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CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION
Over three brief passages in his Regulation School: An Introduction(1990), Boyer
nears closest to this study’s argument. In his words, certain outsiders would consider
‘the growing number of national case studies and the discovery of a degree of
heterogeneity in institutional forms as a sign of the weakness of the theoretical model
and the reduction of the explanatory schema to a mere description’; and another bevy
of bystanders would ‘argue that the regulation approach offers an underdetermined
model of the economy which requires the introduction of other explanatory
factors’(ibid.:23). Former however are not explicit about the terms in which further
theoretical and empirical research within a certain paradigm would not be perforce
antithetical to its former ‘explanatory schema’. In fact, research on and ‘discovery of
a degree of heterogeneity in institutional forms’, that supposedly abates the
explanatory thoroughness of that prolusory heuristic, can even, to that effect, be the
ultimate intimation of an all along resort to descriptivism within that paradigm. The
sheer equivocation here is that a heuristic schema would be explanatory as long as it is
not descriptive and/or when further research is a priori redundant. In short,
explanatory models are always about the degree of aboutissement in theory. Second
reproach as well is under a fardel of equivocation; ‘an underdetermined model’ must
resort to the ‘introduction of other explanatory factors’, but the délaissement of the
said model is equally optional. Still for both cohorts of adversaries, immediately ‘the
question is posed of the consistency and homogeneity of the different works that claim
to use the regulation approach’(ibid.).
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