Commentary

Abstract

Robert Boyer is one of a group of contemporary French political economists ( including inter allia Michael Aglietta, Alain Lipietz, and Jacques Mistral) who have enriched our understanding of the postwar experience of the advanced capitalist economies on both a theoretical and an empirical level. Their theoretical contributions are grounded in the concept of a “mode of regulation”, with which they characterize the institutional framework that shapes the trajectory of a capitalist economy over an extended period of time. This concept bears a close relationship to the concept of a “social structure of accumulation”, introduction by David Gordon and utilized by a school of contemporary American political economists (including inter alia Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards, Michael Reich, and myself) to analyze the succession of major booms and crises that form a “longwave” pattern of capitalist ecomonic development