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analysis of structure and agency’ is more than a velleity for critical realism. Method
of abstraction in that particular scientific paradigm as to the causal mechanisms,
‘emergent properties’ and ‘interactions’ is usually retroduction. This is a heuristic
method that ‘asks what the world must be like for certain stylized facts and/or specific
observations to be possible’. This said, regulationists are most often practical critical
realists; they scantly consider their analytical procedures as critical realist because
regulation theory is foremostly an analysis of capitalism and as such ‘does not make a
philosophical case for critical realism in general’. Secondly, regulation theory
excoriates methods of ‘subsumption’ and ‘logical derivation’ in theory design. For
the former, certain general concepts or explanatory models can be inclusive of all
particular phenomena; any study of their specific extent is thereby redundant.
Regulationists indeed consider one form of such ‘subsumption’ as ‘décalomanie’.
‘Logical derivation’, on the other hand, excogitates more ‘concrete-complex concepts’
from more ‘abstract-simple’ categories. Regulation theory however resorts to
‘method of articulation’. ‘This explores the contingent actualization of natural
necessities and continually redefines, elaborates and adds analytical categories as it
gets closer to specific conjunctures and explores the contingent overdetermination of
the underlying tendencies and countertendencies of the complex capital relation’.
‘Method of articulation’ as well is ever so implicit in regulation theory. One chief
intimation of this method within it is the hierarchy of concepts in all regulationist
research. In more substantive terms, regulation theory is part of the historical
materialist network, especially on the basis of its prinse en compte to the political
economy of capitalism. ‘Thus, proceding from Marx’s more abstract-simple claims in
Capital about the generic features of capitalism and its basic crisis tendencies, first-
generation work studied capitalism at more concrete-complex levels of abstraction’.
And, fourth, regulation theorists rehearse empirical research on the changing
economic and extra-economic forms and mechanisms which, though always partially
and pro tempore, ‘secure capital’s reproduction as a social relation’(Jessop 2006:16-
8).
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