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fictitious category and that ‘the viability of an institutional architecture must be
evaluated by examining the structural compatibility of its various elements, not by
comparing the various institutions to a market configuration without any
institutions’(2000:280).
In these terms, regulation theory is an economic theory of institutions whose basic
injunction is that the incremental transformations of social relations ‘leads in time to a
change in the laws governing the operation of particular economic systems’, in fact
‘the economic, political, and legal features of social relations may take various forms,
the configuration of which must be specified’(1988:8). Regulationists analyse these
‘configurations’ under the concept of structural/institutional forms; wage/labour nexus
as one such institutional form, which does both ‘define the place of individuals and
groups in society’ and ‘produce principles of adjustment’, is expository of the
‘changes in the functioning of the labour market’. A theory of the social relations of
capitalism in the abstract is thereby not enough, the concept of régulation foremostly
touches upon ‘the dynamic of the links in the economic process’ in that ‘“economic
laws” are ideally related to a combination of structural forms’(ibid.:8-9). To that
effect, Boyer and almost all regulationists then contrast structural crisis(crisis of the
mode of regulation) with recessions(crisis in the mode of regulation). The former
touches upon the likely contradictions between ‘the dynamic of the system itself,
and/or the form taken by social and political struggles’ and the very network of
structural forms that circumscribe the regime of accumulation and the mode of
regulation(ibid.:9-10). In brief, the chief intimation of a structural crisis is when there
is a certain off-ness to the ‘régulation in action’(or the very ‘principles of adjustment’)
within the network of forms.
That said, Fordism had once been in the forefront of regulationist research. However
later research has since announced that Fordist regime of accumulation had never
been monolithic across industrialised economies, ‘configurations of basic institutional
forms’ is indeed explanatory of the variable levels of macroeconomic coherence ‘even
during the roaring 1960s’(Boyer 1991:108), and/or ‘variations in performance’(Boyer
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