What is Regulation School?

Regulation School is one branch in economics, which was born in 1970s (Post-Fordism period) influenced by Marxist tradition of thinking (through Louis Althusser).

Pioneered by French prominent scholars, Robert Boyer and Michel Aglietta, this school has a "double criticism", since it criticize neo-classical paradigm on their perfect rationality inducing the institution-free conception on the market competition. And in the same time it also modify the "rigidity" of Marxist perspective by accepting the different regime of accumulation and hence the different regime of institutions.

It is widely accepted that this school have flourished in French and European universities, but actually in United States dispersed-thinking coinciding with the regulation school such as Douglass North, Masahiko Aoki were also developing. As well as, scholars like H.A Simon and Williamson are recognized as persons who promulgate a new institutionalism approach that is relatively comparable in certain senses with Regulation School.

Young scholars in French, like André Orleons and Olivier Favereau, are considerably important in developing the school by accentuating on specific aspects in economics, such as finance (behavioural finance) and labour market (contract theory in labour market or financial market).

Robert Boyer in his article "Les Institutions dans la théorie de la régulation" explains that regulation school considers five principal form of instutionals and regime of accumulation on:
1. Monetary regime
2. Employment mode
3. Competition model
4. International regime
5. State model

Several issues related to these five mode are: constitutional order, institution theory, routines, conventions and habitus.

Regulation school gives major attention on "crisis", which should be important cycle on the long-run, sustainability, mode of accumulation.

Accordingly, Regulation School is actually very vast field of studies, which coincides with several issues on economics and business, such as monetary studies, financial crisis, corporate governance, organizational behaviour, corporate strategy and so on.

It should be important to develop a series of research agenda to address relevant problems related to major concern of Regulation School.