Twenty Years of the Regulation Approach: Has it been worth it?

The regulation approach (hereafter 'RA') has enjoyed acclaim for some twenty years as a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and evolutionary economics and the more general development of 'new political economy'. Its several schools all adopt a heterodox account of capital accumulation and emphasise the latter's socially embedded, socially regularized nature. They focus on the historically contingent ensembles of complementary economic and extra-economic mechanisms and practices which enable relatively stable accumulation to occur over relatively long periods despite the fundamental contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and conflicts generated by capitalism (on different schools, see Jessop 1990). These ideas have been applied most famously to 'Fordism ' and 'post-Fordism ' and extensive interest therein from the mid-80s to mid-90s certainly contributed to the RA's popularity. But even the initial Parisian work addressed other topics and subsequent work has seen a real deepening and widening of the regulation approach far beyond issues of Fordism and/or post-Fordism. These more recent trends are my primary concern below. Since a short survey cannot cover all relevant material, I will provide a general account of the RA's successiv