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along ‘a renewal and reconstruction of the rapport salarial’(Grahl and Teague
2000:163).
In these terms, it is ‘necessary to create a coherent construct from elements that are
equally varied, or at least to establish various compatible formulations of the issues to
be studied’(Boyer 2002:19) as ‘theory informed understanding of time-changing
empirical patterns’ and/or regulation theory’s tripartite research is no longer a basis
for such a ‘coherent construct’ but a foothold for in-born contradictions in an at best
inadvertently ‘coherent construct’.
For Boyer, three levels of analysis at decreasing degrees of abstraction are integral to
the regulation theory(2002:38). The mode of production as a level of analysis is the
most abstract of the three. It is at this level that regulationists argue a theory of
macroeconomics must be a theory of accumulation of capital; however they do not
‘infer from this that there is a single invariable relation between the capitalist mode of
production and forms of accumulation’. At a second level, the Parisian theory studies
these variable patterns of growth as regimes of accumulation ‘according to the nature
and intensity of technological change, the volume and composition of demand and
workers’ life style’. Structural changes in these accumulation regimes are not
antithetical to the analysis of these as regular economic patterns; the latter is inclusive
of the regimes’ ‘evolution and potential crises’. A third level of analysis touch upon
the ‘specific configurations’ of social forms(ibid.). This is the level of institutional
and/or structural forms, and regulationists increasingly consider the consequences and
circumstances of structural endogenous change together with systematic coherence at
this level. Finally, and most concretely a mode of régulation
replaces the notion of static equilibrium with an analysis of dynamic processes
reducing disequilibria constantly caused by accumulation. It inserts markets
into a series of institutional arrangements that socialise both information and
behaviour and ... adopts a situated rationality, illuminated by a dense network
of institutions ... ensures the compatibility of a set of decentralised decisions,
without requiring agents to internalise the principles governing the overall
dynamic of the system(ibid.:41).
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