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CHAPTER 3
REGULATION THEORY
AS AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF INSTITUTIONS
Boyer(2002a:5-6) has a fourfold précis for regulation theory. Analytical scope of a
theory of capitalism must be broad enough so that its units of analysis can
circumscribe simultaneously the economic mechanisms, the variants of social
cohesion and the political verities in the design of societal compromises. Regulation
theory as such does not revel over the otherwise disciplinary and/or methodological
hauteur about the closed analytical scope that certain theories of capitalism and/or the
market rehearse. Secondly, regulation theorists are not taciturn about the precise
historical and territorial parameters in which their concepts have in fact real
explanatory puissance over the phenomena under study. In other words, regulationists
not only rebut ‘disciplinary parochialism’(Sayer 2000) but also axiomatic
parochialism in theory. Indeed the epistemic eligibility of a theory stems from a
‘gradual generalisation’ of its concepts and methods along a farrago of historical
comparative research and not from the degree of axiomatic thinking within it.
Thirdly, regulation theory analyses the terms of capitalist growth and crisis in real
historical time(i.e. as inexorably historical phenomenon) in that the transformations of
socio-economic relations under the capitalist mode of production are sometimes slow
and cinched but at other times profoundly erratic; yet always ongoing since incessant
organisational, social and technological makeovers and change are an intrinsic part of
that system. In short, structural change is endogenous. This is also infinitely close to
an understanding of history as the first threshold for sound theory. Finally,
regulationists, unlike neoclassical economists, do not resort to ad hoc injunctions for
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