Compare methods

	Regulation Theory Analysis	Varieties of Capitalism Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	2001
Originator	Michel Aglietta & Robert Boyer (French Regulation School)	Peter A. Hall & David Soskice
Type	Institutional-macroeconomic framework	Comparative institutional analysis framework
Seminal source	Aglietta, M. (1979). A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. New Left Books / Verso. ISBN: 9781859842225	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	Regulation School Analysis, Theory of Regulation, Accumulation Regime Analysis, Parisian Regulation Approach	VoC Analysis, Varieties of Capitalism Framework, Hall-Soskice Framework, Comparative Capitalisms Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) analysis is a firm-centered comparative framework, set out by Peter A. Hall and David Soskice in their 2001 edited volume, for understanding why advanced capitalist economies are organized in systematically different ways. Its central move is to place the firm at the heart of the analysis and to ask how firms resolve the coordination problems they face with workers, owners, suppliers, and one another. The framework distinguishes two ideal types — Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) such as the United States and United Kingdom, where firms coordinate primarily through competitive markets, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) such as Germany and Japan, where firms coordinate strategically through non-market institutions — and argues that institutions in different spheres reinforce one another to produce distinct, durable, and internally coherent national models with their own comparative institutional advantages.