World-Systems Analysis after Thirty Years: Should it Rest in Peace?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
World-systems analysis has had a major impact on the social sciences over the past three decades. Although originally developed within sociology, its influence has not only been extensive in that field, but has spread to such fields as anthropology and political science as well. This article attempts a new critical assessment of the world-systems paradigm. Its major accomplishments are seen as sixfold: its insistence on understanding the modern world historically, its employment of modes of historical analysis that encompass very long periods of time ( la longue durée), its highly interdisciplinary nature, its rigorous materialism, a conception of capitalism that is broader and more useful than the traditional Marxian conception, and its situation of the current phase of globalization in its proper historical context. On the negative side, I identify five major problems: its tendency toward teleology and reification; its overemphasis on exogenous forces at the expense of endogenous ones; its misrepresentation, in its classical form, of the effect of foreign investment on the periphery; its underestimation of the developmental prospects of the periphery; and its relative helplessness in understanding the nature and collapse of state socialist societies and the future prospects of socialism. I conclude with some suggestions for rebuilding world-systems analysis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it