Regulation School

The Regulation School (French: l'école de la régulation) is a group of writers on political economy and economics whose origins can be traced to France in the early 1970s where economic instability and stagflation were rampant in the French economy. The term régulation was coined by Frenchman Destanne de Bernis who aimed to use the approach as a system theory to bring Marxian economic analysis up to date. They are influenced by structural Marxism, the Annales School, and institutionalism among others and sought to present the emergence of new economic (and hence, social) forms in terms of tensions existing within old arrangements. Since they are interested in how historically specific system of capital accumulation is 'regularized' (i.e. stabilized), their approach is called "regulation approach" or "regulation theory". Though this approach originated in Michel Aglietta's monograph, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (Verso, 1976) and popularized by other Parisians such as Robert Boyer, the school membership goes well beyond the so-called Parisian School: Grenoble School, German School, Amsterdam School, British radical geographers, Social Structure of Accumulation School (US), and neo-Gramscian school, etc.