Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

year, the rate of expansion levelled, and by 1980 there were 252 ‘‘chairs’’ (Sahner 1982, p. 79).

Lepsius modified this feeling of an avalanche of sociology overwhelming academe (Lepsius 1976, p. 12). At the beginning of the 1970s, sociology had 1.3 percent of all the positions in university budgets, no larger a share than ten years earlier; 1.2 percent of the students took a major in sociology, also the percentage before the expansion; public money for sociological research had always hovered around 1 to 2 percent of all grants. The universities had expanded with explosive rapidity, and in this general explosion sociology merely kept its former share.

As a discipline, sociology, however, was among those least prepared to keep its place during an expansion that within a few years quadrupled the number of students in the Federal Republic. Consequently a great many sociologists were appointed to tenured positions who in other times would not have been. In this process the discipline lost cohesion and common scholarly standards.

THE CONSOLIDATION

After 1968 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie was taken over by the Young Turks; from their ranks Dahrendorf, Scheuch, and Lepsius were successively president. The leadership of the association was tired of conventions serving as forums for all kinds of protests, thus further damaging the reputation of the field. Consequently, biannual sociological conventions were suspended until 1974, when a meeting was held in Kassel. While the field had a Babel of views, there was now agreement to coexist.

At the Kassel convention of 1974, a custom was started called Theorievergleich (comparison of theory). This is in reality a juxtaposition of sociological ‘‘denominations,’’ not a weighing of alternative theoretical propositions (Lepsius 1976, sec. II). At that time four such denominations were defined: (a) behaviorism, the chief proponent of which in Germany was Karl-Dieter Opp;

(b) action theory as represented by Hans-Joachim Hummel; (c) functionalism and systems theory, with Niklas Luhman as its prominent representative; and (d) historical materialism, which translates into Marxism. Somewhat later, parts of behaviorism and action theory amalgamated to

become rational choice; two German-speaking Dutch sociologists, Reinhard Wippler and Siegwart Lindenberg, are its best-known proponents. Phenomenological sociology has been successful especially among young sociologists, with Jürgen Helle as the chief representative.

The lines between these denominations keep shifting as new variants emerge. In general, though, this approach to theory—to choose a topic such as evolution and then listen to what each denomination has to say about it—appears to have spent itself.

Concern with theory in Germany again means reacting to theory builders, a most dissimilar pair of whom dominated the scene in the 1970s and early 1980s: Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann is a self-taught sociologist who studied law and became a career administrator. His first specialty was the sociology of organization, which showed a strong influence of Chester I. Barnard. Subsequently Luhmann analyzed phenomena of the Lebenswelt (the key term of phenomenology for the world of immediate, unreflected experience— in contrast to the world that science portrayed) at that time influenced by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, as in Luhmann’s monograph on trust as the basis for social cohesion. Luhmann later met Talcott Parsons, whose work he understood from the perspective of a systems theorist. From then on, he focused on pure theory, going so far as to reject the application of theoretical statements to the empirical world, declaring empirical evidence to be irrelevant for his theoretizing (Luhmann 1987). Since Luhmann writes prolifically in English, his views should be well known outside Germany.

It will be helpful to note his shift in emphasis over the years. The central notion was first functional differentiation as the guiding principle in evolution. This results in an increasing competence of the system if the functionally differentiated areas are allowed to develop their area-specific rationality (Eigenlogik). The economy is seen as a prime example of an Eigendynamik, provided it is not shackled by attempts at political or ethical guidance. Differentiated systems, according to Luhman, need constant feedback to permit a creative reaction. Luhman conceptualizes these feedbacks as selbstreferenzielle Prozesse (self-referential processes). More recently he has become interested in

chaos theory and has given self-organization— which he calls Autopoiesis—a central place in explaining system functioning. It appears that the interest in Luhman has increased as his writings have become more abstract and his terms more outlandish—something he does self-consciously, since he can be a lucid writer.

This is less true for Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher who is self-taught in sociology. He calls his approach critical sociology, a choice that expresses his initial indebtedness to left Hegelianism of the Frankfurt school. While he has included Marxist terminology in his writings, he is probably best understood as a sociological disciple of the idealistic philosopher Fichte. In this perspective society is a problem for man’s true calling: emancipation. He understands emancipation in the spirit of the French Enlightenment. The characteristic element of Habermas’s ‘‘critical sociology’’ is doppelte Reflexivität (double feedback): the sociologist reflects on the context of discovery, and again on the context of utilization of his findings. With this attitude Habermas approaches the problematic relationship between theory and praxis (a Hegelian variant of practice) at a time when human existence is determined by a technological Eigendynamik. Habermas’s writings, available in translation, are internationally known. Viewed over a period of around thirty years, it seems that he is sliding into a position of Great Cultural Theory, of the kind like Pitirim Sorokin’s. And in becoming a synthesizer, he becomes more empirically minded, as Luhman ascends into the more abstract.

SOCIOLOGY AS ‘‘NORMAL SCIENCE’’

While practically all German universities offer degrees in sociology up to the doctoral level, there are some centers in terms of number of students, research facilities, and number of teaching personnel. In terms of faculty size, these centers are Bielefeld, Berlin, and Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, and Mannheim. If one includes among the criteria the number of degrees granted, then Bochum, Hamburg, and Göttingen must be added as centers.

There is now a very developed infrastructure for empirical research. In addition to many public service research institutes both inside and outside universities, there are some 165 commercial institutes for market and social research, the largest employing 600 academics and having a business

volume of 90 million dollars. There is an academic network of three service institutions with a yearly volume of ten million dollars from the budgets of state and federal governments: the Informationszentrum, in Bonn, providing on-line information on research projects and literature abstracts; ZUMA, Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen, in Mannheim, doing some of the work of NORC, National Opinion Research Center, Chicago, and helping anyone in need of methodological support; and the Zentralarchiv in Cologne, which provides data for secondary analysis, as the Roper Center in the United States does. All three together form GESIS, Gesellschaft sozialwissenscaftliche Infrastruktureinrichtungen, Bonn, a package that can be used by the mostly small research institutes of German universities. There are also larger institutes, the biggest in terms of number of academics employed being the Deutsche Jugendinstitut (German Youth Institute) and the largest in terms of finance (eleven million dollars) being the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (Social Science Center in Berlin). All have regular budgets from tax money.

There is a yearly survey on work in progress, and between 1978 and 1988, 29,000 research projects were reported. The Zentralarchivs keeps a count on quantitative research, and limiting its attention only to such work where data are in machine readable format, the yearly academic production in quantitative research is around 900 projects. The preferred method is the personal interview, which during the years had a share of 50 percent for all projects where quantitative data were collected. The doorstep interview is being replaced by the telephone interview, although to a lesser extent than in the United States.

Among the more than 1,000 members of the German Sociological Association the attention given to applied fields is dominant. A content analysis of journal articles shows that only 15.4 percent of all published manuscripts—the rejection rate is around 80 percent of all articles submitted—deal with theory. The most important applied fields are (in order of frequency) industrial sociology, social psychology, methods of quantitative research, sociology of politics, and sociology of the family. All these have shares in publications above five percent. Twenty other fields of sociology contribute altogether 50 percent to journal publications (Sahner 1982).

Heinz Sahner’s (1991) content analysis of the theoretical paradigms used in journal articles between 1970 and 1987 found the expected correlation with the intellectual climate. Marxism declined rapidly from the late 1970s, and it never dominated in German professional journals. Structural functional sociology is still the single most important theoretical paradigm, with phenomenological approaches gaining steadily. Even more so than earlier, sociology in Germany is now a multiparadigm field, including as a prominent part, ‘‘German Sociology.’’

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ERWIN K. SCHEUCH

GLOBAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

See Globalization and Global Systems Analysis.

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

Since the early 1960s, mounting empirical pressure has forced sociology to abandon the assumption that national societies could be understood without looking beyond their borders. The nationstate remains a crucial unit of analysis, but it must be analyzed as intertwined with the operations of a larger global social system. Global flows of culture, technology, people, goods, and capital determines to an ever larger degree how societies change at the national level. The dynamics of transnational social, economic and political structures have become a focus of study in their own right.

The value of international trade has grown more rapidly than the value of goods and services produced and sold within national boundaries.

Manufacturing means assembly of components from around the globe. Electronic youth culture in the United States revolves around Japanese cartoon characters, while a generation of Third World television viewers take their cultural cues from North American TV serials. Capital markets operate around the globe and around the clock as trading moves from Tokyo to London to New York over the course of each day. Sociologists cannot yet claim to understand the working of this global system, but a number of fruitful avenues of analysis have emerged since about 1960.

The approaches favored by sociologists have differed from the study of ‘‘international relations’’ as it has been traditionally defined. International relations approaches have seen the global system as structured primarily by interactions in which nations are unitary actors (see Waltz 1979). The global system is presumed to be structured largely by the distribution of national power among the advanced nations. Sociologists, on the other hand, have been very interested in how the global system is structured by flows of resources, people, ideas, and attitudes across geographic boundaries, flows that often occur without, or even in spite of, national actors.

Within sociology itself, ‘‘globalization’’ has been transformed from a relatively narrow field of study, largely within the political economy of development, to a central theme across a wide range of subfields within the discipline. The topic of globalization has also often drawn sociologists into interdisciplinary debates with political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and even occasionally economists, among others. As recently as the late 1980s, a number of central approaches to global systems analysis could be identified—Marx- ism, modernization theory, dependency theory, and world-system theory. However, although these research traditions continue to be elaborated, studies of globalization have proliferated and research perspectives have become fragmented. This article reviews the early and continuing contributions of these perspectives and outlines the main themes that current global systems analyses are exploring.

MARXISM AND MODERNIZATION THEORY

In the years after World War II, Marxism and modernization theory debated vigorously the problems and consequences of capitalist development.

However, despite their ideological opposition, they shared some basic assumptions regarding the character of this development. In particular, they shared the assumption that the global system is dominated by processes of diffusion. In the words of the Communist Manifesto, the expansive character of capitalist production ‘‘draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.’’ Warren (1980) argues from a Marxist perspective that it is only by the expansion of economic ties to core countries, principally in the form of importing more foreign capital, that poor nations are likely to be able to reduce the gap that separates them from rich nations. Sklair (1991) argues that a world-system organized through nation states is being superseded by a ‘‘global system’’ dominated by transnational economic, political, and social structures. He points to the emergence of a transnational capitalist class that organizes the world economy to its own benefit, in contrast to the world systems view of contending national capitalist classes (for an empirical study, see Bottomore and Brym 1989). Robinson (1998) argues that sociology must move beyond nation–state based analytical approaches to make ‘‘transnational social structure’’ its proper object of study, since individuals are predominantly defined by their position in such transnational economic, political, and cultural structures rather than by national or local characteristics—transnational structures dominated by capital. Other Marxistoriented theorists emphasize the irrationality of capitalist competition on a global scale, since competition between national capitalisms creates a crisis of profitability for capital due to global overcapacity, which in turn leads to declining conditions for labor (R. Brenner 1998; Walker 1999). Nonetheless, the emphasis remains the dilemmas of the diffusion of capitalism—the fact of that diffusion is presumed.

Investigating the prevalence of that complex of ideas and attitudes associated with ‘‘modernity’’ provided an important impetus for modernization theorists to take a global look at the diffusion of culture and social structures. In a classic study, Inkeles and Smith (1974) analyzed the attitudes of citizens in six Third World countries spread around the globe. Modern attitudes were found in social contexts more characteristic of advanced industrial countries. The more time respondents had spent living in cities or working in factories, the more

their attitudes resembled those associated with the culture of advanced industrial countries. The findings suggested a global system structured largely by processes of diffusion. The implicit model was one of gradual convergence around a similar set of ‘‘modern’’ values and attitudes. The spread of modern social institutions helps inculcate the values and attitudes, and the values and attitudes reinforce the institutions.

The work of Meyer and associates (Meyer 1980; Meyer et al. 1997a) shows how ideas and institutions originating in the advanced industrial countries become embodied in a global culture, which in turn shapes local institutions in all countries. Beginning from the surprising homogeneity of national political and economic institutional forms around the world, Meyer and associates (1997a) argue that contemporary actors, including nation-states, organize and legitimate themselves in terms of highly rationalistic, universalistic, world-cultural models. These models largely conform to the prescriptions of modernization theory, with core values such as citizenship, rationality, socioeconomic development, and so on. These models are diffused through the world system largely through the organizations and associations of ‘‘world society’’—intergovern- mental and nongovernmental transnational organizations which act to promote a ‘‘shared modernity’’ rooted in scientific rationalism and in which scientists and professionals are particularly dominant (Boli and Thomas 1999; Meyer et al. 1997a). Nation-states are not destroyed by globalization but, in contrast, the nation-state cultural form is diffused around the world through the institutions of world society.

An extensive body of empirical work has been developed in support of these theoretical insights. Boli-Bennett (1979), for example, examines the way in which national constitutions reflect global legal norms rather than local conditions. Ramirez and Boli (1982) look at the ways in which schools take on similar shapes around the globe as conceptions of what constitutes an effective educational institution come to be shared with surprising speed across geographical boundaries. Meyer and associates (1992) argue that world-society connections diffused mass education to former colonies, rather than education systems developing simply as a function of level of economic development. Meyer

and associates (1997b) examine how a world environmental regime emerged in recent decades through world-society associational processes, facilitated by the statelessness of this world society.

The interaction of these world-cultural forms with local contexts is unclear, however, as Meyer and associates (1997a) argue that there may be significant ‘‘decoupling’’ of these symbolic forms from the social practices in each contexts. Escobar (1995) argues that development discourses have relied exclusively on Western knowledge systems to the extent that non-Western knowledge systems are inherently marginalized by these ‘‘modernization’’ discourses. Ferguson (1990) shows that in Lesotho, the effect of modernization-inspired development policies was not to produce development but to depoliticize poverty and the further entrenchment of the state and Western modernizing influences. Other empirical work suggests that there are in fact a number of contesting models of the global economy, implying a more conflictual process than that depicted by Meyer and associates (Wade 1998).

Other social theorists take a more critical view of modernization while still placing the condition of modernity at the center of their analyses. Beck and associates (1994) have argued that advanced industrial societies are undergoing a new ‘‘reflexive modernization’’ that is closely tied to globalization. These authors see modernization bringing increased control over nature and society, as orthodox modernization theory predicts, but further rounds of modernization generating problems based precisely on its own success. The advance of rationalism and scientism remains central to their theories, but they are more skeptical about the ability of the experts to anticipate or control the side effects of their innovations. Pollution and other ecological disasters are critical political issues but also examples of how technical and social change can result in unanticipated system-lev- el crises.

Giddens (1991) argues that modernity is inherently globalizing. Both are linked by the process of ‘‘disembedding’’—the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction. There are two main mechanisms of disembedding: symbolic tokens (universal media such as money) and expert systems (bodies of technical knowledge

that can be applied across a range of different contexts). Each produces a homogenization of social life across different contexts and relies on trust in absent repositories of expertise. With this trust, therefore, comes a strong element of risk, a risk that is an inherent element of the globalization process.

Beck (1992) places risk squarely at the center of his approach. For Beck, the populations of the advanced capitalist countries are living in a postscarcity age where the major dilemmas are the side effects of success. Risks such as pollution are also inherently global in that they are not limited to the local contexts in which they are produced and also in that they have a tendency to affect all members of society relatively equally. We are also becoming increasingly conscious of these risks and therefore of our global interdependence with other societies. There is a new politics of risk—a politics that is concerned with the distribution not of ‘‘goods’’ but of ‘‘bads,’’ a politics that is not limited by territory and in which multiple groups of experts struggle to legitimate their expertise as the potential solution to risk management.

The globalization of modernist worldviews and their primary agents—scientists and profes- sionals—is once again placed at the center of the analysis. However, Giddens and Beck add an understanding of the dilemmas associated with such globalized rationalist institutions. Lash and Urry (1994) point up the postmodernist emphasis on aesthetic symbols and signs, in contrast to the modernist emphasis on rationalism and the power of scientists and professionals. They direct our attention toward cultural consumption on a global scale rather than toward the diffusion of rationalist worldviews and their effects.

Sociologists concerned with modernity and modernization emphasize the diffusion of rationalistic organizational principles (such as the na- tion-state form) on a global scale rather than the spread of global capitalism. Individuals are culturally constituted by the global system as rationalized, individualized actors rather than as workers or members of classes, while capitalists take second place to experts as the prime movers of the historical process of globalization. Nonetheless, theorists of modernization and modernity share with Marxists the view of an increasingly rationalized world, for better or worse.

DEPENDENCY THEORY

In contrast, sociologists who analyzed the global system from a dependency perspective emphasized the extent to which Third World political economies evolve differently from those of First World countries because they confront a world dominated by already industrialized countries. Deriving their initial inspiration from economists such as Prebisch (1950) and Baran (1957), the dependency approach saw the global system as consisting of a ‘‘core’’ of advanced industrial countries connected both economically and politically to a larger ‘‘periphery’’ of poor nations, rather than as consisting simply of a set of nations that can be ranked along various continua according to individual characteristics such as size and wealth. The structure of the global system was conceptualized primarily in terms of trade and capital flows reinforced by political domination. The principal concern was with the consequences of these ties for social, political, and economic change in the countries of the periphery.

Cardoso and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America (1979 [1969]) is still the classic exemplar of this tradition. Their analysis shows that the way in which economic elites are connected to the global economy shapes not only their strategies of investment but also their willingness to make political alliances with other groups and classes. For example, Latin American countries whose primary ties to the core were formed by mineral exports under the control of foreign capital experienced a different political history from countries who relied on agricultural exports controlled by local elites.

The expectations of the dependency approach with regard to changes in the structure of the global system over time stand in sharp contrast to those of both traditional Marxist and modernization approaches. The dependency perspective emphasizes the ways in which economic elites and their allies in the periphery have an interest in preventing the full diffusion of economic capacities from core to periphery. For example, those who have an interest in the system of trading agrarian exports for core-country manufactures may consider nascent local industrialists to be competitors for both labor and political power.

Empirical work generated by the dependency perspective suggested that the consequences of

core–periphery capital flows, rather than being the most important stimulus to the growth of the periphery as Marxists like Warren suggested, might in fact create obstacles to growth. Korzeniewicz and Moran (1997) show that overall world income inequality increased between 1965 and 1992, particularly in the 1980s—the most significant component of that inequality being between-country inequality. Initial cross-national quantitative analyses discovered that the buildup of stocks of foreign capital had negative, rather than the expected positive, consequences for growth (Bornschier et al. 1978; Chase-Dunn 1975). Firebaugh (1992, 1996), however, shows that the negative effects of foreign investment are in part a result of methodological problems with the analyses and that, while foreign investment is less beneficial than domestic investment, it has a generally positive shortterm effect on growth. Dixon and Boswell (1996a, 1996b) reformulate the dependency argument to emphasize the negative externalities associated with foreign investment that dampen the productivity of domestic investment. Kentor (1998) finds that dependency on foreign capital has particularly harmful effects on growth over the long term (thirty years) through the distortion and disarticulation of the domestic political economy. Crowly and associates (1998), in a review of crossnational quantitative studies in economics and sociology, find that foreign investment has a shortterm positive effect on growth but plays a more negative role over the long term. However, the dynamics through which foreign investment generates negative externalities within a political economy are not well understood (Dixon and Boswell 1996b). While the findings of these studies are still contested, they clearly demonstrate that the results of transnational capital flows are not those predicted by a simple diffusionist model.

The impact of trade liberalization has been just as controversial as that of foreign investment. O’Hearn’s (1990) longitudinal analysis of the Republic of Ireland shows that while foreign investment did not have a direct negative effect, free trade (which was inextricably tied to the foreigninvestment policy) had substantial negative effects on growth and inequality. Crowly and associates (1998) review studies of the impact of trade on growth and find that while export reliance is generally positively related to growth, this positive effect is reduced or reversed under conditions that

approximate to those theorized as ‘‘unequal exchange’’ (Emmanuel 1972). Rodrik (1997), reviewing the economics literature, finds that unskilled workers are likely to experience increased labormarket insecurity in the face of free trade, that nations may have legitimate reasons to limit trade, and that national systems of social security are indeed threatened by trade liberalization.

Again, quantitative cross-national studies played a valuable role in specifying the consequences of industrializing in an already industrialized world. Chase Dunn (1975) found that a greater role for foreign capital was associated with high levels of inequality, and his findings were confirmed by a variety of subsequent studies (e.g., Evans and Timberlake 1980; Rubinson 1976). These studies also confirm the political consequences of global economic ties. Delacroix and Ragin (1981) show that peripheral status in terms of trade relations is associated with weak state apparatuses. Bornschier and Ballmer-Cao (1979) argue on the basis of cross–national data that core-peripheral capital flows strengthen the political position of traditional power holders at the expense of labor and middle-class groups.

One of the criticisms that can be leveled against the dependency approach is that it has focused too much on capital and not enough on labor. Whereas dependency theorists have been concerned with the consequences of transnational capital flows for labor in both periphery and core (e.g., Frobel et al. 1981), the tradition contains no series of crossnational quantitative analyses of either wage levels or the structure of international labor flows studies comparable to the literature on international capital flows. With some notable exceptions (e.g., Portes and Walton 1981) the global structure of labor flows and their consequences is understudied. The 1990s saw a series of valuable case studies of work under globalization, although the consequences of work organization patterns in shaping patterns of dependency has not been explored in detail (Bonacich et al. 1994; Hodson 1998; Salzinger 1997).

Even within a global economy that is becoming more polarized, there have been significant cases of upward mobility. Spain and Portugal, which once formed the core, later moved to the semiperiphery, where they are joined by Taiwan

and Korea, which have moved up from the periphery (Korzeniewicz and Moran 1997). Although dependency theory has concentrated on the obstacles to mobility facing peripheral economies, it has also stimulated a wide range of research on the causes of mobility within the world-system. Analysts of ‘‘dependent development’’ (Cardoso 1974; Evans 1979) argue that intensification of ties with core countries is a dynamic element in reshaping the political economies of Third World countries. Dependent development shares with classic Marxist approaches the assumption that capital flows between core and periphery can play a significant role in generating industrialization in the Third World. It emphasizes, however, that both the economic character of this industrialization and its social and political concomitants are likely to be different from the experience of core countries.

The question of domestic dynamics is particularly important in relation to explanations of the mobility of individual nations from one position to another. While such mobility depends in part on changes in the system as a whole, it also depends on the outcome of domestic political struggles. In his work on Chile, for example, Zeitlin (1984) argues that the outcome of political struggles among economic elites in the nineteenth century was determinative of Chile’s retaining its role as an exporter of raw materials rather than moving in the direction of trying to transform its mineral resources into more processed exports. Zeitlin’s analysis of Chile shows how the outcome of domestic political contests can perpetuate peripheral status.

Brenner’s ( 1976, 1977) interpretation of England’s rise to the core provides another example of the domestic roots of systemic mobility. In Brenner’s view, the differences between the agrarian strategies of England on the one hand and Spain and Portugal on the other were not simply the result of trade possibilities generated by changes at the level of the world-system. They depended crucially on interactions between peasant communities and agrarian elites at the local level, which in turn were rooted in longstanding historical characteristics of the peasant communities themselves.

Likewise, Taiwan and Korea are used as examples of the way in which internal dynamics may allow construction of more effective state apparatuses, which in turn enable a country to improve its

position in the global system (Evans 1987). In the East Asian developmental states, and especially in Japan and Korea, the state sat at the center of an alliance between the large business groups, domestic banks, and certain key state agencies— prodding and poking firms and banks in more developmental directions, organizing political alliances, and mobilizing social resources (Amsden 1989; Evans 1995; Wade 1990). Research stimulated by the dependency perspective has been both a powerful corrective to views of globalization as an inevitable, relatively even process of diffusion from the core to the periphery. Recognizing the obstacles to diffusion has also problematized the cases where mobility has occurred and has focused analysts’ attention on the forces shaping a nation’s ability to overcome these obstacles.

WORLD-SYSTEM THEORY

The dependency approach’s contribution to our understanding of the international system has, however, been limited by the fact that it does not focus directly on the structure of the global system itself. The ‘‘world-system’’ approach, launched by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) and others (see ChaseDunn 1989) at the beginning of the 1970s, took the overall structure of the system as its starting point. Wallerstein’s contribution lay not only in directing attention to analysis of the global system itself, but also in setting the contemporary capitalist worldsystem in the context of previous systems spanning more than one society.

In Wallerstein’s world-system, the hierarchical structure is postulated as essential for its survival. The geographic expansion of northwestern Europe’s economic and political influence beginning at the end of the ‘‘long’’ fourteenth century was, in Wallerstein’s view, essential to the transformation of productive organization in that region. Subsequent interchange among regions with different modes of extraction has been central to sustaining the process of accumulation in the system as a whole. Wallerstein envisions at least three structural positions within the system. Defined in terms of the nature of their exchange relations with other regions, they are (1) the ‘‘core,’’ which exports goods produced by processes more intensive in their use of capital and new technology; (2) the

periphery, which relies on the production of labor and resource-intensive goods; and (3) the semiperiphery, which ‘‘trades both ways’’. Arrighi (1994) emphasizes the role of finance in the worldsystem as a complement to the Wallersteinian focus on trade and the division of labor. He traces the process of capital accumulation across four systemic cycles of accumulation in the world-sys- tem. Each one is associated with a different hegemonic (state) power that coordinates the securing of the conditions for capital accumulation on a world scale.

Quantitative cross-national analysis provides support for the idea that countries can be categorized according to their interactions with other nations and that countries in the same position experience shared benefits (or costs). Snyder and Kick (1979), using ‘‘block modeling’’ techniques, found a block of nations whose characteristics corresponded roughly to those of the core, several blocks that corresponded to the periphery, and a set of nations with the intermediary properties attributed to the semiperiphery. Smith and White (1992) used a similar methodology but improved on Snyder and Kick by examining longitudinal changes in the structure of the system. They were able to demonstrate changes in the structure of relations within and between blocks of nations and chart the mobility of individual nations within the system. Van Rossem (1996), however, using an analysis of the role structure of the world economy, argues that world-system position has little direct effect on growth but is better seen as a framework within which nations can act rather than as a determining force in national economic development.

Some of the most interesting work stimulated by world-system thinking has involved analysis of systems that antedated the emergence of the contemporary one (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989). Wallerstein argues that systems prior to the current one were primarily of two types. ‘‘Minisystems’’ extended across boundaries defined by unified political control and ethnic solidarity but did not come close to being global in scope. These minisystems have been the subject of a number of recent studies, with interesting comparisons across different worldsystems (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998). ‘‘World empires’’ joined various ethnic and social groups in a single division of