World-Systems
Theorizing
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Sociology
University of California-Riverside
Riverside, CA. 92521-0419 USA
chriscd@.ucr.edu
2001 "World-Systems Theorizing" in
Jonathan Turner (ed.) Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York: Plenum.
The intellectual history
of world-systems theorizing has roots in classical sociology, Marxian
revolutionary theory, geopolitical strategizing and theories of social
evolution. But in explicit form the world-systems perspective emerged only in
the 1970s when Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein began
to formulate the concepts and to narrate the analytic history of the modern
world-system. Especially for Wallerstein,
it was explicitly a perspective rather than a theory or a set of theories. A
terminology was deployed to tell the story. The guiding ideas were explicitly not
a set of precisely defined concepts being used to formulate theoretical
explanations. Universalistic
theoretical explanations were rejected and the historicity of all social
science was embraced.[1]
Indeed, Wallerstein radically collapsed the metatheoretical opposites of
nomothetic ahistoricism/ideographic historicism into the contradictory unity of
historical systems. Efforts to formalize
a theory or theories out of the resulting analytic narratives are only
confounded if they assume that the changing meanings of concepts are
unintentional.[2] Rather there
has been sensitivity to context and difference that has abjured specifying definitions
and formalizing propositions.
And yet it has been possible to adopt a more nomothetic
and systemic stance, and then to proceed with world-systems theorizing with the
understanding that this is a principled difference from more historicist world-systems
scholars. Indeed world-systems scholars, as with other macrosociologists, may
be arrayed along a continuum from purely nomothetic ahistoricism to completely
descriptive idiographic historicism.
The possible metatheoretical stances are not two, but many, depending on
the extent to which different institutional realms are thought to be law-like
or contingent and conjunctural. Fernand
Braudel was more historicist than Wallerstein. Amin, an economist, is more nomothetic. Giovanni Arrighis (1994) monumental work on
600 years of systemic cycles of accumulation sees qualitative differences in
each hegemony, while Wallerstein, despite his aversion to explicating models,
sees rather more continuity in the logic of the system, even extending to the
most recent era of globalization.
Gunder Frank (Frank and Gills 1993) now claims that there was no
transition to capitalism, and that the logic of capital imperialism has not
changed since the emergence of cities and states in Mesopotamia 5000 years
ago. Metatheory comes before theory. It
focuses our theoretical spotlight on some questions while leaving others in the
shadows. No overview of world-systems
theorizing can ignore the issue of metatheoretical stances on the problem of
systemness.
In this chapter I will provide an
intentionally inclusive characterization of the late 20th century
cultural artifact that is designated by the words world-systems/world systems
scholarship (with and without the hyphen).
Some reflections on the intellectual ancestors of this artifact are
included in the discussion below. An earlier overview of the several heritages
that provoked world-systems theorizing is to be found in Chase-Dunn (1998,
Introduction). I will also outline my own view as to where world-systems theorizing
ought to be going. In his instructions to the chapter authors of this Handbook
of Sociological Theory Jonathan Turner (1999) said I am less interested in summaries of a
theoretical orientation, per se, than in what you are doing
theoretically in this area. Thus the
theoretical research program I have been constructing with Tom Hall (Chase-Dunn
and Hall 1997) and my foray into praxis with Terry Boswell (Boswell and
Chase-Dunn 2000) will loom large in what follows.
What
It Is
The hyphen emphasizes the idea of the whole system, the
point being that all the human interaction networks small and large, from the
household to global trade, constitute the world-system. It is not just a matter
of international relations. This
converts the internal-external problem of the causes of social change into an
empirical question. The world-systems perspective emphatically does not deny
the possibility of agency because everything is alleged to be determined by the
global system. What it does is to make it possible to understand where agency
is more likely to be successful, and where not. This said, the hyphen has also come to connote a degree of
loyalty to Wallersteins approach.
Other versions often drop the hyphen. Hyphen or not, the world(-)systems
approach has long been far more internally differentiated than most of its
critics have understood.
The
world-systems approach looks at human institutions over long periods of time
and employs the spatial scale that is necessary for comprehending whole
interaction systems. It is neither
Eurocentric nor core-centric, at least in principle. The main idea is simple: human beings on Earth have been
interacting with one another in important ways over broad expanses of space
since the emergence of ocean-going transportation in the fifteenth
century. Before the incorporation of
the Americas into the Afroeurasian system there were many local and regional
world-systems (intersocietal networks).
Most of these were inserted into the expanding European-centered system
largely by force, and their populations were mobilized to supply labor for a
colonial economy that was repeatedly reorganized according to the changing
geopolitical and economic forces emanating from the European and (later) North
American core societies.
This
whole process can be understood structurally as a stratification system
composed of economically and politically dominant core societies (themselves in
competition with one another) and dependent peripheral and semiperipheral
regions, some of which have been successful in improving their positions in the
larger core/periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their
relative positions.
This structural perspective on world history allows us to
analyze the cyclical features of social change and the long-term trends of
development in historical and comparative perspective. We can see the
development of the modern world-system as driven primarily by capitalist
accumulation and geopolitics in which businesses and states compete with one
another for power and wealth.
Competition among states and capitals is conditioned by the dynamics of
struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral
peoples to domination from the core. In
the modern world-system the semiperiphery is composed of large and powerful
countries in the Third World (e.g. Mexico, India, Brazil, China) as well as
smaller countries that have intermediate levels of economic development (e.g.
the East Asian NICs). It is not possible to understand the history of social
change in the system as a whole without taking into account both the strategies
of the winners and the strategies and organizational actions of those who have
resisted domination and exploitation.
It is also difficult to understand why and where innovative
social change emerges without a conceptualization of the world-system as a
whole. As with earlier regional intersocietal systems, new organizational forms
that transform institutions and that lead to upward mobility most often emerge
from societies in semiperipheral locations.
Thus all the countries that became hegemonic core states in the modern
system had formerly been semiperipheral (the Dutch, the British, and the United
States). This is a continuation of a long term pattern of social evolution that
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) call semiperipheral development. Semiperipheral marcher states and
semiperipheral capitalist city-states had acted as the main agents of empire
formation and commercialization for millennia. This phenomenon arguably also
includes the semiperipheral communist states as well as future organizational
innovations in semiperipheral countries that will transform the now-global
system.
This
approach requires that we think structurally. We must be able to abstract from
the particularities of the game of musical chairs that constitutes uneven
development in the system to see the structural continuities. The core/periphery hierarchy remains, though
some countries have moved up or down.
The interstate system remains, though the internationalization of
capital has further constrained the abilities of states to structure national
economies. States have always been
subjected to larger geopolitical and economic forces in the world-system, and as
is still the case, some have been more successful at exploiting opportunities
and protecting themselves from liabilities than others.
In this perspective many of the phenomena that
have been called globalization correspond to recently expanded international
trade, financial flows and foreign investment by transnational corporations and
banks. The globalization discourse generally assumes that until recently there
were separate national societies and economies, and that these have now been
superseded by an expansion of international integration driven by information
and transportation technologies. Rather
than a wholly unique and new phenomenon, globalization is primarily
international economic integration, and as such it is a feature of the
world-system that has been oscillating as well as increasing for centuries.
Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer (2000) have shown that trade globalization is
both a cycle and a trend.
The
Great Chartered Companies of the seventeenth century were already playing an
important role in shaping the development of world regions. Certainly the
transnational corporations of the present are much more important players, but
the point is that foreign investment is not an institution that only became
important since 1970 (nor since World War II).
Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has shown that finance capital has been a
central component of the commanding heights of the world-system since the
fourteenth century. The current floods
and ebbs of world money are typical of the late phase of very long systemic
cycles of accumulation.
An inclusive bounding of the circle of world(-)system
scholarship should include all those who see the global system of the late 20th
century as having important systemic continuities with the nearly-global system
of the 19th century. While
this is a large and interdisciplinary group, the temporal depth criterion
excludes a large number of students of globalization who see such radical
recent discontinuities that they need know nothing about what happened before
1960.
A second criterion that might be invoked to draw a
boundary around
world(-)systems
scholarship is a concern for analyzing international stratification, what some
world-systemists call the core/periphery hierarchy. Certainly this was a primary focus for Wallerstein, Amin and the
classical Gunder Frank. These
progenitors were themselves influenced by the Latin American dependency school
and by the Third Worldism of Monthly Review Marxism. Wallerstein was an
Africanist when he discovered Fernand Braudel and Marion Malowist and the
earlier dependent development of Eastern Europe. The epiphany that Latin America and Africa were like Eastern
Europe that they had all been peripheralized by core exploitation and
domination over a period of centuries -- mushroomed into the idea of the whole
stratified system.
It
is possible to have good temporal depth but still to ignore the periphery and
the dynamics of global inequalities.
The important theoretical and empirical work of political scientists
George Modelski and William R. Thompson (1994) is an example. Modelski and
Thompson theorize a power cycle in which system leaders rise and fall since
the Portuguese led European expansion in the 15th century. They also
study the important phenomenon of new lead industries and the way in which
the Kondratieff Wave, a 40 to 60 year business cycle, is regularly related to
the rise and decline of system leaders. Modelski and Thompson largely ignore
core/periphery relations to concentrate on the great powers. But so does
Giovanni Arriguis(1994) masterful 600 year
examination of systemic cycles of accumulation.[3] Gunder Franks (1999) latest reinvention, an
examination of Chinese centrality in the Afroeurasian world system and the
abrupt rise of European power around 1800, also largely ignores core/periphery
dynamics.
So
too does the world polity school led by sociologist John W. Meyer. This
institutionalist approach adds a valuable sensitivity to the civilizational
assumptions of Western Christendom and their diffusion from the core to the
periphery. But rather than a dynamic struggle with authentic resistance from
the periphery and the semiperiphery, the world polity school stresses how the
discourses of resistance, national self-determination and individual liberties
are constructed out of the assumptions of the European Enlightenment.
I contend that leaving out the core/periphery
dimension or treating the periphery as inert are grave mistakes, not only for
reasons of completeness, but because the dynamics of all hierarchical
world-systems involve a process of semiperipheral development in which a few
societies in the middle innovate and implement new technologies of power that
drive the processes of expansion and transformation. But I would not exclude scholars from the circle because of this
mistake. Much is to be learned from those who focus primarily on the core.
It is often assumed that world-systems must necessarily
be of large geographical scale. But systemness means that groups are tightly
wound, so that an event in one place has important consequences for people in
another place. By that criterion, intersocietal systems have only become global
(Earth-wide) with the emergence of intercontinental sea faring. Earlier
world-systems were smaller regional affairs. An important determinant of system
size is the kind of transportation and communications technologies that are
available. At the very small extreme we have intergroup networks of sedentary
foragers who primarily used backpacking to transport goods. This kind of
hauling produces rather local networks.
Such small systems still existed until the 19th century in
some regions of North America, and Australia (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998).
But they were similar in many respects with small world-systems all over the
Earth before the emergence of states.
An important theoretical task is to specify how to bound the spatial
scale of human interaction networks.
Working this out makes it possible to compare small, medium-sized and
large world-systems, and to use world-systems concepts to rethink theories of
human social evolution on a millennial time scale.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have been doing just
that. Kasja Ekholm and Jonathan Friedman (1982) have pioneered what they have
called global anthropology, by which they mean regional intersocietal systems
that expanded to become the Earth-wide system of today. Archaeologists studying
the U.S. Southwest, provoked by the theorizing and excavations of Charles
DiPeso, began using world-systems concepts to understand regional relations and
interactions with Mesoamerica. It was archaeologist Phil Kohl (1987) who first
applied and critiqued the idea of core/periphery relations in ancient Western
Asia and Mesopotamia. Guillermo Algazes The Uruk World System (1993) is
a major contribution as is Gil Steins (1999) careful examination of the
relationship between his village on the upper Tigris and the powerful Uruk core
state. Stein develops important new concepts for understanding core/periphery
relations.[4]
Research and theoretical debates among Mesoamericanists has also mushroomed.
And Peter Peregrines (1992,1995) innovative interpretation of the
Mississippian world-system as a Friedmanesque prestige goods system has cajoled
and provoked the defenders of local turf to reconsider the possibilities of
larger scale interaction networks in the territory that eventually became the
United States of America (e.g. Neitzel
1999).[5]
The Comparative World-Systems Perspective
Tom Hall and I have entered the fray by formulating a
theoretical research program based on a reconceptualization of the
world-systems perspective for the purposes of comparing the contemporary global
system with earlier regional intersocietal systems (Chase-Dunn and Hall
1997). We contend that world-systems,
not single societies, have always been the relevant units in which processes of
structural reproduction and transformation have occurred, and we have
formulated a single model for explaining the changing scale and nature of
world-systems over the past twelve thousand years.[6]
Institutional
Materialism
Due in part to its multidisciplinary sources of
inspiration our formulation bridges many disciplinary chasms. The term we now
use for our general approach is institutional materialism. We see human social evolution as produced by
an interaction among demographic, ecological and economic forces and
constraints that is expanded and modified by the institutional inventions that
people devise to solve problems and to overcome constraints. Solving problems at one level usually leads
to the emergence of new problems, and so the basic constraints are never really
overcome, at least so far. This is what allows us to construct a single basic
model that represents the major forces that have shaped social evolution over
the last twelve millennia.
This
perspective is obviously indebted to the cultural materialism of Marvin
Harris and its elaboration by Robert Cohen, Robert Carneiro and Stephen
Sanderson. Our approach to conceptualizing and mapping world-systems is greatly
indebted to David Wilkinson, though we have changed both his terminology and
his meaning to some extent (See Chapters 1-3 in Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997).
It
is the whole package that is new, not its parts. We contend that world-systems
have evolved because of the basic demographic, ecological and economic forces
emphasized by cultural materialism, but we do not thereby adopt the formalist
and rational choice individual psychology that is bundled with the cultural
materialism of Harris and Sanderson.
Our approach is more institutional because we contend that there have
been qualitatively different logics of accumulation (kin-based, tributary and
capitalist) and that these have transformed the nature of the social self and
personality, as well as forms of calculation and rationality. We remain
partisans of Polanyis (1977) substantive approach to the embeddedness of
economies in cultures. This does not
mean that we subscribe to the idea that rationality was an invention of the modern
world. We agree with Harris and Sanderson and many anthropologists that people
in all societies are economic maximizers for themselves and their families, at
least in a general sense. But it is also important to note the differences in
the cultural constructions of personality, especially as between egalitarian
and hierarchical societies. Here we follow the general line explicated by
Jonathan Friedman (1994).
Semiperipheral
Development
We
also add the important hypothesis of semiperipheral development that
semiperipheral regions are fertile locations for the emergence of new
innovations and transformational actors. This is the main basis of our claim
that world-systems are the most important unit of analysis for explaining
social evolution.
As
we have said above, the units of analysis in which our model is alleged to
operate are world-systems. These are defined as networks of interaction that
have important, regularized consequences for reproducing and changing local
social structures.[7] By this
definition many small-scale regional world-systems have merged or been
incorporated over the last twelve thousand years into a single global system.
The Iteration Model
Our basic explanatory model shows what we
think are the main sources of causation in the development of more hierarchical
and complex social structures, as well as technological changes in the
processes of production. We call our schema an iteration model because the
variables both cause and are caused by the main processes. It is a positive
feedback model in which systemic expansion, hierarchy formation and
technological development are explained as consequences of population pressure,
and in turn they cause population growth, and so the sequence of causes goes
around again.[8] We use the term iteration because the
positive feedback feature repeats the same processes over and over on an
expanding spatial scale. Figure 1 illustrates the variables and our hypotheses
about the causal relations among them. Positive arrows signify that a variable
increases another variable. Negative arrows indicate that a variable decreases
another variable. Thicker arrows
indicate stronger effects.
Figure 1: Basic Iteration Model
The
model is not alleged to characterize what has happened in all world-systems. Many
have gotten stuck at one level of hierarchy formation or technological
development. Our model accounts for
instances in which hierarchy formation and technological development occurred.
There were many systems in which these outcomes did not occur. Our claim is not that every system evolved
in the same way. Rather we hold that those systems in which greater complexity
and hierarchy and new technologies did emerge went through the processes
described in our model.
At
the top of Figure 1 is Population Growth.
We realize that procreation is socially regulated in all societies, but we
contend, following Marvin Harris, that restricting population growth,
especially by premodern methods, was always costly, and so the moral order
tended to let up when conditions temporarily improved. This led to a long-run
tendency for population to grow. Population Growth leads to Intensification, defined by Marvin
Harris (1977:5) as the investment of more soil, water, minerals, or energy per
unit of time or area. Intensification
of production leads to Environmental
Degradation as the raw material inputs become scarcer and the unwanted
byproducts of human activity modify the environment. Together Intensification
and Environmental Degradation lead
to rising costs of producing the food and raw materials that people need, and
this condition is called Population
Pressure. In order to feed more
people, hunters must travel farther because the game nearest to home becomes
exhausted. Thus the cost in time and effort of bringing home a given amount of
food increases. Some resources are less subject to depletion than others (e.g.
fish compared to big game), but increased use usually causes eventual rising
costs. Other types of environmental degradation are due to the side effects of
production, such as the build-up of wastes and pollution of water sources.
These also increase the costs of continued production or cause other problems.
As long as there were available lands to
occupy, the consequences of population pressure led to Migration. And so humans populated the whole Earth. The costs of Migration are a function of the
availability of desirable alternative locations and the effective resistance to
immigration that is mounted by those who already live in these locations.
Circumscription (Carneiro 1970) occurs when the costs of leaving are higher than the costs of
staying. This is a function of available lands, but lands are differentially
desirable depending on the technologies that the migrants employ. Generally
people have preferred to live in the way that they have lived in the past, but Population Pressure or other push
factors can cause them to adopt new technologies in order to occupy new lands.
The factor of resistance from extant occupants is also a complex matter of
similarities and differences in technology, social organization and military
techniques between the occupants and the groups seeking to immigrate. When the
incoming group knows a technique of production that can increase the
productivity of the land (such as horticulture) they may be able to peacefully
convince the existing occupants to coexist for a share of the expanded product
(Renfrew 1987).[9] Circumscription
increases the likelihood of higher levels of Conflict in a situation of Population
Pressure because, though the costs of staying are great, the exit option is
closed off. This can lead to several
different kinds of warfare, but also to increasing intrasocietal struggles and
conflicts (civil war, class antagonisms, clan war, etc.) A period of intense conflict tends to reduce
Population Pressure if significant
numbers of people are killed off. And some systems get stuck in a vicious cycle
in which warfare and other forms of conflict operate as the demographic
regulator, e.g. the Marquesas Islands (Kirch 1991). This cycle corresponds to
the path that goes from Population
Pressure to Migration to Circumscription to Conflict, and then a negative arrow back to Population Pressure. When population again builds up the circle
goes around again.
Under
the right conditions a circumscribed situation in which the level of conflict
has been high will be the locus of the emergence of more hierarchical
institutions. Carneiro (1970) and Mann (1986) contend that people will tend to
run away from hierarchy if they can in order to maintain autonomy and equality.
But circumscription raises the costs of exit, and exhaustion from prolonged or
extreme conflict may make a new level of hierarchy the least bad alternative.
It is often better to accept a king than to continue fighting. And so kings
(and big men, chiefs and emperors) emerged out of situations in which conflict
has reduced the resistance to centralized power. This is quite different from
the usual portrayal of those who hold to the functional theory of
stratification. The world-system
insight here is that the newly emergent elites often come from regions that
have been semiperipheral.
Semiperipheral actors are unusually able to put together effective campaigns for erecting new levels of hierarchy. This may involve both innovations in the techniques of power and innovations in productive technology (Technological Change). Newly emergent elites often implement new production technologies as well as new waves of intensification. This, along with the more peaceful regulation of access to resources organized by the new elites, creates the conditions for a new round of