ABSTRACT
German social scientists have a long tradition of institutional analysis going from Max Weber to economics with Volkswirschaft or institutional economics. The German model had a difficult time with Fordism but found a modicum of success with it. Similarly, it encounters lean production with a full embrace of some concepts and a rather tenuous distance on others. The Parisian or French “regulation approach” was a theory that developed in the 1980s and 1990s in an institutional and Marxian vein to explain the system of capitalism at that time. The productive models approach is much broader that typical lean production models. It has a generous portion of political economy with institutions and questions of finance and accumulation of capital. The Productive Models school comes out of Regulation Theory, which is a neo- or institutional-Marxist theory not about simple government regulation but rather about the rules of the capitalist system that shape production and business in general.
