theories

Despite very different starting points and relatively diverse objects of enquiry, from the mid-1980s it has become increasingly evident to a few practitioners from both camps that the evolutionary and regulationist research programmes share some important ‘building blocks’ and that a more systematic comparison of the two types of analysis would be mutually enriching. (See also Coriat and Dosi, 1998, for a more detailed discussion of what follows.)

Régulation theory was developed essentially to study a very challenging specific issue. In fact it was intended to furnish theoretical tools and interpretative constructs to account for a particular form of crisis (stagflation) in the 1970s and the transition from sustained growth to ‘structural crises’. The challenge of such an interpretation has been that crises had to be analysed in their endogenous drivers, and not only as outcomes of external shocks (Boyer, 1986a; Coriat, 1994b). Conversely, the contemporary ‘evolutionary’ research programme emerged in the late 1960s as an attempt to account for processes of economic growth fuelled by endogenous technical innovation and grounded in ‘bounded rational’ notion of agency.