Regulation School

A school of economic thought whch looks at diferent regimes of regulation in order to explain the evolution of capitalism as well as differences between countries. The interpretation of 'Cognitive Capitalism' draws on the finds of the Regulation School, while also critiquing and adapting it.

Evaluation

Bob Jessop:

"Bob Jessop in his introductory speech first explained the emergence of the Parisian regulation approach. He pointed out that those most strongly associated with RT, Michel Aglietta, Alain Lipietz and Rober Boyer, had not been trained as political scientists or economists at university level but came from polytechnicals and had worked in various institutions subordinate to the "Commissariat Général au Plan". They were technocrats fascinated by and busy with the production of diagrams, slow charts, timelines and data series.

Jessop highlighted one of the central achievements of the regulation approach, the identification of structural forms. RT was developed as a critique of neo-classical macroeconomics which understood the equilibrium between production and consumption as an automatic outcome of market forces. RT posed that the reproduction of capitalism was 'improbable' in the first place and that a kind of stability was achieved only through the emergence of 'structural forms' during the era of Fordism. Structural forms were the result of antagonistic forms of class struggle, but once those forms had settled in they were capable of important functions of mediation such as the mediation between production outcomes and consumption norms. Jessop listed five structural forms: wage, enterprise, money, state and the international regime.

Then Jessop went on to explain where RT failed and succeeded. It failed in economics, insofar as it could not replace neo-classical economics as the dominant paradigm in France. Although regulation approach theorists gained some level of influence on French governments, this influence waned in the long term. One reason for this failure that Jessop cited was that neo-liberalism had some very robust defence mechanism and that with its appearant success on the world scale French institutes involved with economic analysis such as CEPREMAP received less and less funding. Today, Jessop reprorted from a recent visit to Paris, even the building is in a sorry state and the major funding does not come from the French state but from corporations interested in long term planning scenarios. Many economists with leftist leanings have turned their backs to RT and are now leaning towards institutional economics which has non-Marxist origins.

According to Bob Jessop, RT's success and failure in social theory is even more paradoxical. Generally it can be said that RT made a big impact on the social sciences. The periodisation and the usage of the terms Fordism and Postfordism is an achievement of RT. The wide-spread reception of RT in the social sciences however, was based on its hybridisation and remix with an eclectic range of other theories through which the specificity of the regulation approach was lost. Or, to put it in more populistic terms, as one friend recently said, in the lefty art-scene today you have to use the term Postfordism to look cool, otherwise you just haven't got it. That the hybridisation of theories results in the dilution of some of the key original concepts is a well known fact and usually regrettable. It is, however, not always clear, what gets lost and what gets won." (http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1328)

More Information

The Regulation School: some documentation

Some recent articles and essays from a newsletter associated with the Regulation school, will give you an idea of the high quality and level of interest of their production:

1. On the concept of ‘worldwide public goods’, at http://www.upmf grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR48.pdf ;
2. the current phase of American hegemony is unsustainable, at http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR46.pdf ;
3. on the need to reconsider our outdated notions of productivity, which have no bearing on the current situation, at http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR43.pdf ;
4. an overview of intellectual property regimes and their evolution, at http://www.upmfgrenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/index.html