View Original - Middle East Technical University

‘all these configurations are not the exception but the rule for contemporary developed
countries’(Boyer 1996b:20) so and so that ‘the market can be Pareto inferior to
alternative organizations provided by networks, associations or even vertically
integrated firms’(Boyer 1996a:103).
To that effect, Boyer argues, ‘the superiority of the market only results by default of
alternative coordinating mechanisms’(2001:70) as opposed to the highly austere
invariants of a Walrasian equilibrium. Fruthermore, the basic institutions of
capitalism, which regulationists study under the category of institutional forms are
integral to a theory of capitalism, precisely when the phenomenan under study is not
the contradictory/counterfactual ‘static efficieny’(general equilibrium) but the very
real ‘dynamic efficiency’ of market mechanisms. Matter-of-factly, it is the very
contradictions of the extent of Walrasian ‘static efficiency’ that would importune for
an analysis of ‘dynamic efficiency’ in institutionalist/regulationist terms; ‘the very
limits of Walrasian economic theory call for precisely the same basic institutions that
are captured by the five institutional forms’(ibid.:52). To that effect, in regulation
theory, ‘analysis of the economic dynamic is based on the theorisation of institutional
forms, defined as a codification of fundamental relations’(Villeval 2002:292). In
Boyer’s words, regulation theorists excogitate a ‘continuum of concepts’ from the
more abstract levels of analysis(eg., mode of production) to the more concrete level of
the stylised facts and the social routines of economic units(eg., the very ‘régulation’
mechanisms)(1988b:70). Institutional/structural forms and accumulation regime are
more intermediate categories within that continuum.
First of the five institutional forms is the credit and monetary regime. For
regulationists, money is endogenous to the capitalist system. Capitalist economies are
decentralised monetary systems. Particular forms of money and the payment system
are integral parts of the regulationist analysis of the monetary variables of a regime of
accumulation. And so is the institutional ‘configurations’ of the monetary
regime(monetary policy, financial policy, lander-of-last-resort mechanisms,
international system of funding)(Guttmann 2002:58). As Boyer argues, ‘as soon as
64