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which have been undergoing a process of refinement since the early 1970s’(Boyer
2002:15). Mavroudeas(1999) however studies this polemical heuristic mechanism in
regulationist research as middle-range theory. Some middle-range theories all
together excoriate abstract foundations as infeasible and resort to inductive-deductive
method of positivism. Others at best rehearse a positivistic abstractionist method of
form analysis. The latter has two sub-categories, both equally desultory.
Structural forms as intermediate concepts are part of this middle-range method of
regulation theory. These, in Coriat(1994)’s words, ‘have gradually acquired the status
of genuinely intermediate categories in the following sense: as between pure theory
and invariants on the one hand, and observed and modelled facts on the other, they
provide the indispensable tools we were searching for in order to be able to conceive
changes and their specifities, over and above constants’. In Aglietta’s early study,
structural forms are foremostly about the ‘organic unity’ of social forms; in fact ‘the
law of reproduction of the wage relation in the space of social forms is the principle of
the organic unity of all these basic forms. We shall call such a unity a structural form.
A structural form, then, is a mode of cohesion of basic social forms arising from the
development of one and the same basic social relation’(1979:188). This basic social
relation is rapport salarial or the wage relation; for Aglietta, it is the structural
invariant of capitalist mode of production. A Theory of Capitalist Régulation then
argued ‘structural forms evolve with the material transformations of the mode of
production’(ibid.:189), so that the basis for analysis of ‘mode of cohesion of basic
social forms’ was none other than Marxist theory. Marxist or not, the concept of
structural form already substantially considered an intermediate level of theory as
integral to the analysis of capitalist régulation and/or ‘this capacity for evolution’ of
the structural forms which ‘ensures social cohesion’(ibid.).
One could say, and Robert Brenner and Mark Glick certainly do say it, that regulation
theory’s ‘original intention was to grasp how networks of institutional forms, during
the successive epochs in which they held sway, have affected the expression of -or
actually modified- the underlying tendencies or laws of capital
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