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that realist ontology has decisive consequences for theory –first, ‘the necessity of
operating with different types and modalities of causality which we analytically
identify at different levels of abstraction and planes of analysis’(ibid.), and second,
‘explanation is only adequate relative to a given explanandum’(Jessop 2004:44).
Ontological/historical contingency, on the other hand, undersells any understanding of
‘necessity’ as nomothetic causality; internal relations of social forms anticipate that all
is not random(Bertramsen 1991:106-7). Furthermore, necessity ‘need not, does not
and cannot mean that whatever happens in the real world is the result of a single
causal mechanism’(Jessop 2004:98)
4.2 Jessop on Regulation Theory
While first-generation work was likely to cite the fundamental contradictions
and conflicts generated by capitalism’s distinctive dynamic, later generations
were more inclined to refer to middle-range analyses of the self-undermining
nature of particular accumulation regimes and modes of regulation defined in
more institutional terms. This prompted an interest in moving beyond the
generic crisis tendencies of capitalism to identify their specific forms in
different periods and/or varieties of capitalism and to examine the major
ruptures and structural shifts that occur as accumulation and its regulation
develop in and through class struggle and other types of social conflict. Given
these concerns, the RA focuses on the changing combinations of economic and
extra-economic institutions and practices that help to secure, if only
temporarily and always in specific economic spaces, a certain stability and
predictability in accumulation(Jessop 2006:14).
Jessop, since the 1990s, has argued that some thirty year long regulationist research
has ‘four key features’(two methodological and two substantive), all of which have a
heavy foothold in the first-generation ‘Marxist concerns’(Jessop 1990, 1999, 2001,
2006). First, implicit in regulation theory is the resort to critical realist scientific
ontology and epistemology. Critical realism is an anti-positivist, anti-empiricist
scientific paradigm. Critical realists touch upon ‘contingently actualized’ but
nevertheless real causal mechanisms. Analysis of these causal mechanisms and
‘natural necessities’ together with ‘conditions in which they will be actualized’ are
paramount to critical realist research. Furthermore, ‘properly dialectical, interactive
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