Regulation school

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The regulation school (French: l'école de la régulation) is a group of writers in political economy and economics whose origins can be traced to France in the early 1970s, where economic instability and stagflation were rampant in the French economy. The term régulation was coined by Frenchman Destanne de Bernis, who aimed to use the approach as a systems theory to bring Marxian economic analysis up to date.^[1] These writers are influenced by structural Marxism, the Annales School, institutionalism, Karl Polanyi's substantivist approach, and theory of Charles Bettelheim, among others, and sought to present the emergence of new economic (and hence social) forms in terms of tensions within existing arrangements. Since they are interested in how historically specific systems of capital accumulation are "regularized" or stabilized, their approach is called the "regulation approach" or "regulation theory". Although this approach originated in Michel Aglietta's monograph A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (Verso, 1976) and was popularized by other Parisians such as Robert Boyer,^[1] its membership goes well beyond the so-called Parisian School, extending to the Grenoble School, the German School, the Amsterdam School, British radical geographers, the US Social Structure of Accumulation School, and the neo-Gramscian school, among others.

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Institutions are essential parts of any society. Think about it. Police stations, schools, hospitals, businesses like Walmart and Trader Joe's are all core parts of the community. In a sense, they impose structure on how individuals behave. For example, if all the laws that exist in our community disappeared, would I still have a normal day? Probably not. People would be speeding down the street, looting my neighborhood coffee shop, and perhaps a stranger would be sleeping on my living room couch. All the things that I'm used to would be completely disrupted. Maybe a more reasonable example is, let's say all the schools had a new rule of no classes on Fridays. Then parents would have to figure out childcare for that day. Institutions and their rules definitively guide what we do. You may be thinking that you don't have a kid and maybe you don't need child care services. But in general, individuals are reliant on the institutions in their community. But is the reverse true? Do institutions need individuals? In general, they need lots of folks to contribute to allow them to function. But they don't typically need any one random individual. So there's a bit of an imbalance between institutions and individuals, if that makes sense. While they need individuals and are created by groups of individuals, they will continue even after the individual is gone. The concept of institutions may seem like a daunting idea. But try thinking of them as just a form fulfilling a need. Institutions meet the needs of society by filling expected roles and behaviors. For example, in order for a society to continue, it needs people year after year after year. The family institution makes sure that there will be people to carry on the next generation. We know society needs a way to keep people healthy. So you have the medical institution. And society even needs a way to encourage innovation and progress, so you have universities. There are two views of institutions-- a conservative view and a progressive view. The conservative view sees institutions as being natural positive byproducts of human nature. For example, the institution of hospitals forms naturally from the activities of humans and naturally benefits them. The progressive view takes the standpoint that institutions are artificial creations that need to be redesigned if they are to be helpful to humanity. So perhaps you could see businesses as potentially harming society if they aren't reined in. Now unfortunately, institution is one of those words that has a very different meaning to a sociologist than it does to the average person. We average people might think of just a business or corporation when we hear the word institution. A sociologist, on the other hand, thinks of social structures when they hear the word institution. They think of governments, families, hospitals, schools, the legal system, religion, as well as businesses. Each of those parts of society continues on without regard to any individual. Governments continue even after the people within them turn over. Families continue from one generation to the next. Laws continue on after the people who wrote them are long dead and buried. Hospitals, schools, businesses-- all continue past the time span of any individual and are not dependent on any one individual, either.

The regulation approach

Robert Boyer describes the broad theory as "The study of the transformation of social relations, which creates new forms- both economic and non-economic- organized in structures and reproducing a determinate structure, the mode of reproduction".^[2] This theory or approach looks at capitalist economies as a function of social and institutional systems and not just as government's role in the regulation of the economy, although the latter is a major part of the approach.

Regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation

Regulation theory discusses historical change of the political economy through two central concepts, "regime of accumulation or accumulation regime" (AR) and "mode of regulation" (MR). The concept of regime of accumulation allows theorists to analyze the way production, circulation, consumption, and distribution organize and expand capital in a way that stabilizes the economy over time. Alain Lipietz, in Towards a New Economic Order, describes the regime of accumulation of Fordism as composed of mass-producing, a proportionate share-out of value added, and a consequent stability in firm’s profitability, with the plant used at full capacity and full employment (p. 6).

An MR is a set of institutional laws, norms, forms of state, policy paradigms, and other practices that provide the context for the AR's operation. Typically, it is said that it comprises a money form, a competition form, a wage form, a state form, and an international regime, but it can encompass many more elements than these. Generally speaking, MRs support ARs by providing a conducive and supportive environment, in which the ARs are given guidelines that they should follow. In cases of tension between the two, a crisis may occur. Thus this approach parallels Marx's characterisation of historical change as driven by contradictions between the forces and the relations of production (see historical materialism).

Translation and definition

Bob Jessop summarises the difficulties of the term in Governing Capitalist Economies as follows: "The RA seeks to integrate analysis of political economy with analysis of civil society and or State to show how they interact to normalize the capital relation and govern the conflictual and crisis-mediated course of capital accumulation. In this sense, régulation might have been better and less mechanically translated as regularization or normalization" {Jessop, 2006, p.4}. Therefore, the term régulation does not necessarily translate well as "regulation". Regulation in the sense of government action does have a part in regulation theory.

History of modes of regulation

Robert Boyer distinguished two main modes of regulation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries:

The "mode of regulation of competition" (1850–1930). It consisted of a first mode of regulation, from 1850 to the beginning of the 20th century, that Boyer called "extensive mode of regulation", characterized by low productivity gains, important part of the output dedicated to equipments, and high competition. The second period is called "intensive mode of regulation without mass consumption", because it consists of high productivity gains (thanks to Taylorist methods) and the production of consumption commodities.
The "monopolist mode of regulation" (after 1930), characterized by high productivity and mass consumption. The Fordist system made possible a regular growth of economic output and an increase in income at the same time.

Crisis

Regulationist economists distinguish between cyclical and structural crises. They study only structural crises, which are the crises of a mode of regulation. From this distinction, they have formulated a typology of crises that accounts for various disarrangements in institutional configurations. According to its initial objective, which was to understand the rupture of the Fordist mode of regulation:

Exogenic crises are due to an external event; they can be very perturbing but cannot endanger the mode of regulation, and even less the mode of accumulation. Neoclassical economists (or economists of the school of rational anticipations) consider that all crises are exogenic.
Endogenous crises are cyclical crises that are necessary and inevitable, for they make it possible to cancel imbalances accumulated during the phase of expansion without major deterioration of institutional forms. These crises are inseparable from the operation of capitalism.
The crisis of the mode of regulation: unable to avoid a downward spiral, institutional forms and the ways the state intervenes in the economy must be modified. The best example is the crisis of 1929, where the free play of market forces and competition did not lead to a renewed phase of expansion.
The crisis of the mode of accumulation means that it is impossible to continue long-term growth without major upheaval of institutional forms. The crisis of 1929 is the best example: the interwar period marks the passage from a mode of accumulation characterised by mass production without mass consumption to a mode incorporating both mass production and mass consumption.

Current development

Since the 1980s, the Regulation school has developed research at other socio-economic levels: firms, markets and branches studies (food and agriculture, automotive, banking…); development and local regions ("regulation, sectors and territories" research workshop); developing countries or developed economies others than France and USA (South Korea, Chile, Belgium, Japan, Algeria, etc.): political economy of globalization (diversity of capitalisms, politics and firms...). By doing so, its methods now range from institutional macroeconomics to discourses analysis, with quantitative and qualitative methods.

Members of the Regulation School

^[6]^[7]^[8]

Notes

^ ^a ^b The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction (Columbia University Press, 1990)
^ The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction (Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 17
^ "Site du CEPREMAP".
^ "Jamie Peck - Canada Research Chair in Urban and Regional Political Economy". Archived from the original on 2010-01-07. Retrieved 2009-10-29.
^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-01-18. Retrieved 2023-01-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^ Edgell, Stephen; Gottfried, Heidi; Granter, Edward (2015). Fordism and the Golden Age of Atlantic Capitalism. doi:10.4135/9781473915206. ISBN 9781446280669. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
^ Vidal, Matt (June 2013). "Postfordism as a Dysfunctional Accumulation Regime". Work, Employment and Society. 27 (3): 451–471. doi:10.1177/0950017013481876. S2CID 55223929. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
^ "Incoherence and dysfunctionality in the institutional regulation of capitalism". Retrieved 16 November 2020.

References

Bob Jessop, Ngai-Ling Sum, Beyond The Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies In Their Place, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006.
Boyer, Robert, Saillard, Yves (Ed.), (2002), Régulation Theory. The State of the Art, Routledge, London & New-York.

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This page was last edited on 19 September 2023, at 13:44

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