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through cyclical crises to the high rates of growth had been slighter, falls in nominal
prices were less frequent and so was the short-term unevenness between production
and sales. ‘Cumulative growth gives rise to a circular process of economic
development’, mostly because ‘adjustments increasingly [takes] the form of
productivity gains handed on to those groups that provided mass consumption’(Boyer
1988b:6). In other words, such an exceptional growth had its bases in the structure of
a wage society(i.e. a capital-labour compromise that afforded the sectors of mass
production via mechanisation-cum-productivity, mass consumption as working-class
consumption via growth of income for wage-work, and a ‘wage-earner state’ that
spent much of its income on the system of social wage than as payments to large
firms/monopoly capital).
In Boyer’s words, ‘the capital-labour compromise provided the foundation for
régulation in action’ under Fordism(2000:280). He indeed considers this ‘foundation
for régulation’ in terms of the ‘constraints imposed by the polity’(199:101) or ‘the
expression of a hitherto hidden dialectic between the success of Keynesianism and a
specific form of labour relations’(1988b:12). Then regulationist ‘studies propose an
analysis of the economic consequences of institutionalized compromises’(1997b:75).
The consequences of such an analysis is particularly stark vis-a-vis the provisos of
standard neo-classical theory on the labour market. The latter cannot expatiate on the
determinant effects of the postwar wage-labour nexus upon the no longer moribund
intensive accumulation; ongoing growth of nominal wages at a time of high as well as
increasing unemployment is a priori derisory within that theoretical model. Especially
here regulation theory espouses the overall institutionalist prolepsis –institutions
matter. These are not rigid structures as opposed to the nonrigid market structure.
Secondly, most economic theory on institutions of capitalism have so far argued that
‘these can operate independently of one another’. That is to say, partial equilibrium
can be the corrective heuristic in the analysis of manifold patterns and modalities of
economic growth, however this stray heuristic considers that prices outside the said
partial equilibrium are still very Walrasian, ‘in order to determine what would be the
optimal form of organization’. Boyer then argues Walrasian equilibrium is mostly a
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