Global Political
Sociology and World-Systems
V 2-11-18 6996
words
Sakin Erin
and Christopher Chase-Dunn
A chapter in the Cambridge New Handbook of Political Sociology edited by Cedric de Leon, Thomas Janoski, Isaac Martin and
Joya Misra
Irows Working Paper #120 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows120/irows120.htm
Thanks to Catherine Desroches for translating this
article into Latvian. Her translation is at https://www.
Abstract: The new global
political sociology is a response to the growing awareness that humans have
constructed an Earth-wide polity along with the global economic system. The
disciplinary boundaries among the social scientists, especially between
anthropology, sociology, political science, history and economics are
formidable to the effort to comprehend and to explain global social change and
world history. The world-systems perspective is a useful framework for global
political sociology and for explaining political, economic and cultural
globalization and the evolution of global governance. We discuss the main conceptual issues and we
review those studies that have utilized formal network analysis for studying
the world-system.
World-systems analysis is a holistic
and critical social science approach that proposes the study of social change
focusing on whole systemic human interaction networks. The general theoretical
approach is based on institutional materialism that is inspired by classical
sociology and anthropology (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2016).[1] The
world-system perspective emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to explicate the nature
of the core/periphery hierarchy over the last five centuries. Its originators
were Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Giovanni Arrighi
(Amin 1980a; Frank 1966, 1967 1969; Arrighi 1994; Wallerstein 2011[1974]).
Wallerstein (2000:74) says:
We
take the defining characteristic of a social system to be the existence within
it of a division of labor, such that the various sectors or areas are dependent
upon economic exchange with others for the smooth and continuous provisioning
of the needs of the area.
According to Wallerstein’s formulation,
whole historical social systems are clusters of individuals, organizations and
polities that are systemically interconnected with one another. These interaction networks have not always
been global (Earth-wide). In the past, when transportation and communications
technologies were less developed, world-systems were smaller (Wallerstein
2000:75-6). What makes a whole system is not the amount of space it encompasses
but rather the degree of interconnectedness such that what happens in one place
has large consequences for what happens in another place (see also Tilly 1984).
When transportation and communication technologies limit long-distance
interactions the consequences of events fall off with distance, and so whole
systems are smaller. Only with the development of the capitalist world-economy
did the modern world-system become global. A hierarchical division of labor
emerged linking the European core states with their colonial empires in Africa,
Asia, Oceania and the Americas. This global division of labor has been
politically organized as a system of fighting and allying sovereign states in
the core and a set of colonial empires. Waves of decolonization since the
eighteenth century extended the system of theoretically sovereign states to the
non-core. In global political sociology the state is understood as an
organization that claims jurisdiction over a territory. Nations are a form of
collective identity or a solidarity similar in form to ethnicities, clans, and
lineages. Nationalism refers to the sentiments and beliefs that constitute and
reinforce a nation.
One
Logic or Four?
Global
political sociology recapitulates a long-standing debate between historians and
social scientists regarding the advantages and dangers of emphasizing either
systemic structures, on the one hand, versus particularity, uniqueness and
conjunctural complexity on the other. Focusing on the global does not resolve
this debate on way or the other, but a reasonable compromise can be based on
the recognition that some aspects of human social change are, indeed, open-ended
and conjunctural whereas other aspects are more systemic, structural and
predictable.[2]
Among the systemists there continue
to be debates about the nature of systemic logics and how they may or may not have
changed over time. Realist international relations theorists assume the
existence of a timeless geopolitical power logic in which competing states try
to conquer one another or keep from being conquered. Formalist economists see a
timeless logic of competition among rational individuals to acquire valuables.
Evolutionary Marxists see transformations of systemic logics based on normative
integration constructed as kinship to institutionalized coercion in the
tributary (state-based) modes of accumulation to capitalist accumulation based
on the acquisition of profits from commodity production and financial
transactions. World-system analysts have argued that underlying logic of the
modern global system combines the geopolitics of the interstate system with the
logic of capitalist accumulation (Chase-Dunn 1998: Chapter 7).[3]
This formulation is based on the idea that the multipolar interstate system and
the capitalist world-economy reproduce one another. The international migration
of capital prevents world empire (global state formation) and nationalism and
the system of competing states undercut political movements that challenge the
rule of capital.
Michael Mann (2016) contends that
many important sociocultural developments that have shaped world history and
prehistory have been conjectural accidents that are not predictable by theories
of sociocultural evolution, though he admits that some developments are best
understood as evolutionary (list both kinds in footnote). Mann’s work on modern
social change 1986; 2004) applies his Weberian schema in which four
institutional realms develop somewhat separately, with occasional important
interactions with one another. The four realms are economics, politics, the
military and ideology. Mann explicitly
denies that there is a single modern global system and his critiques of those
he calls “hyperglobalists” are often trenchant. He prefers to describe the
major institutional changes occurring in his four reams separately to produce
his world historical narrative. His work is a valuable structural account of
modern world history despite his refusal to see a systemic logic operating at
the level of the whole world-system.
Core/Periphery
Hierarchies
The idea that there are system-wide
socially structured hierarchies in whole world-systems is a central notion for
world-systems analysis. The comparative and evolutionary version developed by
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) makes the issue of the existence or non-existence of
a core/periphery hierarchy an empirical issue for each system based on the
finding that some small-scale systems had very mild forms of core/periphery
hierarchy (Chase-Dunn and Mann 199x). The
modern core is composed of a number of internally and externally strong states
that are home to the headquarters of global firms and that have economies based
on capital-intensive production using highly skilled labor. The contemporary
core states are in Western Europe, North America and include Japan. The
periphery consists of states that are internally and externally weak in which
production consists of agricultural and mineral raw material exports and
low-productivity agriculture. The periphery is composed of former colonies in
Asia, Africa and Latin America. The semiperiphery is composed of two different
kinds of states: small states with middle levels of development (e.g. South
Korea, Israel; South Africa, Taiwan, etc.), and large states that include both
developed and little-developed regions (e.g. China, India, Indonesia, Mexico,
Brazil, Argentina, Russia, etc.). There
have always been hierarchical global commodity chains linking production
processes into the transnational hierarchical division of labor that
constitutes the core/periphery structure (Wallerstein and Hopkins 2000).
The institutional basis and nature
of core/periphery relations change over time, but they are always a mix of
institutionalized political coercion and economic comparative advantages that
undergird unequal exchange in which the core extracts resources from the
non-core. Tributary empires extracted taxes and tribute from conquered
territories and subaltern polities. Capitalist core states have obtained
favorable terms of trade from formal colonialism and then from
semimonopolization of products in which they have a comparative advantage and
from foreign investment and financial centrality. The neo-colonial
core/periphery hierarchy which has emerged following decolonization combines
interstate clientelism with foreign investment and financial services to
extract profits from the non-core. Technological rents and international
financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and global banks
are increasingly relied upon.
The Modern System
The modern world-system emerged in
Europe and its colonies in the long 16th century between 1450 and
1640 CE (Wallerstein 2011). Though capitalism in many forms had existed since
the Bronze Age, the modern system was the first whole network in which the
capitalist mode of accumulation became predominant. The endless accumulation of
capital, which is the primary principle around which capitalist accumulation is
organized (Arrighi 1994), requires a world-economy that is based on
exploitation, monopolization and unequal exchange. Military, political, and
cultural forms of organization are used to successfully accumulate capital in a
competitive and hierarchical system. In the fifteenth century Genoa and
Portugal made an alliance based on this logic of accumulation that resulting in
the emergence of the Europe-centered world-system (Arrighi 1994). The United
Provinces of the Netherlands followed suit in the seventeenth century, emerging
as a far reaching capitalist nation-state that joined characteristics of
earlier capitalist city-states in a federal structure that facilitated the
invention of joint stock companies, a stock exchange and a far reaching
colonial empire based on profit-taking rather than tribute or taxation
(Wallerstein 1984). A great struggle for global domination between the British
and the French in the 18th century eventuated in the 19th
century hegemony of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, which was then
followed, after another period of interimperial rivalry, by the 20th
century hegemony of the United States.
According
to Wallerstein, the modern world-system is different from earlier world-empires
such as ancient Rome and China because no single state has conquered the whole
world-economy and transformed into a world-empire. Instead, the core has
remained organized as group of competing states in which hegemons have risen
and fallen but no single state has taken over the whole system. The global
capitalist class expanded their trade networks in search for much needed labor
and raw materials, which led to the colonization of most of the rest of the
world by Europeans. The modern world-system is structured as an hierarchical
international division of labor that consists of three zones: the core, the
semiperiphery, and the periphery. Andre Gunder Frank (1966) developed the idea
of “the development of underdevelopment” to explain the reproduction of the
core/periphery hierarchy. The periphery and the semiperiphery provide raw
materials and cheap labor for the expanding production of the system, while at
the same time it functions as a marketplace for the commodities produced in the
core zone. The semiperiphery is a buffer zone between the core and periphery
preventing the bifurcation of the system. Immanuel Wallerstein (2000) contends
that the semiperiphery is essential for assuring the political stability of the
system. The core/periphery hierarchy is one of the most important structures of
the current world-system. In the modern world-system this structure has been
reproduced over centuries despite upward and downward mobility of a few
national societies. The basis of power in the current system is the
concentration of innovations in new lead industries and in military and
organizational technologies that affect the relative power and capacities of
firms and states.
State-Centrism
and Core/Periphery Hierarchy
Core/periphery hierarchies have
always been organized class structures as well as interpolity relations.
Classes have been both regionally nested within national societies and
transnational. Samir Amin (1980) produced a structural analysis of global classes
long before the global capitalism hyperglobalists discovered the transnational
capitalist and working classes. And the
core/periphery hierarchy is not just a tripartite stack of zones that contain
states. There has always been a system-wide class structure in which both
national and transnational class relations were important. There have been
system-wide class structures in world-systems since the evolutionary emergence
of class relations in complex chiefdoms. The theorists of a global stage of
capitalism have disparaged the “state-centrism” of world-systems analysis along
with other social theorists and observers that continue to see a world of
disconnected national societies. The world-systems theorists were among the
first to challenge the state-centric analysis of separate national societies as
if each were on the moon. In the world-systems perspective polities (including
states) are not all-encompassing and disconnected whole social systems. The
state is an organization in field of social interactions that include other
states and all the transnational interactions that cross state boundaries.
Sovereignty is a legal theory about jurisdiction, not a true description of
autonomous existence. State policies differ with respect to their efforts to
attain autonomy, but all states in the system, including the core states, are
heavily influenced by processes that are occurring in the larger system. The
global class structure is intertwined with the interstate system, such that
workers in the core states have a rather different relationship capital than do
workers in the non-core. And this changes over time as the class struggle
interacts with core/periphery relations. The primary sector of core workers
were able to become included in the Keynesian developmental project after World
War II but were “peripheralized” back into the precariat with the rise of the
neoliberal globalization project.
National and transnational class relations have been and continue to be
important for understanding the evolution of global capitalism (Robinson
2014).
The evolution of global governance: political globalization
Although
the world-system perspective emerged to comprehend the Europe-centered modern
world-system since the sixteenth century CE, some scholars have expanded the
theory to examine continuities with earlier periods (e.g. Frank and Gills 1993)
or to compare the modern system with earlier regional systems (Chase-Dunn and
Hall 1997). These have interacted with theorists of global capitalism and
international relations theory in political science to produce a new political
sociology of world-systems that examines the evolution of world politics in the
context of political and economic globalization.
As anthropologists and world historians
have long noted, the scale and complexity of political organization has
increased over the long run, albeit in waves. Figure 1 shows the territorial
sizes of the largest polities in Europe and East Asia between 1500 BCE and 2010
CE. 
Figure 1: Territorial Sizes of largest polities in Europe and East Asia (square megameters):
1500 BCE- 2010CE (Source
Chase-Dunn et al 2015, Figure 6)
The recent decline in the sizes of the largest
polities is due to the decolonization of the colonial empires, the demise
traditional territorial empires, and the extension of the interstate system to
the non-core. But the sizes of the modern hegemons have continued to increase
(from the Dutch to the British to the U.S. hegemony, and so the long-term trend
toward eventual global state formation has continued. The current decline of
U.S. hegemony indicates the emergence of a new multipolar inter-regnum that
will likely be followed by the rise of a new hegemon or global state formation.
The new political sociology needs to comprehend the long-term
trends as well as recent developments in the evolution of the global polity.
The modern world-system is somewhat similar to earlier regional world-systems
in that there is a cycle of the rise and fall of powerful polities. The
existing system of global governance is based on a mixture of institutions that
developed within formerly separate regional international systems. In the 19th century
the European international system merged with the system that had long existed
in East Asia (Arrighi, Hamashita and Selden 2003; Chase-Dunn and Hall
2011). The European Westphalian interstate system surrounded and
engulfed the trade-tribute system of East Asia (Arrighi 2006). In the 20th century
the last great wave of decolonization extended the system of sovereign national
states to the rest of the non-core (Figure 2).
Figure 2:
Waves of colonization and decolonization, 1415-1995 CE (Source: Henige 1970)
Thus did the system of colonial empires that had been a major
structure of global governance since the rise of the West come to an end. But the
institutional means by which core countries could dominate and exploit non-core
countries did not end. Colonial structures were replaced by neocolonial
institutions such as financial indebtedness and foreign direct investment. This
neocolonial regime was organized after World War II around international
institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and what
became the World Trade Organization. But the rise and fall of hegemonies that
had long been a characteristic of the European system (Wallerstein 1984;
Arrighi 1994) continued as the major structural basis of global governance. The
British hegemony declined and the U.S. hegemony rose.
The rise and fall of hegemons intermittently supplies global
regulation for the world-system, but the method of choosing leadership has been
by means of a contest in which the winners of global wars become the hegemons.
This is a form of leadership selection that humanity can no longer afford
because of the development of weapons of mass destruction.
There was also a continuation of a trend that had begun with the
Concert of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars – the emergence of both general and
specialized international political organizations that began the formation of a
world state. The League of Nations was followed by the
more substantial United Nations (U.N.).
The long-term trends over the past two centuries have included the
extension of national sovereignty to the Global South because of the
decolonization movements (Figure 2 above), the growing size of the hegemon in
the transition from the British to the U.S. hegemony (Figure 3 below;
Chase-Dunn, Kwon, Lawrence and Inoue 2011) and the emergence of still-weak
but strengthening global-level political institutions. This has been
a long-term process of political globalization in which global
governance is becoming more centralized and more capacious because of the
increasing relative size of the hegemon and the emergence of global proto-state
organizations. Of course, there have also been counter-movements and periods in
which the long-term trends reversed. We are in such a period now because U.S.
hegemony is in decline[1] (Wallerstein
2003; Chase-Dunn, Kwon, Lawrence and Inoue 2011; Friedman 2017) and
support for the United Nations is also in decline because the U.S. has been its
main supporter.
The current period is
similar in many important ways to the period just before the outbreak of World
War I. The hegemon is in decline and powerful potential challengers are
emerging. In all earlier periods of this sort a World War among the contenders
has settled the issue of who should be the next hegemon (Chase-Dunn and
Podobnik 1995). We can no longer afford to use this primitive form
of leadership selection because a war among core states using weapons of mass
destruction would probably be suicidal for humanity. Thus the system
of global governance must evolve an effective mechanism for managing uneven
development and interstate conflicts without resort to major
wars. No single state is large enough to replace the United
States in the role of hegemon. The system is moving toward a multipolar
structure in which the U.S. hegemony is slowly declining and challengers are
rising. In the past this has been a prelude to world war. What is
needed to prevent violent interimperial rivalry is a structure of global
governance that can effectively resolve future conflicts without resort to
violence (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2008; Chase-Dunn and Inoue 2010).
But
there are also several important differences between the current period and the
period of decline of the British hegemony. Britain was never as economically
large relative to the size of the whole world economy as the United States has
been (see Figure 3). And Britain never had such a preponderance of military
power. Even at the height of British hegemony there were other core states that
had significant military power. Giovanni Arrighi (2006) noted that the period
of British hegemonic decline (1870-1914) moved rather quickly toward
conflictive interimperial rivalry because economic competitors such as Germany
and Japan could develop powerful military capabilities that were used to
challenge the British. The U.S. hegemony has been different in
that the United States ended up as the single superpower after the demise of
the Soviet Union. Some economic challengers (Japan and Germany) cannot easily
play the military card because they are stuck with the consequences of having lost
the last World War. This, and the immense size of the U.S. economy, will
probably slow the process of hegemonic decline down compared to the rate of the
British decline.
And the decline of Britain took place during the transition from
the coal energy regime to the oil energy regime (Podobnik 2006), whereas U.S.
decline is occurring as the world approaches its peak production of fossil
fuels and when global climate change is threatening to disrupt the
world-system. These developments parallel, to some extent, what happened a
century ago, but the likelihood of another “Age of Extremes” (Hobsbawm 1994) or
a Malthusian correction such what occurred in the first half of the 20th
century could be exacerbated by some new twists. The number of people on Earth
was only 1.65 billion when the 20th century began, whereas at
the beginning of the 21st century there were 6 billion.
Moreover, fossil fuels were becoming less expensive as oil was replacing coal
as the major source of energy. It was this use of inexpensive, but
non-renewable, fossil energy that made the geometric expansion and
industrialization of humanity possible.
Now we are facing global warming as a consequence of the spread
and rapid expansion of industrial production and energy-intensive consumption.
Energy prices have temporarily come down because of fracking and overproduction
by countries that are dependent on oil exports, but the low hanging “ancient
sunlight” in coal and oil has been picked. “Peak oil” is
approaching. “Clean coal” and controllable nuclear fusion remain
dreams. The cost of energy will probably go up no matter how much is invested
in new kinds of energy production.[3] None
of the existing alternative technologies offer low cost energy of the kind that
made the huge expansion possible. Many believe that overshoot has already
occurred in terms of how many humans are alive, and how much energy is being
used by some of them, especially those in the core. Adjusting to rising energy
costs and dealing with the environmental degradation caused by industrial
society will be difficult, and the longer it takes the harder it will become.
Ecological problems are not new, but this time they are on a global scale. Peak
oil and rising costs of other resources are likely to cause more resource wars
that exacerbate the problems of global governance. The war in Iraq was both an
instance of imperial over-reach and a resource war because the U.S.
neoconservatives thought that they could prolong U.S. hegemony by controlling
the global oil supply. The Paris Agreement on greenhouse gas
emissions reached in December of 2015 is good news, but compliance will be
difficult, especially for non-core countries and the Trump administration is
threatening to ignore global warming.
And the British government still had a colonial empire that it
could tax in order to support its military position whereas the shift from
colonialism to clientelism (Go 2011) means that the U.S. can only legally tax
its own citizens to support its global military preponderance. This may be seen
a progress, but it is also a factor that is likely to result in the decline of
the currently stable structure of global military power.
Political globalization and the rise and fall of hegemons have
been driven, in part, by a series of world revolutions – periods in which
social movements, rebellions and revolutions within countries – have clustered
in time. We have studied the emergence of the New Global Left and
now are giving attention to the nature of the New Global Right. The world
revolution of 1917 included the Russian, Mexican and Chinese revolutions and
the rise of organized social movements based on the labor movement and anti-imperialism.
During the 1920s and the 1930s – the “age of extremes” -- fascist
movements emerged in many countries.
Figure 3:
Shares of World GDP (PPP), 1820-2006 CE [Source: Chase-Dunn, Kwon, Lawrence and
Inoue 2011]
The New
Global Right (NGR), like the New Global Left (NGL), is a complex conglomeration
of movements. Radical Islam harkens back to a mythical golden age of god-given
law in reaction to the perceived decadence of capitalist modernity.
Neo-conservatives advocate the use of U.S. military superiority to guarantee
continued access to inexpensive oil. Populist nationalists reject the
universalism of neoliberalism and the multiculturalism of the global justice
movement. They hark back to religious, racial and national golden ages and seek
protection from immigrants and the poor of the Global South. Politicians
mobilize support from those who have not benefited from neoliberal capitalist
globalization, often using nationalist or racial imagery. The New Global Right
is both a response to neoliberal capitalist globalization and to the New Global
Left. And the New Global Left is increasingly responding to what many perceive
to be the rise of 21st century fascism. The interesting world
historical question is how the NGR is similar to and different from the Global
Right that emerged out of the World Revolution of 1917 in the 1920s and 1930s.
Fascism (nationalism on steroids) was a reaction to the crisis of global
capitalism that occurred in the first half of the 20th century.
Strong fascist parties and regimes emerged in several core and non-core
countries (Goldfrank 1978), and there were even efforts to organize a fascist
international. Fascist movements were driven in part by the threats posed by
socialists, communists and anarchists. And, in turn, the popular fronts and
united fronts that emerged on the left in the 1930s were partly a response to
the threats posed by fascism. The New Global Right is mainly
populist nationalism now, but if another, deeper, global economic crisis
emerges (which is likely) it could morph in to true fascism.
Formal Network Studies
The
hierarchical structure of the world-system and its systemic boundaries can be
empirically studied using formal (quantitative) social network methods. The
method of formal network analysis is appropriate because world-system theory is
based on interrelations among sets of actors in which both direct and indirect
connections are important. Perceiving
the world-system as a global network of local and transnational interactions
among individuals, organizations, states and international organizations
(Wilkinson 1987, 1991) warrants the application of network methods to describe
the system and to test hypotheses. In the following section we review research
that has used formal network analyses to study the modern world-system.
The world-system functions as a network of
entities that are involved in a variety of different kinds of interactions.
Social network science is a relatively young approach (Granovetter 1973,
Wellman 1983). The application to world-system research dates back to David
Snyder and Ed Kick’s (1979) study of world-system position and the economic
growth of nation-states. The relational understanding of economic growth among
nations has been central in the theories of the founding fathers of political
economy (See Smith 1776 [1977]). Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage
was premised on a concept of dyadic relations among pairs of nations. As such,
it postulated that a nation will draw maximum benefit if it exchanges goods and
services produced at a lower cost by another nation. In this dyadic exchange,
the greatest goods will be optimized for the greatest number of people. The
classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo did not contextualize exchanges
between dyads of nations when developing this formulation. Dyadic exchanges
occur within a complex structure of indirect connections. These complex structures
of direct and indirect connections are the reality behind hierarchical
core/periphery relations position in this global hierarchy has consequences for
national development and is an important determinant of economic, political,
and social welfare outcomes that tend to disadvantage the non-core. These
structural consequences can be better captured by treating international and
transnational relations as networks of direct and indirect ties.
A social network refers to connections
among a set of entities, which can be individuals, nation-states, firms or
other types of actors (Wasserman and Faust 1994). World-systems theory
emphasizes the hierarchical positionality of global relations without offering
ways to operationalize these concepts (Snyder and Kick 1979). Social network
analysis (SNA) offers a way of empirically testing hypotheses about the
consequences of positionality by means of its mathematical algorithms for
deriving characteristics of whole networks and of network nodes from
information about all the direct and indirect connections among nodes. SNA provides a mechanism to explain how
entities in social systems are connected to each other directly as well as how
the disparate parts of the network can affect each other through indirect
linkages (Borgatti et al 2013). Because of these advantages SNA has been used
by a growing number of researchers for studying the world-system (Lloyd et al. 2009).
The
world-system studies applying SNA methods use network algorithms to assign
countries and cities to their proper positions such in the core, the periphery
and the semiperiphery. These methods portray the boundaries between these
structural positions with a great accuracy and indicate whether or not these
conceptual categories are empirically separate from one another (Arrighi and
Drangel 1986) or are just labels for different positions on a continuous
hierarchy (Chase-Dunn 1998: Chapter 10). The core/periphery structure in the
SNA approach has its own unique concept. According to Borgatti and Everett (1999),
the network core/periphery model is based on the notion the core nodes are
connected to other core nodes in a maximal sense and they are only loosely
connected to the periphery nodes by a cohesive. An SNA core/periphery structure
reveals patterns of interaction among entities constituting the core and
periphery and the extent to which advantages are accrued to the core by these
connections.
The
SNA studies of the world-system test the notion of structural hierarchy, but
they also assess the unequal exchange relations between the zones and the
extent to which there is mobility between zones. The most common method used is
to identify roles and positions of each entity in a network of relations
(Wasserman and Faust 1994, Borgatti et al.
2013). This approach proceeds from a relation or set of relations to predict
the degree of similarity among nodes based on “equivalence criteria” assigning
entities to equivalent groups or blocks (Lloyd et al. 2009). World-system
studies using SNA employ two different approaches for identifying the role and
position of a nation-state: structural equivalence, which uses the CONCOR
network algorithm, and regular equivalence (structural isomorphism), which is
associated with the REGE algorithm. These algorithms assume that a node’s
position in set of relations should be defined by its connections with other
nodes (Borgatti and Martin 1992). Structural equivalence is a very strict
criterion, as it requires structurally equivalent nodes to have identical
relationships with other nodes. In terms of countries, two nations would be
structurally equivalent with one another if they have exactly the same trading
partners. This approach is not useful for assessing the structure of the global
system because the requirement of exact structural equivalence is almost never
met (Smith and White 1992). Because of this SNA studies of the world-system
usually use regular equivalence. In this case the U.S. and Belgium occupy the
same position in the world economy even though they do not necessarily trade
with the exactly the same nations.
The
strict structural equivalence criterion was first used in Snyder and Kick’s
(1979) classical block-model study, which analyzed the world-system structure
using both economic and non-economic ties–trade flows, diplomatic relations,
military interventions and conjoint treaty membership– among nations spanning
1960-1967 period to examine the structural positions of the whole system. Using
CONCOR, they found that the structural core/periphery relationship was more
evident in trade relations. Snyder and Kick discovered a more refined
world-system structure in which there were three partitions within the
semiperiphery and six within the periphery. They used their SNA-derived
position measures in a cross-national regression to examine differences in
rates of economic growth. Their OLS regression analysis showed that the
differential economic growth among nations was attributable to their position
in the world-system such that the core tended to be more grow more than the
lower tiers. This contradicted the notion that linkages to the developed
nations bring modernization and development. A more recent study using
structural equivalence criterion (Kick and Davis 2001) confirms that the core
primarily consists of Western industrial nations.
Studies
employing regular equivalence (Nemeth and Smith 1985 and Smith and White 1992)
also analyze the core/semiperiphery/periphery structure and the extent to which
there is mobility across these categories. Smith and White (1992) examined the
trade data for industrially sophisticated commodities at three different time
points, 1965, 1970, 1980. Their block model of regular equivalence yielded five
different world zones: core, strong semiperiphery, weak semiperiphery, strong
periphery and a weak periphery. Their results indicated that higher zones of
the world-system produce capital intensive manufactured goods while lower zones
produce labor intensive commodities. Their analysis of trade data for 1965 and
1980 revealed more upward mobility than downward mobility in the world division
of labor (Smith and White 1992). Their findings implied that the categories of
the world-system are more continuous than categorical.
The most recent studies have a mix of
results sometimes confirming the results of the earlier studies and at other
times contradicting them. For example, Mahutga (2006) constructs five sets of
block models that contain several zones: core, strong periphery, strong
semiperiphery, weak semiperiphery, strong periphery and periphery. Analyzing
economic data spanning 1965 to 2000, he concludes that the international
division of labor based on the unequal exchange between the core and periphery
remains intact, with upward mobility being evident in only a few countries. A
study by Kick and Davis (2000) found that the classical three-tiered structure
had been replaced by a core, a semi-core, a semiperiphery and a periphery. Kim
and Shin (2002) explain this trend as due to a dynamic process of
globalization. Looking at commodity trade networks from 1959 to 1996, they
argue that the world became increasingly globalized. The growth in the number
of trading partners allowed poorer
peripheral countries to become more integrated into a world economy that was
becoming less hierarchical (Kim and Shin 2002).
Other studies (Kick, et al 2011) have found that there are multiple
cores but that the core/semiperiphery/periphery structure as formulated by
Wallerstein (1974) remains intact. Contrary to this finding, Clark and
Beckfield’s (2009) trichotomous partition model based on the international
trade network during the 1980 to 1990 decade found an expanded core and a set
of upwardly mobile states from the semiperiphery and the periphery. They also found an expanding core, a
semiperiphery and stagnating periphery but they also show that the network still
exhibits a core/periphery hierarchy.
Global political sociology can benefit
from the use of formal network analysis to better understand the trajectories
of political and economic globalization. Knowledge of both the attributes of
entities and their direct and indirect connections are needed. The formal
network studies have tended to confirm the utility of the world-systems
concepts for describing and explaining recent global social change.
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