Regulation theory
조절이론
A current of political economy founded in France in the 1970s by Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, Alain Lipietz and others. It explains why capitalism, despite its contradictions and tendency to crisis, can grow fairly steadily for decades by pairing a "regime of accumulation", the way production, distribution and consumption mesh to expand capital, with a "mode of regulation", the set of institutions, norms and state policies that sustain it. It interpreted the post-war golden age as a Fordist regime of accumulation joining mass production to mass consumption, and the crisis of the 1970s as a structural crisis of that regime. Régulation here does not mean government regulation but the way social relations settle into a stable pattern.
In depth
Marxists hold that capitalism falls into crisis again and again because of contradictions such as the falling rate of profit or overproduction. Why, then, did Western capitalism grow fast for nearly thirty years after 1945 without a major slump, and why did that growth stop abruptly in the early 1970s? Regulation theory began from these two questions. In the early 1970s France suffered economic instability and stagflation, and researchers in administrative bodies such as the national statistics institute INSEE set out to find why the growth of the Trente Glorieuses had stalled.
The word "regulation" invites misunderstanding. The first to use the French term régulation in economics was Gérard Destanne de Bernis, who meant to bring Marxian economic analysis up to date as a systems theory. The British political scientist Bob Jessop remarked that it might have been better translated as "regularization" or "normalization" than as government regulation, since the question is how the conflictual, crisis-ridden process of capital accumulation comes for a time to run like a normal course. The school drew on structural Marxism, the Annales School, institutionalism, Karl Polanyi and Charles Bettelheim.
Its starting point is the book Michel Aglietta drew from his doctoral thesis, Régulation et crises du capitalisme: l'expérience des États-Unis (1976; in English A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience). Aglietta analysed how American capitalism had managed the conflict between labour and capital over the long term, and Robert Boyer, who extended the approach, became the school's other pillar. Boyer defined it as "the study of the transformation of social relations, which creates new forms, both economic and non-economic".
Two concepts are central. A "regime of accumulation" is the way production, circulation, consumption and distribution are organised so as to expand capital while keeping the economy stable over time. Lipietz described the Fordist regime of accumulation as mass production, a proportionate share-out of value added, and a consequent stability in firms' profitability, with plant used at full capacity and full employment. A "mode of regulation" is the set of laws, norms, forms of state and policy practices that let the regime work. Five "institutional forms" are usually named: the form of competition, the money form, the form of the state, the wage relation (how wages and employment are set and labour organised) and the form of insertion into the world economy. When the two fit, growth continues; when they clash, crisis follows. The scheme parallels Marx's account of historical change as driven by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.
With these concepts the school divides the history of capitalism. The nineteenth century paired "extensive accumulation", drawing in capital and labour in mass, with "competitive regulation", in which market competition adjusted everything. Between the wars came "intensive accumulation without mass consumption": Taylorism raised productivity sharply but popular consumption did not keep pace. In John Kenneth Galbraith's figures, US productivity rose by 43 percent between 1919 and 1929 while wages stagnated. Regulation theory sees the crash of 1929 as a crisis of the regime of accumulation produced by that mismatch. After the Second World War the Trente Glorieuses established Fordism, "intensive accumulation with mass consumption", sustained by collective bargaining that turned productivity gains into wage rises, the Keynesian state and the Bretton Woods system.
The school also ranks crises. Exogenous crises come from outside events; endogenous or cyclical crises clear the imbalances built up in a boom without major change to the institutional forms; a crisis of the mode of regulation is one that cannot be halted without changing the institutional forms; a crisis of the regime of accumulation is one in which long-term growth cannot continue without overturning them; and a crisis of the mode of development is the collapse of the system. The crash of 1929 was both a crisis of the mode of regulation and of the regime of accumulation, and the crisis of the 1970s is read as the break-up of the Fordist mode of regulation. As the Annales historian Ernest Labrousse put it, "every society has the crises of its structure".
From the 1980s regulation theory extended its research to firms, industrial sectors, regions and economies beyond France and the United States, such as South Korea, Chile, Japan and Algeria. For the newly industrialising countries Lipietz distinguished "peripheral Fordism", where a real process of development had begun, from "peripheral Taylorism", which used low-wage labour without social advances. Late twentieth-century capitalism was divided into market-led (Anglo-Saxon), meso-corporatist (Japan), social-democratic (Scandinavia) and state-led (France and other Latin countries) models. What came after Fordism set off the debate on post-Fordism; Boyer characterised the later period as "extensive accumulation with mass consumption", but whether a new finance-led mode of regulation has formed remains an open question within the school. Aglietta himself moved on to money, international finance and the critique of shareholder value.
The school spread beyond Paris to the Grenoble School, the German School, the Amsterdam School, British radical geographers, the US Social Structure of Accumulation School and the neo-Gramscians. Criticism followed. In "The Regulation Approach: Theory and History" (New Left Review, 1991), Robert Brenner and Mark Glick summarised the regulationists as denying that capitalism can be understood through a single set of laws from its inception to its end, seeing instead a succession of phases distinguished by institutional forms; they noted that the school's relationship to Marxism was unclear and examined its historical account. Against the theory of post-Fordism, others replied that Fordism was not in crisis but simply evolving, or that mass production and flexible specialisation coexist within one industry. Regulationists answer that the theory is a tool of analysis, not of prediction, for studying the coherence of institutions and economic dynamics.