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This paper argues that the emergence, assertion and failure of the financialisation regime was enabled by the political construction of the small firm. Key shifts in societal relations, the formulation of new agendas and the extension of new forms of political, economic and social rights were asserted by political elites through the instrument of the political construct of the small firm. The paper argues that this is because of the dominant specificity model that characterises the small firm, and demonstrates how the denaturing of the small firm has allowed political elites to assert invariant behaviours to resolve historically specific contradictions in capitalist accumulation. The argument is demonstrated through parliamentary debates and through the redefinition of individual risk as household risk through the 2002 Enterprise Act.

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This article investigates the problem of legitimation in the European Union (EU) through an examination of EU small and medium sized enterprise (SME) policy. While SMEs are broadly perceived to be central to the prosperity of the EU, by definition they are anomalous to the economic order upon which the EU was established. The development of EU SME policy has therefore been the construction of a policy in a hostile political environment. Beetham's legitimation of power is used to identify discrete dialogues of rules, representations and beliefs, which help to map the development of the policy. These discrete dialogues highlight the tensions that arose during the institutionalization of the policy. The method employs different strands of institutional analysis to unpack systemic bias and so reveal specific failures of the EU to accommodate SMEs. In addition to describing the key characteristics of SME policy, the article also introduces a framework for policy analysis that combines sociological conceptions of legitimacy with constructivist approaches to the EU.

This paper discusses the challenges to Regulation Theory (RT) that are presented by post-national modes of accumulation. It begins by introducing to RT's core analytical foundations a mode of social regulation and its explanation of the regime of accumulation. The paper then examines how, despite clear asymmetries, the stability of the international system supported domestic accumulation. Because of this, RT only really addressed the international from the perspective of the nation state, and with only limited engagement with North-South issues. While some authors did address the international system, the greater instability of the 1970s combined domestic regime change with greater international insecurity. Up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, new political ideologies and economic ideals challenged the nation-based Keynesian compromise while greater trade from the South and greater financial liberalisation fundamentally altered the international environment. Various approaches to the post-Fordist international regime are discussed, including that of a financial regime, and the conclusion identifies some of the areas for future research.