ructures began to topple. Instead of attracting capital to finance production and consumption, unwieldy state, corporate, and labor relations gave way to Neoliberalisms "race to the bottom" logic of cost-minimizing behavior, effectively annihilating the predictable virtuous cycle of growth that had maintained itself since the end of World War II.Thus Fordism was undermined by two inherent contradictions. First, the tension between the globalizing forces of accumulation, aided by the emergence of an unregulated credit and trade system, and the Keynesian welfare state undercut the basis of the Fordist mode of social and political regulation. Second, and connected to the first, the rigid Fordist mode of accumulation was overwhelmed by the breakout of capitalisms inherent "bottom-line logic" and the increasingly narrow focus on short-term production techniques and transitory consumption patterns.Two regulationist interpretations of the post-Fordist era thus arise. The first, espoused by many Neoclassicists and policymakers, is that Neoliberalism itself the primacy of the disembedded free market constitutes a new, distinct, and indeed global regime of accumulation. In this formulation, social concerns are adjunct to the stable, competitive functioning of the market. At the same time, the markets corresponding laws dictate the mode of social and political regulation. Peck and Tickell cogently outline the features of what many tout as the emerging "institutional fix":o The wage relation: a recomposition of the collective laborer and a resegmentation of the labor market, involving skill polarization, flexibilization in internal and external labor markets, decentralized pay bargaining, new forms of social wage.o The enterprise system: a shift towards flatter, leaner and more flexible forms of corporate organization, involving increased contracting out of functions, greater intra-corporate competition, emphasis on continual innovation, ...
