Vidal - Plight of postfordism - WES - FINAL.pdf (246.83 kB)
Postfordism as a dysfunctional accumulation regime: A comparative analysis of the USA, the UK and Germany
The article seeks to reanimate the early regulation theory project of building Marxist political economy through the development of mid-range institutional theory. The concept of a mode of regulation - central to the Parisian wing of regulation theory - is rejected in favour of a distinction between functional and dysfunctional accumulation regimes. The Fordist regime of accumulation provided a unique institutional context allowing an extraordinary combination of high profits, rising real wages and strong GDP growth. In contrast, the postfordist regime is shown to be inherently dysfunctional, characterized by manifest tendencies toward stagnation and associated regressive trends in work and employment relations. A comparative analysis of profit rates, wage shares, growth rates and debt in the USA, UK and Germany shows that the single model of postfordism as a dysfunctional accumulation regime fits all three countries, although with important differences in forms of dysfunctionality. © The Author(s) 2013.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Work, Employment and SocietyVolume
27Issue
3Pages
451 - 471Citation
VIDAL, M., 2013. Postfordism as a dysfunctional accumulation regime: A comparative analysis of the USA, the UK and Germany. Work, Employment and Society, 27(3), pp. 451-471.Publisher
© The authors. Published by SAGE JournalsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Work, Employment and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017013481876ISSN
0950-0170Publisher version
Language
- en