Regulation School

The Regulation School, or Ecole de la Regulation, is a school of political economy that originated in France in the early 1970s among economists including Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer and Alain Lipietz, in response to the breakdown of postwar economic stability. It applies ideas from systems theory to update Marxian analysis of capitalism, arguing that capital accumulation is never automatically stable but must be actively stabilized, period by period, through historically specific institutions and social compromises. The school organizes this analysis around two linked concepts: a regime of accumulation, the pattern by which production and consumption grow together over a period, and a mode of regulation, the ensemble of institutional forms, such as the wage relation and the monetary regime, that keep a given regime of accumulation coherent for a time. Its best-known application is the analysis of Fordism, the mass-production, mass-consumption regime that stabilized growth across advanced economies from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s, and of that regime's later crisis. The school remains an active current within heterodox political economy, particularly in France and continental Europe. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/