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Thereby, ‘the question’ is not substantially the real ‘consistency and homogeneity’ of
the regulation theory, but why ‘the question is posed of the consistency and
homogeneity’ of the regulationist research for those who are against as well as for
those who are all for the délaissement of the Parisian model. In short, ‘the reduction
of the explanatory schema to a mere description’ and regulation theory as an
‘underdetermined model’ are at best secondary to ‘the question’ of the segmental
open-endedness of regulation theory. This is foremostly so because the former
exactly touch upon the two circumstances in which open-endedness in theory may
rebound. First, explanatory schemas are always explanatory of certain phenomena
and/or mechanisms, and as such analysis of categories outside the formerly substantial
quaesitum of an explanatory schema still with the unchanged heuristic may afford an
‘underdetermined model’ in that this would be a fictively visionary openness via an
analytical precocity which is largely rhetorical. Secondly, heuristic infléchissement
within a certain explanatory schema for the analysis of sectors of the real not formerly
under study may increasingly resort to ad hoc provisos, which would then lower the
level of decisiveness within the said explanatory schema. This model of open-
endedness would indeed be a ‘reduction of the explanatory schema to a mere
description’.
In these terms, the very ‘question ... of the consistency and homogeneity’ of the
Parisian theory is in fact more about its ‘[inconsistent] consistency and
[heterogeneous] homogeneity’ than its real ‘consistency and homogeneity’. That is,
regulation theory has always rehearsed a ‘theory informed understanding of time-
changing empirical patterns’(Noel 1987) mostly of economic growth and crises across
industrialised economies; yet the abstract theoretical foundations for the analysis of
these stylised facts –time-changing empirical patterns- have been so far optional and
therefore multifarious(Marxist, Keynesian, Kaldorian etc.). Despite the eclecticism of
this method however, the regulationist analyses have not in the slightest had any
oblique consequences. In fact, Boyer almost brags that ‘régulation theory expanded in
methodological tools –giving the impression of explosive division- and yet
simultaneously produced a set of conclusions which were noticeably convergent and
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