View Original - Middle East Technical University

foundations in economic analysis, Parisian theory even in its value-theoretical
category does not have a theory of crisis that is inwardly regulationist but still is very
much a theory of capitalist crisis; and can even rehearse certain Marxian provisos in
its price-theoretical category. A study of regulation theory must then touch upon –
does this heuristic procedure of more-than-one abstract foundation have any
antithetical consequences for a theory of capitalist régulation, or is this ab initio a
contradiction of the very middle-range method of regulationist research?
Third and fourth chapters are on Boyer and Jessop. Boyer argues for a ‘theory of
economic institutions’ infléchissement of regulation theory. Latter’s five institutional
forms are increasingly heuristic categories for the comparative historical research on
capitalism(s), the chief argument of which is that ‘not only could the modes of
regulation differ for a particular kind of growth regime, but several such regimes
relied on varying types of institutional architecture’(Boyer 2005:515) and that ‘the
emergence of institutional forms able to release production potentials is a historical
contingeny’(Grahl and Teague 2000:162). This institutionalist and society-wide
analysis of comparative capitalist history however is not a ‘théorie locale’(Perkmann
1996) in Boyer; that is, the understanding of institutional forms cannot be concretist.
Boyer indeed excogitates the concepts of ‘institutional hierarchy’ and institutional
complementarity’ for a ‘théorie générale’ of capitalist institutionalisation in and
through the changing structures of governance within an always socially embedded
market economy and not for a localistic theory of particular economic regimes.
For Jessop as well, the regulation theory is chiefly about the institutedness of
economies. However, unlike Karl Polanyi who ‘depicts a two-step movement from
unregulated to regulated capitalism, the RA describes a crisis-mediated movement
from one regularised regime to another, each with its own dynamic and crisis-
tendencies’(Jessop 2001:217). Still Polanyian sociology, regulation theory and
Luhmann’s autopoeitic systems theory analyse the forms of embeddedness in
economies; there are three such forms –social, institutional and societal
embeddedness. In fact, Jessop’s ‘integral economic’ infléchissement of regulation
8