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2002:320). Though in Marxist theory as well as in regulation theory, as a mode of
production, ‘capitalism is defined by the conjunction of two principles of economic
organization’ –namely, a market/commodity relation and capital-labour/wage relation;
and ‘there is not just a single way of organizing these two fundamental relationships
but a degree of variety’(Boyer 1997b:75), it is more specifically at the conceptual
level of the institutional forms that capitalism in the future anterior has been the
quaesitum of regulationist research. For Boyer, these are the exact terms in which an
ex ante analysis of the ‘functional coherence of institutional forms’ as an ‘exercise in
macroeconomic fiction’ contrasts with the ex post regulationist theory of Fordism.
This would foremostly be about the thorough analysis of the changes in institutional
forms and the design of macro-models for the study of the concequences of these
changes upon the regime of accumulation together with a decidedly less economistic
uptake on structural change(1991:109).
Thus regulation theorists further excogitated concepts for the analysis of crisis in real-
time in terms of régulation. Regulationists first borrow the concept of ‘the co-
evolution of institutions’ from evolutionary economics. It technically expatiates on
the mechanism when ‘the resulting developments introduce the elements of a
reconfiguration’, even though there is not de novo any systematic coherence between
the institutional forms. In short, any minimal and/or partial level of systemacity in
some macroeconomic governance stems from this mechanism of institutional ‘co-
evolution’. Institutional complementarity, on the other hand, ‘signifies that the
conjunction of two institutional forms supplies an adaptability and performance that is
superior to alternative configurations in which only one of the forms is present’(Boyer
2002:330-31). Even outside any ‘co-evolution’, therefore circumstances around any
systematic coherence touch upon the fact that often than not ‘a form of constructivism
is at work when forms of economic organization are created, with the result that the
corresponding holistic conception implies that some –the most obvious-
interdependencies between institutions, organizations and the market are being taken
into account’(Boyer 2000:287). Institutional hierarchy in Boyer is about the
‘dominance of one institutional form over another’; here on top of the ex ante
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