Robert Boyer

The 2019 prize winner is Professor Robert Boyer based on his three books, Boyer, R. and Yamada, T. (eds.) Japanese Capitalism in Crisis: A Régulationist Interpretation, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, Boyer, R., Uemura, H. and Isogai, A. (eds.) Diversity and Transformations of Asian Capitalisms, Routledge, Abingdon, 2012. En Français:Capitalismes asiatiques: deversité et transformations, Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2015, and Boyer, R., Uemura, H., Yamada, T. and Song, L. (eds.) Evolving Diversity and Interdependence of Capitalisms: Transformations of Regional Integration in EU and Asia, Springer, Tokyo, 2018. For additional reference, Boyer, R. Économie politique des capitalismes: Theorié de la régulation et des crises, La Découverte, 2015.

Robert Boyer was a professor at Centre pour la recherche économique et ses applications (CEPREMAP), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and École d'économie de Paris, also served as a research director at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). He is now working as a fellow at the Institut des Amériques in Paris. Here we award the JSPE-Routledge Book Prize to him for his three publications: (1) Boyer, R. and Yamada, T. (eds.) Japanese Capitalism in Crisis: A Régulationist Interpretation, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, (2) Boyer, R., Uemura, H. and Isogai, A. (eds.) Diversity and Transformations of Asian Capitalisms,Routledge, Abingdon, 2012. En Français: Capitalismes asiatiques: deversité et transformations, Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2015, and (3) Boyer, R., Uemura, H., Yamada, T. and Song, L. (eds.) Evolving Diversity and Interdependence of Capitalisms: Transformations of Regional Integration in EU and Asia, Springer, Tokyo, 2018. During the selection process, we also referred to his French publication, Économie politique des capitalismes: Theorié de la régulation et des crises.

Professor Boyer has been well-known as a leader in the field of the political economy of capitalism by the "Régulation theory" (hereinafter abbreviated "RT"), which originates in France, since the 1980s. After Michel Aglietta established the RT in the book Régulation et crise du capitalisme in 1976, he has been a prominent researcher in this school, making an enduring effort to develop the theory as well as expanding the scope of the application through the communication with various approaches in economics and others that are effective in investigating the varieties of capitalism and its transformation and evolution. Those include politics by A. Gramsci and N. Poulantzas, economic sociology by P. Bourdieu, and comparative historical analysis by K. Thelen. The above three publications are all founded upon the deepening core concepts of the RT and the development of researches in individual domains such as labor, finance, the state and international economy in the 1980s and 90s. He led an international research team to produce them under the collaboration with Asian researchers from Japan, China and Korea etc.

The discussions in these publications are outstanding not only in making full use of analytical methods of the RT which identifies itself as the economics of the temporal and spatial variability but also in its completeness as a systematic theory of political economy of capitalism by the régulationist approach to challenge neoclassical orthodoxy. These three can be regarded as compiled works of Professor Boyer’s long research of the RT through 20-year international collaborations. What is the essence of Professor Boyer’s political economy of capitalism? We can grasp it in the title of the French reference Économie politique des capitalismes: Theorié de la régulation et des crises. The core concepts of neoclassical orthodoxy are “market”, “economics”, “equilibrium” and “growth”; he replaces them with the concepts of “capitalism”, “political economy”, “régulation” and “crisis”. Through the radical critique of “market economics: the theory of equilibrium and growth”, he reconstructs the science of economy.

Professor Boyer has been a world leader in the field of political economy for half a century, and his field of study spreads widely to present an original framework of the political economy of capitalism with refined measures for the future. These achievements are unfolded in the collaborative publications with Asian researcher groups, the core members of which are Japanese researchers in JSPE. They richly merit the award of the 2019 JSPE Routledge Book Prize.