Diffusion and Success as Sources of Crisis

The industrialised economies are distinguished by the pressures they create for innovation, their succession of economic crises, the geographical expansion of their markets and the internationalisation of production. These tendencies lead from success to the gradual exhaustion of the potential to expand, especially for the production model and the dominant mode of regulation. Hence, even if crisis appears to be the outcome of unforeseen events or accidents, such as the increased price of oil in 1973 or the stock market crash of 1929, these only have a lasting and structural impact if the logic of the mode of regulation is itself destabilised and loses its coherence. The model of postwar Fordist growth was not immune to this rule, for its principles, the organisational forms they implied and the employment relations they generated proved increasingly counter-productive (Figure 2.1).