World Systems Theory

11 Key excerpts on "World Systems Theory"

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  Encyclopedia of Identity

  • Ronald L. Jackson II, Ronald L. Jackson(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  World systems theorists agree that society’s division of labor is best characterized by a ruling capital class (the core), which dominates a subordinate, exploited class (the periphery and semi-periphery). World systems theorists use the language of surplus value, capital accumulation, and uneven exchange to discuss social dynamics 895 World Systems Theory within the system. World systems theorists also draw upon Lucácsian and Gramscian notions of class consciousness and hegemony in order to reveal the powerful role ideas play in the world economy. Foremost, world systems theorists advo-cate for a socialist solution to the ills of the modern capitalist order. Following brands of development theory popu-lar at its emergence, world systems theorists oppose theories of modernization that assume the nation-state is the main agent in the struggle for modernization and that there is one trajectory that all polities must follow. Instead, world systems theorists view varying polities as interdependent and in flux. Likewise, they emphasize underdevel-opment as a form of avertable socioeconomic exploitation. World systems theorists adopt the language of dependency theory—terms that high-light the uneven social relations between core and peripheral states. However, they augment tradi-tional dependency theory with recognition of a liminal state that core and periphery move in and out of (the semi-periphery). Finally, WST is drawn from major concepts in cyclical economics and Annales School historical studies. World systems theorists are particularly indebted to Joseph Schumpeter and Nikolai Kondratiev, two economists focused on rise-and-fall intervals pertaining to seismic economic shifts, for their critical expansion/constriction view of social history.

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  Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World

  Social movements, networks and hierarchies

  • Athina Karatzogianni, Andrew Robinson(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  2 World-system theory

  This chapter explains the world-system perspective and provides theories on global development and structural crisis. This refers to structural crisis in the world-system, and in the periphery. The chapter also discusses the state in terms of failure, transformation, capitalism and the state, and the transnational capitalist state. It includes problems of state power versus market and the state’s role in global development. Another section explores the promotion of polyarchy, the imperial executive, ambiguities of media hegemony and the state as a war-machine. The final section looks at structural cycles in the world-system, American and British hegemony, Empire and hegemonic transition, and attempting to theorise the system’s future.

  Explaining world-systems analysis

  World-systems analysis is constructed as a long-term type of thinking in antagonism with ‘royal science’. Wallerstein argues that thinking in world-system terms requires ‘unthinking’ much of what one has learnt from the educational system and media (2004: xii). Historical knowledge as episteme has been written with or without the history of peoples and with or without the presence of archives (2004:5). Any other history describing the Other, for example Orientalism and anthropology, are viewed as about particularities (2004:9). History was written under a Western lens, developed to incorporate the Other into the narrative of Western history.

  For Wallerstein, world-system theory is based on a macro-perspectival understanding of history. It understands the system as a hierarchical apparatus, with a core of ‘advanced’ countries exploiting scarce technologies or patents to secure a systematic advantage, a semi-periphery of industrialised countries specialising in manufacturing, and a periphery – containing most of the global South. In a classic assertion, Cardoso similarly argued that corporations seek to maintain export of profits not only through technological monopolies but also ‘through the payment of licenses, patents, royalties and related items’ (Cardoso and Faletto 1979:91). Similarly, Samir Amin has recently argued that

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  Semiperipheral Development and Foreign Policy

  The Cases of Greece and Spain

  • M. Fatih Tayfur(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  th century within which the cycles and trends and social action has occurred (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1996: 2). In the historical evolution of the world-system, Hopkins and Wallerstein identify six such distinguishable, but not separable, domains: the interstate system, the structure of the world production, the structure of the world labour force, the patterns of the human welfare, the social cohesion of states, and the structures of knowledge. These properties can be studied in their own right, or in terms of their effects on the development of national societies. However none of these properties has developed in isolation from the others, and thus any change in any one of them directly influences the others. Indeed, they form an imperfect organic whole.

  Modern world-system analysis is basically synchronic; it investigates the structural relations among different societies within a given time period (Bergersen, 1980: 6). In this way, modern world-system analysis tries to understand the question of how nations are interrelated with each other in the world-economy. The concepts of core-periphery relations, the division of labour, unequal exchange, and so forth are the main concerns of modern world-system analysis in explaining the interconnections among nations and long-term social changes in the capitalist world-system. In Wallerstein's words, "if there is one thing which distinguishes a world-system perspective from any other, it is its insistence that the unit of analysis is a world-system defined in terms of economic processes and links, and not any units defined in terms of judicial, political, cultural, geological etc., criteria" (Hopkins, 1977 quoted in Bergersen, 1980: 8).

  Nevertheless, the world-system perspective claims that economics and politics are not separate phenomena. A social system can only be understood by analysing how both power and production/wealth are organised. In this context, it looks at the political economy of the modern world-system, which focuses on the interaction and interdependence between economic and political activities. In other words, the world-system school investigates the "specific ways in which economic and political action are intertwined within the capitalist world-economy" (Chase-Dunn, 1989: 107). Accordingly, the world-system school argues that the interstate system, which is composed of unequally powerful and competing states, is the political body of the capitalist world-economy, and that the capitalist institutions of this system are central to the maintenance and reproduction of the interstate system, and vice versa (Chase-Dunn, 1989: 107). The interstate system is a creation and integral part of the modern world-system, and "above all [it] is a matrix of reciprocal recognitions of the (limited) sovereignty of each of the states, a framework that has been (more or less) enforced by the stronger on the weaker and by the strong on each other" (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1996: 2).

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  An Introduction To The World-system Perspective

  Second Edition

  • Thomas R Shannon(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The world-system view that the periphery has been incorporated into a capitalist world-system and that peripheral societies are thus “essentially capitalist” is a controversial one among mainstream Marxist scholars. As we have seen, it requires that one broaden the definition of capitalism beyond circumstances in which free wage labor prevails. But the world-system approach (if it does not lead to a neglect of internal factors) represents a theoretical improvement over previous Marxist theorizing about the periphery. The world-system view is more consistent with the evidence concerning the extent to which traditional economic and social structures were transformed during the colonial period. (This view also avoids the pitfall of modernization theory, which sees the problems of the periphery primarily in terms of its degree of traditionalism or historical backwardness.) The world-system notion of different forms of capitalist labor control in the periphery allows for a more precise, parsimonious description of different economic systems in the periphery and thereby avoids awkward, imprecise, and complex efforts to define seemingly endless modes of production simultaneously operating in a single system of political-economy.

  Despite its overemphasis on economic explanations, world-system theory does argue for a necessary (and reciprocal) relationship between capitalism and the interstate system. Although the theory's account of this relationship may not be adequate, the concurrent emergence of both systems strongly suggests that such a connection does exist. To their credit, world-system theorists address the issue. Most conventional theorists of international relations may consider specific sources of international tension generated by economic competition, but they have curiously ignored the general connection between capitalism and the interstate system.

  During the past decade, contributions by world-system theorists have demonstrated the flexibility of the approach in accommodating valid criticism as well as new historical evidence, substantive concerns, and questions. World-system theorists have not retreated into a single dogma espoused by one or a few leading theorists. Rather, world-system analysis has proven itself to be a relatively dynamic, theoretically diverse perspective, able to include a number of theoretical approaches and substantive concerns. Such flexibility should allow the world-system perspective to continue to evolve into an even more lively and contentious interdisciplinary subfield in which theory is refined and modified rather than fixed and defended.

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  The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century

  Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

  • Ramón Grosfoguel, Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel, Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 173 engage the contributions of postcolonial theory. I briefly summarize these assumptions to indicate the frame around which much of the post-critique is organized. Arguing against both modernization theory and dependency theory, where nation-states are reified social entities as well as sites of action and change, the world-systems paradigm moves away from considering nation- states as “relatively independent units whose level of development is deter- mined by the presence or absence of particular conditions—either the at- tributes of individuals or those of the autonomous nation-state. Instead, nation-states are assumed to be subunits whose political structures are con- tained within a larger economic structure that is incorporated into a his- torically unique network of societies” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1967: 39). The holism identified by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (1967) is emphasized as well by Robert Bach more than a decade later, where he argues that capitalism arose only once; it was a “world” system from its inception and theoretically “global” in its projected scope (Bach 1980: 295). This foundational claim, the notion of a single system, situates the distinctiveness of the world-systems approach: “If there is one thing which distinguishes a world-system perspective from any other, it is its insistence that the unit of analysis is a world-system defined in terms of economic processes and links, and not any units defined in terms of jurid- ical, political, cultural, geological, etc., criteria” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977: 123; emphasis in original).

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  Economic Cycles and Social Movements

  Past, Present and Future

  • Eric Mielants, Katsiaryna Bardos, Katsiaryna Salavei Bardos(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  longue durée, there has been a constant process of spatial differentiation, a manifestation of the uneven ability of relevant actors (e.g., workers, capitalists, rulers) to protect and enhance their relative command over resources and well-being. Such spatial reconfigurations are not generally acknowledged in the relevant literature, hence the main argument of this contribution: the processes, activities, and spaces of differentiation in the world-system have always been in flux, and thereby should be established through empirical research rather than reifying categorical assumptions.

  What Has World-Systems Analysis Meant by “Core” and “Periphery”?

  In the 1970s, world-systems scholars critically engaged both modernization and dependency theories by respectively arguing that the world-economy featured a growing gap between those at the top (core) and at the bottom (periphery) of a world division of labor and a stable third cluster (the semiperiphery) permanently situated between core and periphery (Wallerstein 1974b, 1979; Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977; Chase-Dunn and Rubinson 1977). But there has been an analytical bifurcation in the exploration of the attendant concepts. At times, authors have emphasized that each cluster of countries in this tripartite structure results from the mix of changing economic activities contained within territorial boundaries. Along these lines, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein argued that through various mechanisms, some economic activities (core-like) produced comparatively high profits and thereby derived the greater share of the wealth generated by the world division of labor. Other economic activities (peripheral) featured low-profits and derived the least benefits from the world division of labor. Semiperipheral areas are characterized by a more or less even mix of core and peripheral activities. Such a depiction, emphasizing world-historical specificities, tends to emphasize change over time in the economic activities providing access to greater or lesser shares of wealth (e.g., textile manufacturing had been a “core” activity at one point in time but eventually became “peripheralized”), in the geographical location of these activities (e.g., countries and areas may “move” between zones), and in the specific mechanisms producing unequal distributional outcomes (e.g., colonialism may have played a role at one point in time, but eventually became less relevant).2

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  World System History

  The Social Science of Long-Term Change

  • Robert. A Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, George Modelski, Robert. A Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, George Modelski(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part IGeneral perspectives on world system history

  Passage contains an image

  1 The five thousand year world system in theory and praxis

  Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K.Gills

  We posit a world system continuity thesis. Our purpose is to help replace Eurocentric history and social science by a more humanocentric and eventually also ecocentric approach. Our guiding idea is the continuous history and development of a single world system in Afro-Eurasia for at least 5,000 years. This world historical-social scientific approach challenges received studies that attribute ‘the rise of the West’ to European exceptionalism. In our view, the rise to dominance of the West is only a recent, and perhaps a passing event.

  Our approach is unabashedly historical materialist. Its main theoretical premises are: (1) the existence and development of the world system stretches back not just five hundred but some five thousand years; (2) the world economy and its long-distance trade relations form a centerpiece of this world system; (3) the process of capital accumulation is the motor force of world system history; (4) the center-periphery structure is one of the characteristics of the world system; (5) alternation between hegemony and rivalry is depictive of the world system, although system wide hegemony has been rare or non-existent; and (6) long economic cycles of ascending and descending phases underlie economic growth in the world system.

  Theoretical categories and operational definitions

  The world system

  Per contra Wallerstein (1974a), we believe that the existence and development of the same world system in which we live stretches back five thousand years or more. According to Wallerstein and unlike our world system (without a hyphen), world-systems (with hyphen and sometimes plural) need not be even world wide. Braudel and Wallerstein both stress the difference between world economy/ system and world-economy/system. ‘The world economy is an expression applied to the whole world…A world-economy only concerns a fragment of the world, an economically autonomous section’ (Braudel 1984:20–1). ‘Immanuel Wallerstein tells us that he arrived at the theory of the world-economy while looking for the largest units of measurement which would still be coherent’ (Braudel 1984:70).

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  Mass Education, Global Capital, and the World

  The Theoretical Lenses of István Mészáros and Immanuel Wallerstein

  • T. Griffiths, R. Imre(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Consistent with Wallerstein’s position with respect to orthodox Marxist perspectives, the thesis of transition toward an alternative but uncertain world-system is quite distinctive, rejecting accounts of national societies progressively moving through sequential stages of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism. As Mielants (2012, 59) highlighted in his summary of the debates over the nature and temporal location of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, world-systems analysis is in the unusual position of being criticized for being Marxist by liberal and Smithian theorists, while “Orthodox Marxists claim no affiliation with the perspective.”

  In short, the thesis here is that regular cycles of expansion and contraction are characteristic of the capitalist world-economy, as leading and usually monopolistic industries in core zones fuel growth and accumulate high levels of capital, before increased competition and overproduction lead to declining rates of profit and recession. It is through this regular cycle of expansion and contraction that industries are relocated to other zones of the world-economy, in search of cheaper labor to restore rates of profit, accounting for a series of shifts over time of industrial activity from the core to the semi-periphery and periphery as the core areas invest in new “quasi-monopolies” that drive the next cycle of expansion and capital accumulation.

  Perhaps the most emblematic example is textile production, which “circa 1800 . . . was possibly the preeminent core-like production process . . . [but which] . . . by 2000 . . . was manifestly one of the least profitable peripheral production processes” (Wallerstein: 2004c, 29). While each cycle restores the world-economy to some sort of equilibrium, Wallerstein’s perspective is that the recurring cycles contribute to longer-term secular trends, whereby structural contradictions that are associated with these cycles and characteristic of the capitalist system as a totality are moving toward their absolute limit, or asymptote, and the “disintegration” of the prevailing historical world-system.

  Wallerstein’s theorizing has identified several dimensions of the systemic crisis, leading to a phase of crisis and transition toward an uncertain alternative. Most crucial is an identified long-term trend of pressures on the systemic imperative to maximize the accumulation of capital. The cyclical and longer-term pressure on profits and capital accumulation has multiple sources. First, Wallerstein’s analysis repeatedly cites the orthodox tension faced by capital seeking to reduce wages as a cost of production to boost profits, and to increase rates of consumption and so demand as a strategy to maintain profits, the latter requiring higher wages. This involves a contradictory requirement for low-rates of fully proletarianized labor to support low-wages, and higher rates to increase demand and consumption. The relocation of production to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas involves the move to areas with lower wages supported by semi-proletarianized labor (Wallerstein: 1979), such that “it becomes very clear that geographical expansion of the world-system served to counterbalance the profit-reducing process of increased proletarianization, by incorporating new work-forces destined to be semi-proletarianized” (Wallerstein: 1983, 39).

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  Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World

  System, Scale, Culture

  • David Palumbo-Liu, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Bruce Robbins, David Palumbo-Liu, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Bruce Robbins(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Your true friends are not the ones who politely withhold that scrutiny. They are the one who force you to make the case. A response that would look better in public would have to engage more directly with the motives and results of Wallerstein’s work—not necessarily in its own terms, but at least as translated into a cross-disciplinary ethical lingua franca. Such translation would not be difficult. As seen with non- blaminG the SyStem 49 specialist eyes, Wallerstein’s research seems to have had a relatively simple and compelling motivation: a desire to understand the sad state of the post-colonial world in the 1970s, the failure of seemingly victorious movements of national liberation to change the basic political and economic inequality between developed and underdeveloped countries. What was needed, it seemed, was a deeper level of causality. In search of it, Wallerstein went back to the acquisition of European political and economic superiority in the Early Modern period, when a division was established, he argued, be-tween core and periphery. The modern world-system that he saw taking shape in that period worked to ensure the systematic transfer of surplus from the periphery to the core without military conquest but merely by means of market exchange. The result, in other words, was a theory of power at the global scale, a theory that was all the more persuasive because it accounted not only for how the present inequality of power and resources at the level of the planet came to exist, but also, crucially, for how it managed to per-petuate itself despite seemingly dramatic clashes and reversals, like the move-ments of national independence. This theory does not interpellate social scientists alone. Anyone recogniz-ing and wishing to change the present continuing state of global inequality, whatever her or his discipline, would seem to have an unavoidable interest in such a theory.

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  Social Welfare in Global Context

  • James Midgley(Author)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Like the dependency writers, Amin believes that a decisive break with capitalism is needed if the developing countries are to prosper. Wallerstein does not think that this is possible. Instead, Third World governments need to understand the way the system works and seize the chances created by the flow of global capital. The fact that previously impoverished nations in East Asia have been able to experience rapid industrial development is due to the fluidity of these forces and the ability of astute governments to influence capital flows. Their ability to attract investment 30 INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL WELFARE AND THE GLOBAL SYSTEM capital and to adopt export-led development strategies has successfully exploited the opportunities afforded by the global economy. World Systems Theory has not only transcended the limitations of the dependency school but has provided powerful insights into the way the global economy operates. In addition, its basic ideas are regularly expressed in popular journalism and political arguments where the consequences of economic globalization are interpreted in very different ways. While many believe that the integration of the world's economy will enhance prosperity for all, others are pessimistic about the future. Many progressives in the industrial countries are worried about the way economic globalization will affect employment opportunities and standards of living. Dimensions of Globalization Economic Aspects Today, the term globalization is largely used in an economic sense. But it also has political, technological, cultural, and social connotations. Used in the eco-nomic sense, the term has acquired a strong negative connotation reflecting growing concern about the effects of international economic forces on incomes, jobs, and economic stability. This concern is particularly intense in the Western industrial nations where it is widely believed that globalization is destroying local industries.

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  Unity in Diversity

  • Nicolas A. Nyiri, Rod Preece, Nicolas A. Nyiri, Rod Preece(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  Meanwhile, some of us are in the process of applying GST to the development of a systems model for the analysis of political geography. To illustrate my remarks I thought it may be useful to show how I have structured a course at Queen's on Environments and Technology -- and the role played by GST in its theoretical formu-lation and empirical demonstration. (It will take the form of a book in the next year by Braziller as a study of a systems approach to societies at different historical ages and organizational stages.) 32 Unity in Diversity Our systems model endeavors to account for both: (a) systemic levels of socio-cultural organization; and (b) cybernetic processes that demonstrate (i) systemic self-stabilization within a given level of organization and integration; and (ii) systemic transformation so as to result in a socio-cultural quantum leap across an environment frontier. The question of delineating the number and categories of organizational levels depends upon one's particular purpose. I approached this question from the basic standpoint of the man-environment nexus because, of course, sociocultural systems are open and exhibit feedback stabilization with their overall environment. Regarded horizontally, each level depicts transactions occurring between the physical environmental factors, the stage of manipulative equilibration (as made possible by existing technologies and science), transportation facilities, communication networks, and the paradigmatic character and organization of the given society in which the political process (the authoritative allocation of values) functions. It is a geo-political model inasmuch as it correlates specific levels of societal and political organization with precise stages -- or dimensions -- of environmental control as shown in the expleted-and impleted-space columns.

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