness and
plethora of studies that analyse the régulation of capitalist economies, the downside
here, on the contrary, which broods all regulation theory as such is the fact that
theoretical openness may sometimes rebound. The openness of regulationist research,
as long as this is de novo a non-negotiable epistemological asset of regulation theory,
thereby anticipates a strategy of putting regulation theory in its place prospectively,
which must touch upon the extent to which ‘search and search again!’ motto(Boyer
2002:54) of regulationist method has or has not indeed sulked into an obnoxious
idealism.
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