The evolutionist and the regulationist approaches

The evolutionist approach is founded on the study of institutions. Markets are viewed as specific, history-contingent institutions. The institutions mean various forms of organisations:

- Formal organisations (firms, trade unions, public institutions, state agencies, etc).

- Patterns of behaviour, shaped out of the routines, social conventions, ethical

codes.

- Constraints: formal and informal laws and moral prescriptions.

Following Coriat and Dosi (2002)2, we can set the main theoretical aims of

the evolutionist approach through some principles:

- Suggesting a dynamic approach: why and how a given phenomenon exists

(opposing to the existence theorem or to the functionalist explanations);

- Revealing the micro-foundations of what and why agents do;

- Using the idea of bounded rationality in an uncertain environment;

- Assuming heterogeneous agents with imperfect and incomplete knowledge and

path-depending learning;

- Assuming the economic process as a process of discovering, new behavioural patterns, new organizations, continuous change and various forms of novelty in the system;

- Taking into account collective interactions, within and outside markets, as

selection mechanisms that lead to differential evolution.

Institutionalists state that markets are institutional constructions, of which characteristics deeply affect collective output. Markets are not seen as only private places (the efficient manner of coordinating individual decisions, neo-classical and new-classical theories) or an alternative coordination system parallel to the internal organizations’ coordination process These mechanisms are associated with a configuration of wage relations, forms of competition, forms of governance of monetary and financial system, forms and aims of state interventions and international hierarchy. Usually, the evolutionists use the following framework in order to comprehend the 20th century United States performance:

- resource abundance and large market size permitting the longstanding strength in mass production and

- investment in higher education and in R&D leading to high technology industries Parallel to this evolutionist approach, the regulationist school suggests the following factors as the conditions for a regime of sustained growth in the century:

- mechanization and standardization of production;

- development of Fordist patterns of industrial organisation leading to the mass

production and mass consumption;

- mechanism of management of labour market (more conventional than

confrontational);

- oligopolistic structure of the markets (stability and development of firms);

- Keynesian policies and welfare State;

- Bretton Woods and emergence of a stable international hierarchy, favourable for

the US.

The hypothesis of institutional embeddedness of social behaviours does not mean a functional representative agent schema (Fordist firm, unionized worker, etc.). They are only pedagogical examples. A regime or mode of regulation is a main modality, in a temporally and geographically localized society, which insures the compatibility of separated individual decisions without necessarily requiring that agents are conscious of the dynamics of the system as a whole.