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Although, Aglietta studied both the economic mode of economic regulation and social
mode of economic regulation, regulationists have since increasingly studied the social
mode of economic regulation, which ‘operates primarily as a heuristic for studying the
socially embedded, socially regularized nature of economic activities’(Jessop
1995:316). Even when regulationists are not at one ‘on how the social mode of
economic regulation is best interpreted and how it relates to the economic mode of
economic regulation, there is at least broad agreement that the basic objects of
regulation are connected to the capital relation in its integral economic sense’ and/or
‘the self-valorisation of capital in and through régulation’(ibid.:317-8). Theories of
governance, on the other hand, analyse ‘a wide range of ‘social modes of social co-
ordination’ as opposed to ‘narrowly political(sovereign, juridico-political,
bureaucratic or at least hierarchically organized) modes of social organization’. As
such, these are a form of integral political heuristic that research ‘the resolution of
(para-)political problems(in the sense of problems of collective goal attainment or the
realization of collective purposes) in and through specific configurations of
governmental(hierarchical) and extra-governmental(non-hierarchical) institutions,
organizations and practices’(ibid.). For Jessop, the very contradiction in-built within
an integral economic heuristic is an integral economism in that although regulationists
are privy to the fact that ‘form problematizes the function’, often the forms under
study in regulation theory are economic forms. As he argues
[i]f one accepts that regulation and governance are not conceptually identical
and actually refer to different objects, processes and practices, there is no
reason to anticipate that attempts to re-regularize an (integral)economic object
will solve problems of (integral)political governability. It also points to
possible substantive dilemmas, conflicts and contradictions between a
response to economic and political crisis which is more oriented to solving
problems of accumulation and one which is more oriented to issues of (para-
)political governability ... Likewise, whether an emerging mode of governance
is subsequently linked to a new mode of regulation will also depend on the
nature of the structural coupling between political and economic processes,
i.e., on the appropriateness of the mode of governance to integral economic as
well as governability problems. In this sense, although regulation problems
certainly provide a context for identifying and solving governance problems,
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