World-systems theory traces emerged in the 1970s. Its roots can be found in sociology, but it has developed into a highly interdisciplinary field.....
World-systems theory was aiming to replace modernization theory, which Wallerstein criticized for three reasons
- its focus on the nation state as the only unit of analysis
- its assumption that there is only a single path of evolutionary development for all countries
- its disregard of transnational structures that constrain local and national development.
There are three major predecessors of world-systems theory: the Annales school, the Marxist tradition, and the dependence theory. The Annales School tradition (represented most notably by Fernand Braudel) influenced Wallerstein to focusing on long-term processes and geo-ecological regions as unit of analysis. Marxism added a stress on social conflict, a focus on the capital accumulation process and competitive class struggles, a focus on a relevant totality, the transitory nature of social forms and a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction.
World-systems theory was also significantly influenced by dependency theory, a neo-Marxist explanation of development processes.
Other influences on the world-systems theory come from scholars such as Karl Polanyi, Nikolai Kondratiev[16] and Joseph Schumpeter (particularly their research on business cycles and the concepts of three basic modes of economic organization: reciprocal, redistributive, and market modes, which Wallerstein reframed into a discussion of mini systems, world empires, and world economies).
Wallerstein sees the development of the capitalist world economy as detrimental to a large proportion of the world's population. Wallerstein views the period since the 1970s as an "age of transition" that will give way to a future world system (or world systems) whose configuration cannot be determined in advance.
World-systems thinkers include Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, with major contributions by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Beverly Silver, Volker Bornschier, Janet Abu Lughod, Thomas D. Hall, Kunibert Raffer, Theotonio dos Santos, Dale Tomich, Jason W. Moore and others. In sociology, a primary alternative perspective is World Polity Theory, as formulated by John W. Meyer.
Dependency theory
World-systems analysis builds upon but also differs fundamentally from dependency theory. While accepting world inequality, the world market and imperialism as fundamental features of historical capitalism, Wallerstein broke with orthodox dependency theory's central proposition. For Wallerstein, core countries do not exploit poor countries for two basic reasons.
Firstly, core capitalists exploit workers in all zones of the capitalist world economy (not just the periphery) and therefore, the crucial redistribution between core and periphery is surplus value, not "wealth" or "resources" abstractly conceived. Secondly, core states do not exploit poor states, as dependency theory proposes, because capitalism is organised around an inter-regional and transnational division of labor rather than an international division of labour.
During the Industrial Revolution, for example, English capitalists exploited slaves (unfree workers) in the cotton zones of the American South, a peripheral region within a semiperipheral country, United States.
From a largely Weberian perspective, Fernando Henrique Cardoso described the main tenets of dependency theory as follows:
- There is a financial and technological penetration of the periphery and semi-periphery countries by the developed capitalist core countries.
- That produces an unbalanced economic structure within the peripheral societies and between them and the central countries.
- That leads to limitations upon self-sustained growth in the periphery.
- That helps the appearance of specific patterns of class relations.
- They require modifications in the role of the state to guarantee the functioning of the economy and the political articulation of a society, which contains, within itself, foci of inarticulateness and structural imbalance.
Dependency and world system theory propose that the poverty and backwardness of poor countries are caused by their peripheral position in the international division of labor. Since the capitalist world system evolved, the distinction between the central and the peripheral nations has grown and diverged. In recognizing a tripartite pattern in division of labor, world-systems analysis criticized dependency theory with its bimodal system of only cores and peripheries.
Immanuel Wallerstein
The best-known version of the world-systems approach was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein notes that world-systems analysis calls for an unidisciplinary historical social science and contends that the modern disciplines, products of the 19th century, are deeply flawed because they are not separate logics, as is manifest for example in the de facto overlap of analysis among scholars of the disciplines. Wallerstein offers several definitions of a world-system, defining it in 1974 briefly:
a system is defined as a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems.
He also offered a longer definition:
...a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning.
In 1987, Wallerstein again defined it:
... not the system of the world, but a system that is a world and which can be, most often has been, located in an area less than the entire globe. World-systems analysis argues that the units of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, are for the most part such world-systems (other than the now extinct, small minisystems that once existed on the earth). World-systems analysis argues that there have been thus far only two varieties of world-systems:
world-economies and world empires. A world-empire (examples, the Roman Empire, Han China) are large bureaucratic structures with a single political center and an axial division of labor, but multiple cultures. A world-economy is a large axial division of labor with multiple political centers and multiple cultures. In English, the hyphen is essential to indicate these concepts. "World system" without a hyphen suggests that there has been only one world-system in the history of the world.
Wallerstein characterises the world system as a set of mechanisms, which redistributes surplus value from the periphery to the core. In his terminology, the core is the developed, industrialized part of the world, and the periphery is the "underdeveloped", typically raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the market being the means by which the core exploits the periphery.
Apart from them, Wallerstein defines four temporal features of the world system. Cyclical rhythms represent the short-term fluctuation of economy, and secular trends mean deeper long run tendencies, such as general economic growth or decline. The term contradiction means a general controversy in the system, usually concerning some short term versus long term tradeoffs.
For example, the problem of underconsumption, wherein the driving down of wages increases the profit for capitalists in the short term, but in the long term, the decreasing of wages may have a crucially harmful effect by reducing the demand for the product. The last temporal feature is the crisis: a crisis occurs if a constellation of circumstances brings about the end of the system.
In Wallerstein's view, there have been three kinds of historical systems across human history: "mini-systems" or what anthropologists call bands, tribes, and small chiefdoms, and two types of world systems, one that is politically unified and the other is not (single state world empires and multi-polity world economies).
World systems are larger, and are ethnically diverse. Modernity is unique in being the first and only fully capitalist world economy to have emerged around 1450 to 1550 and to have geographically expanded across the entire planet, by about 1900. Not being political unified, many political units are included within the world system loosely tied together in an interstate system. Efficient division of labor is the unifying element of the different units, and it is also a function of capitalism, a system based on competition between free producers using free labor with free commodities, 'free' meaning available for sale and purchase on a market. More specifically, it can be described as focusing on endless accumulation of capital; in other words, accumulation of capital in order to accumulate more capital.
Such capitalism has a mutually dependent relationship with the world economy since it provides the efficient division of labour, the unifying element of the world economy, through the process of accumulating wealth. Likewise, such capitalism is dependent on the world economy since the latter provides a large market and a multiplicity of states, enabling capitalists to choose to work with states helping their interests.
Research questions
World-systems theory asks several key questions:
- How is the world system affected by changes in its components (e.g. nations, ethnic groups, social classes, etc.)?
- How does it affect its components?
- To what degree, if any, does the core need the periphery to be underdeveloped?
- What causes world systems to change?
- What system may replace capitalism?
Some questions are more specific to certain subfields; for example, Marxists would concern themselves whether world-systems theory is a useful or unhelpful development of Marxist theories.
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