Re-Stating the Problem of Regulation and Re-Regulating the Local State

Economy and Society

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1995, Pages 387-407

  Hay, Colin ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

crisis; failure; local governance; post Fordism; Regulation; state

Indexed keywords

GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE; LOCAL STATE; POST-FORDISM; REGULATION THEORY; THEORETICAL STUDIES;

EID: 0029546674     PISSN: 03085147     EISSN: 14695766     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03085149500000016     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. On the notion of the integral economy and its relation to Gramsci’s conception of the integral state (from which my use of the notion integral politics is derived) see Jessop (1993a).In the context of this paper I prefer the more generic notion of integral politics to Gramsci's notion of the integral state which might be seen to privilege political dynamics at the level of the national state.
2. Since capitalism is inherently contradictory and prone to failure it is impossible to identify periods of capitalist accumulation in which contradictions are in fact absent. However, periods of sustained capitalist accumulation and economic growth do periodically s diment as a regime of accumulation and a mode of social regulation develop in complementarity. 1; such phases of capitalist development, the symptoms of the underlying and inherent contradictions are successfully displaced or deferred such that they do not directly threatencontinued capital accumuiation in the short to medium term. This, then, can be conven ently referred to as a period more-or-less lacking in contradiction, aperiodofstasis (see Goodwin and Painter 1993: 2-5; Lipietz 1993: 117).
3. At this point it might be protested that, with the tendential regionalization and internationalization ofprocesses of capitalist accumulation (Budd 1993: 9-10; Dunford 1990.
4. There is some evidence to suggest that Britain is somewhat ‘out of step’with these developments in moving towards greater political centralization at a time of generally increasing local autonomy and decentralization in Europe (Blair 1991; Crouch and Marquand 1989; Goldsmith and Newton 1988; Norton 1991; Stoker 1991;).
5. On the structural coupling of systems see Jessop (1990: 327–328,358–360).
6. It is important to note the contingent relationship between the existence of the symptoms of economic failure and perceptions of crisis. The present conjuncture in Britain is one of profound state and economic failure, yet it is clearly not one in which there is a predominant perceived crisis of the structures of the state (as distinct, say, from a perceived crisis of governmental competence). What this suggests is the current opportunity for the left to mobilize perceptions of a crisis of the state capable of finding resonance with individuals’ various experiences of state and economic failure. Thus far, however, the Labour Party has consistently failed to avail itself of this opportunity, preferring to indulge the politics of Thatcherite revisionism (Hay 1994d).
7. It is imvortant to note that the imvosition of a new state vroiect and accumulation, strategy need not necessarily resolve the contradictions of the pre-existing structures. State Projects are responses to constructionsofcrisis.not directely to the contradictions and failures that give rise to them. Similarly, the development of a new accumulation strategy need not represent the consolidation of a new regime of accumulation and associated mode of social regulation. In both respects the Thatcherite project is a case in point.
8. Or at least a break-down of the complementarity between a regime of accumulation and a mode of (social) regulation.
9. Here it is important to stress once again the need for close, theoretically informed research if we are to adjudicate between these competing theoretical models.
10. This is not to suggest that there was not in fact a ‘fiscal crisis’ (more accurately fiscalfailure) of the local state. Such fiscal failure, however, did not enable decisive intervention at the local level. Rather, it was coopted in the New Right’s construction of the crisis of the central state as a crisis of overextension and ungovernability. The restructuring of the local state was thus a response to this crisis at the level of the central state, not a series of specific local responses to a crisis at the level of the local state.
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