I have been a fan of Carlotta Perez’s work since reading her book; her account of five phases of capitalism with dominant technologies and morphing socio/political structures seems to explain so much. I have just started Mitchell & Fazi’s “Reclaiming the State”, and in their pursuit of why the State was lost, they talk about the “regulation theory school” which states that capitalism co-exists with other oppressive forces and that, in their words, capitalism “develops across its history through a series of discontinuous stages”. They see Michael Aglietta as its first proponent, and it would seem that the word Regulation comes from his 1979 paper, “A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience”. (Why did we not do this stuff at University?) More to read!
Regulation