Regulation Theory Analysis

A regime of accumulation is the macroeconomic pattern itself — the stable, reproducible relationship between how surplus is produced and how it is distributed and consumed that lets capital accumulation proceed over a long period (mass production matched by mass consumption, in the Fordist case). A mode of regulation is the institutional scaffolding that makes that pattern actually hold together: the ensemble of institutional forms, norms, rules, and habits — the wage-labor nexus, monetary regime, forms of competition, the state, and international insertion — that channel behavior so the regime reproduces itself. A regime needs a compatible mode of regulation to be stable; when they fit, growth is durable, and when they cease to cohere, a structural crisis follows.

Fordism names the postwar regime of accumulation built on assembly-line mass production with steadily rising productivity, coupled to mass consumption sustained by a wage-labor nexus that passed productivity gains through to wages via collective bargaining and the welfare state. Regulated by oligopolistic competition, credit money, and an interventionist (often Keynesian) state, it underwrote the long postwar boom. The crisis of Fordism, from the late 1960s and through the 1970s, set in as productivity growth slowed, profits were squeezed, the productivity-wage bargain broke down, and international competition and monetary instability intensified. Regulation theorists read this not as a normal recession but as a structural crisis of the whole model, opening the contested transition toward post-Fordist and later finance-led regimes.

Both are institutional accounts of capitalism, but they differ in level and lineage. Regulation theory is a macro-historical, heterodox (Marxian-institutionalist) framework focused on how accumulation regimes are stabilized over long periods by modes of regulation and why they fall into structural crisis; its unit is the growth model or era. Varieties of Capitalism is a firm-centered, rational-choice comparative framework focused on how firms coordinate across institutional spheres and how that yields comparative advantage; its unit is the national institutional configuration. Regulation theory is more dynamic and crisis-oriented and asks how capitalism reproduces and transforms itself; VoC is more comparative-static and efficiency-oriented. The contemporary growth-model literature explicitly bridges the two.