The World-System as Unit of Analysis

Past Contributions and Future Advances

Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351589017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

World-system analyses have recast the study of between- and within-nation country inequality as constituent aspects of a single field of inquiry: the study of inequality and social stratification as processes that always have been global in their very essence. World-system analyses maintain that global social stratification pivots around institutional arrangements that render distributional outcomes as simultaneously "national," "gendered," "racialized," and "global" processes.

This book takes stock of some of the enduring theoretical and empirical contributions of a world-system perspective, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry and discussion. Some chapters reassess the scope and methodologies of world-system analysis around several key problems (e.g., the spatial and temporal boundaries of global commodity chains, the construction and challenge of various dimensions of social inequality, systemic and antisystemic social movements). Others take stock of areas in which world-systems are promoting methodological innovation and/or generating useful global data, and identify questions that demand additional methodological and empirical attention for future research.

In different ways, this book help us to critically reconsider some of the enduring legacies within a world-system perspective (such as Karl Polanyi's concept of the "double movement," or the distinction drawn by Giovanni Arrighi or Immanuel Wallerstein between systemic and antisystemic movements). As argued by many of the authors in this book, a world-historical approach calls for greater sensitivity to the manifold ways in which conceptual boundaries change over time and space. Taking seriously the issue of unit of analysis, this book explores critically productive ways for better understanding global patterns of continuity and change.

1
By Way of Introduction

Selected Discussions on the Scope and Empirics of World-System Analysis

Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz

The 40th Conference on the Political Economy of the World-System provided a unique opportunity to take stock of some of the enduring theoretical and empirical contributions of this perspective, and to identify promising directions for future inquiry and discussion. To this end, the conference brought together scholars offering analytical syntheses of major fields of inquiry (e.g., the spatial and temporal boundaries of global commodity chains, the construction and challenge of various dimensions of social inequality, systemic and antisystemic social movements). We also welcomed empirical studies providing fresh insights and perspectives on these fields and key substantive premises of world-system research, regardless of whether the aim was to endorse, challenge, or reformulate existing arguments. The chapters in this book are salient examples of work addressing this broad range of issues.

Several chapters in this volume are centrally concerned with reassessing the scope and methodologies of world-system analysis. In particular, as emphasized by David Baronov in Chapter 2, world-system scholars historically have problematized the notion of unit of analysis in ways that often have been ignored elsewhere in the social sciences. For Baronov, in fact, “the radical ontological insights essential to this original paradigm shift” are what gave a world-system perspective its “coherence [as] a distinct [and holistic] scholarly project.”

David Baronov distinguishes such a holistic project from other modes of research and interpretation that might self-identify as world-systemic, but that he would label as “analytical” rather than “holistic.” These “analytical” approaches claim to follow a world-system interpretation and use elements of such a terminology (e.g., distinguishing between “core” and “peripheral” nations), but in fact move away from understanding the world-economy as a unit of analysis, operationalize variables as “categorical classifications” rather than “interactive processes,” and assume that narrow spatial and temporal units (e.g., “the part not the whole,” such as nations) can be treated “as cases that may serve as units of analysis unto themselves.” Drawing on the work of Terence K. Hopkins, Baronov argues that by following these paths, “analytical” approaches fail to follow the key ontological insights and premises of world-system analysis.

Compatible with Baronov’s call for following the key ontological insights and premises of world-systems analysis, and in particular recovering past methodological insights by Terence K. Hopkins, Kelvin Santiago-Valles in Chapter 3 calls for understanding “‘race’ and/or ‘gender’… as inescapably relevant to historically concrete labor.” For Santiago-Valles, “[i]n the historical long-term, capitalism repeatedly separates, degrades, and hierarchically transforms demographic and ecological differences between and within human groups.” For this reason,

[a]s counterintuitive as it may sound, “ethno-race” and “sex/gender” do not actually exist as distinguishable forms of being, any more than “social class” or “age grade” does, i.e., as constitutive elements of labor and more generally of capitalism as a historical system.

Advancing a somewhat different position, Chapter 4 by Ramón Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants argues that world-system analysis generally has paid little attention to “other structural dimensions of civilizations such as forms of political authority, epistemic structures of knowledge, religious hierarchies, gender/sexual social relations, etc.” In so doing, according to Grosfoguel and Mielants, world-system analyses have in their own way also narrowed their units of analysis by focusing primarily on economic processes and interactions. Paying greater attention to other dimensions of civilization would provide greater insights into current cultural and political transformations, but also bring academic inquiry into closer contact with broader communities.

World-system scholars also emphasize the importance of critically assessing the types of evidence and methodologies that are most adequate to apprehend the world as a whole, over time, as the relevant unit of analysis. For this reason, the conference also aimed to take stock of areas in which world-systems are promoting methodological innovation and/or generating useful global data, and to identify questions that demand additional methodological and empirical attention going forward.

For example, focusing on world income distributions, Sahan Savas Karatasli and Sefika Kumral argue in Chapter 5 that crises of hegemony over time have been accompanied by major shifts in these distributions. In the shift from Dutch to British hegemony, the world income distribution shifted from a unimodal to a bimodal pattern. In the shift from British to US hegemony, in turn, the distribution shifted from a bimodal to a trimodal pattern. In the contemporary period, according to the authors, a decline of US hegemony has been accompanied by a shift in the distribution to a quadrimodal pattern. Thus, Karatasli and Kumral suggest that rather than experiencing a great convergence in the income of populations across the world, today we are witnessing new patterns of divergence, marked by historically specific bifurcations between different clusters of nations (and epicenters of wealth accumulation). This type of narrative represents precisely what Baronov would characterize as a holistic approach to world-economic analysis.

Daniel Pasciuti and Corey Payne tackle overlapping empirical questions in Chapter 6. Are we experiencing a great convergence? Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi, the authors advance the notion that mobility is restricted within any system organized around “relational processes of exploitation and relational processes of exclusion.” Replicating some of the data and methodological procedures originally used by Arrighi and Drangel (1986), Pasciuti and Payne argue that that “despite significant absolute changes in wealth and income since the turn of the twentieth century, the position of nation-states vis-à-vis other nation-states has remained mostly static.”

Earlier, this chapter discussed Baronov’s criticism of superficial categorical classifications that draw on world-system terminologies but not their ontological premises. A clear example of such a use of categorical classification can be found in how raw material production is often assumed to prevail in “peripheral” nations, and counterposed to the more advanced “manufacturing” or “industrial activities” that supposedly characterize core nations. Ciccantell and Gellert in Chapter 7 avoid such a simplistic portrayal, mapping the complex longue durée of coal production. They suggest that particularly during the ascendance of nations into the core of the world-economy, their growth required the creation of “generative sectors” facilitating the production and consumption of raw materials. From their account, it seems clear that this type of raw material production has not followed a simple pattern of gradual shift from core to peripheral areas of the world-economy. Thus, their study of coal production as a global commodity chain (GCC) underlines the importance of spatial and temporal inequalities in the distribution of the costs and rewards of production, distribution, and consumption.

World-system analyses have been recasting the study of between- and within-nation country inequality as constituent aspects of a single field of inquiry: the study of inequality and social stratification as processes that always have been global in their very essence (that is, not simply the interaction of otherwise “autonomous” processes involving, for example, “national wage stratification” on one dimension, “gender” in another, “race” in a third, “global inequality” on a fourth, and so on). Global social stratification pivots around institutional arrangements that render distributional outcomes as simultaneously “national,” “gendered,” “racialized,” and “global” processes.

Perhaps focusing on what Baronov would describe as analytical approaches within a world-system perspective, Anja Weiß in Chapter 8 argues that within the latter, “while the theoretical focus is on global linkages and interregional institutions, empirical studies continue to focus on the nation-state and on relations between nation-states.” Instead, she calls for an analytical approach that considers “a plurality of analytically distinct contexts, namely in territorial containers, socially differentiated contexts, and politically contested contexts.” Moreover, while skeptical of state-centered approaches, Weiß observes that “territorially contained context relations remain important for marginalized and poor populations who depend on public goods available in the form of materialized action settings.”

The remaining chapters explore how a world-system perspective might be used to provide an alternative perspective on patterns of continuity and change, and on how social movements periodically lead us to reevaluate the boundaries between the “systemic” and “antisystemic.” Brendan McQuade, in Chapter 9, argues that from a world-system perspective, there is “a complex and mutually constituting association of systemic reproduction and antisystemic transformation engendered among particular relations of domination and the struggles to transform them.” Rather than aiming at constructing “reified, post hoc” categorical classification of movements as “systemic” or “antisystemic,” according to McQuade, a world-system perspective on social movements “brings process and multiplicity at the center of our analyses.” Again, such an emphasis fits well with Baronov’s emphasis on the holistic dimensions of world-system analysis. To advance such a perspective, McQuade builds upon Arrighi’s (1994) discussion of passive revolutions, but calls for broadening the scope of discussion to include right-wing, conservative and/or counterrevolutionary movements and politics (rather than merely the “progressive” or “revolutionary” versions of social movements).

A somewhat different perspective is provided by Devparna Roy in Chapter 10. Roy draws on Nancy Fraser (2013) to argue that rather than Polanyi’s “Double Movement,” the contemporary world-economy faces a “Triple Movement”—simultaneously engaging advocates of marketization, adherents of social protection, and partisans of emancipation, with shifting alliances between these three poles. Moreover, Roy seeks to modify the usual adoption of Karl Polanyi’s ideas by arguing that progressive social movements can be, at times, pro-market: progressive social movements can and do “make instrumental use of markets to counter both exploitation and domination.” For Roy,

the key question for contemporary progressive politics is to analyze how markets (including those in certain fictitious commodities) can be made to work in the interest of all—not just in the interests of the stably employed, but also unwaged caregivers, the precariat, and the non-workers.

Such an interpretation echoes as well in Chapter 11, where Robert K. Schaeffer explores the “exit” strategies developed by social movements in Africa. On the one hand, the persistence of “immiseration, scarcity, and marginalization associated with low-level equilibrium traps” has led to migration, according to Schaeffer “one of the [non-violent and relatively more inclusive] ‘repertoires’ that social movements have used to make social change.” In Schaeffer’s account, as earlier in Roy’s, a social movement aims at gaining greater inclusion in markets, in this instance by relying on available networks to physically move from more insecure to more secure areas of the world-economy. On the other hand, social movements in Africa have adopted the form of violent and patriarchal “sectarian male militias” that seek to seize resources through the exclusion (or elimination) of others. Schaeffer concludes that such developments have exacerbated low-level equilibrium traps, further contributing to the marginalization of “ungovernable spaces” from global markets, and hence, further promoting migration as an exit strategy.

In different ways, the last three chapters help us to critically reconsider the ways in which enduring legacies within a world-system perspective (such as Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement,” or the distinction drawn by Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein between systemic and antisystemic movements) may bias world-system research—for example, toward reading all forms of resistance to markets as “antisystemic,” and/or all movements relying on market mechanisms as “systemic.” In fact, as discussed in these chapters, a world-historical approach calls for greater sensitivity to the manifold ways in which such boundaries change over time and space. Then again, taking seriously the issue of unit of analysis, this is precisely the type of sensitivities that a world-system perspective seeks to render critically productive.

2
The Analytical-Holistic Divide within World-System Analysis

David Baronov

Since its emergence in the mid-1970s with the seminal work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), world-system analysis has remained one of the most influential world-historical perspectives of the past few decades and served as an apt harbinger for the current infatuation with globalization scholarship. The fundamental point of departure marking world-system analysis was its framing the capitalist world-system as a singular unit of analysis and site of social change. Indeed, it is this operative premise and the ontological implications that follow therefrom that, in part, distinguishes world-system research methodologically as a mode of inquiry from other approaches to the study of global-historical capitalism. Over time, however, this distinction has eroded as world-system scholars have adopted modes of investigation whose ontological premises vis-à-vis the capitalist world-system have increasingly borrowed from conventional, positivist social science inquiry. This trend is not new and has resulted from time to time in calls to formalize world-system scholarship and to model this work along the lines of the deductive-nomological social sciences. Though such mimicry might earn world-system scholarship the approval of some of its rivals, it is argued here that abandonment of certain core ontological commitments risks marginalizing the role of world-systems as an alternative, critical paradigm for the analysis of historical capitalism.

While the balance of world-system contributors refrain from overtly addressing ontological matters, two broad tendencies predominate—those proceeding from more analytical precepts and those hewing to a more holistic perspective.¹ In this respect, the contributions of Chase-Dunn, Rubinson, and others favoring a more analytical approach have provided a valuable service in laying bare important conceptual differences within the world-system literature.² Nonetheless, for some time, world-system scholarship has suffered from a pronounced dearth of explicit conversations about such matters. This essay is an attempt to engage others in such debates and to, thereby, better distinguish a world-system approach for the study of historical capitalism from other interpretations. Importantly, the contrast I draw here between analytical and holistic approaches is carried out in heuristic fashion. Rather than representing categorical or mutually exclusive positions, each approach is best understood as a set of tendencies that lie at different points along a common continuum. Proceeding in this fashion allows us to then make more visible those features most salient for an analytical and a holistic approach to world-system analysis.

From the start, Wallerstein and his colleagues pointedly framed world-system as an alternative perspective that offered both a critique of developmental-modernization theory and a critical paradigm shift for the analysis of historical capitalism.³ The paradigm shift envisioned world-system as a unique conceptual perspective that introduced new frameworks of analysis not merely for correcting a mistaken developmental model (or model of capitalism more generally) but for reframing how development (and capitalism) was to be conceived. It is this critical paradigm shift that we thus explore here, contrasting a holistic world-system approach with an increasingly popular analytical approach for the study of disparate global phenomena. It is argued, ultimately, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 By way of Introduction: Selected Discussions on the Scope and Empirics of World-System Analysis
• 2 The Analytical-Holistic Divide Within World-System Analysis
• 3 Coercion and Concrete Labor Within Historical Capitalism: Reexamining Intersectionality Theory
• 4 Modern World-System or Capitalist Civilization?
• 5 Great Convergence or the Third Great Divergence? Changes in the Global Distribution of Wealth, 1500–2008
• 6 Illusion in Crisis? World-Economic and Zonal Volatility, 1975–2013
• 7 The Longue Durée and Raw Materialism of Coal: Against the So-Called Death of Coal
• 8 Contextualizing Global Inequalities: A Sociological Approach
• 9 (Anti)Systemic Movements: Hegemony, the Passive Revolution, and (Counter)Revolutions
• 10 Brokering Markets for Labor and Nature: Social Movements and the Transition to a Just Economy
• 11 Exit Strategies: Marginalization, Social Movements, and Exit From the Capitalist World-System
• Bibliography
• Index