Regulation Theory Analysis

Regulation theory analysis is an institutional-macroeconomic framework developed by the French Regulation School — above all by Michel Aglietta in A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (1979) and Robert Boyer in The Regulation School (1990) — to explain how capitalism, despite its inherent crisis tendencies, manages to reproduce itself and sustain growth for extended periods. Its central distinction is between a regime of accumulation (a stable macroeconomic pattern linking production, investment, and consumption) and a mode of regulation (the ensemble of institutional forms, norms, and habits that make that pattern cohere). When a regime of accumulation and a compatible mode of regulation lock together — as in postwar Fordism, where mass production was matched by mass consumption through a productivity-indexed wage — capitalism enjoys a long phase of stability. When the institutional forms can no longer contain the contradictions of the accumulation pattern, the framework diagnoses a structural crisis and a search for a new model, as in the crisis of Fordism and the transition toward post-Fordism.