The Modern World-System as a Unit of Analysis

There are a number of variants of world-systems analysis, however Immanuel Wallerstein has arguably developed the best known version. In the video above, Wallerstein talks about why he gravitated toward the world-system as a unit of analysis. He also talks about some of the epistemological problems he encountered when he pursued world-system analysis. The video is poor, but it is the only one I can find which discussed the unit of analysis and provides a useful starting point for this blog.

To him, the state as a unit of analysis didn't make sense, it's not where social action occurred. He saw the states organized within a hierarchical system. The Modern world system evolved in the 15th century and was a significant break, a capitalist world economy.

The epistemological problems hinted at involved the artificial academic disciplines between history, sociology, economics and history. From the standpoint of systems theory, the world system could only be studied from the system perspective, not from the perspectives of narrow academic disciplines.

The epistemological problems were clear to me when I was working on my dissertation in the late 1970's and early 1980's. The University of Wisconsin formally allowed interdisciplinary degrees but the academic disciplines I was interested in bringing together (sociology, history and economics) did not look very favorably on the project. Interestingly, the problems really had to do with the systems models I was using. Economists were not entirely comfortable they way concepts were being operationalized and the strong emphasis on empirical-statistical rather than theoretical model building (Kalman's data -> model approach that I'll discuss later), the sociologists were not yet comfortable with macro analysis and the historians were having trouble with quantitative history.

Wallerstein took, instead, a qualitative approach and was in the end more successful. I still think a quantitative approach to world-systems analysis using systems models is possible, especially since Wallerstein has paved the way with excellent qualitative analysis.

One other important epistemological point is that Wallerstein rejects the idea that he is developing world-system "theory". Rather, he looks at his project as world-systems "analysis". His perspective highlights the problem of theory construction in this area and is a topic I am pursuing in the Causal Macrosystems blog.