The Doctrine of Inevitability

[Bill Cochrane]

G'dday
Patrick Bond writes
>But I agree that the new regime of accumulation required to set
>things right isn't immediately on the horizon (though some folk have
>argued that Japan can become a hegemon once its economic deadwood is
>cleared). What are the regulationists who posited a post-fordist mode
>saying now? My doctoral supervisor (your favourite, David Harvey)
>wrote in 1989, in The Condition of Postmodernity, that the flexible
>regime was embryonic but potentially there, but he was never too
>convinced about that. I haven't followed the regulationists more
>recently... what's their story about the way forward?
If you want to catch up on what the Regulation School is up to try Gordon
Mcleods piece in Progress in Human Geography 21.4 pp 530-553 " Globalizing
Parisian thought waves: recent advances in the study of social regulation,
politics, discourse and space" or if you read french there is a recent
'encyclopedia' of the regulation approach with contributions from most of
the major francophone's. There is of course Ash Amins excellent reader,
cleverly entitled Post-Fordism: A reader (1994). On the specific topic of
Post - Fordism the recent work of Tickell and Peck is very good, IMHO,
basically  taking the position that talk of the stabilization of a post
fordist RA is very premature and probably not theoretically admissable
within the RS framework, arguing instead that what we have witnesssed since
the demise of Fordism is largely the politics of crisis ie that neo-liberal
reforms havent laid the basis for a return to a, relatively, prolonged
period of stable reproduction and accumulation. If any one is particularly
interested in cites for any of the stuff mentioned above let me know and
I'll get them, my beloved Endnote library is on another machine so I cannt
get at them right now.
Cheers
Bill Cochrane
Anyone interested might try looking at the Lettre de la régulation web site at
http://melpomene.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/Lregul/

Bill Cochrane           	|  email: billc at waikato.ac.nz
Archivist               	|  URL: http://www2.waikato.ac.nz/~jadm
Political Science
University of Waikato
New Zealand