Modern World System Research Articles

Does world system theory rein in social media? Identifying factors contributing to country mentions on X

This article examined how social media content has shaped the representation of countries for publics around the world. Based on world system theory, the study investigated the underlying predictors of country mentions on X (formerly Twitter) in 2018. It confirmed that countries with greater economic power – or higher status in the world system – received more mentions. Furthermore, countries with larger populations were mentioned more frequently as were countries that experienced major conflicts. The findings from structural equation modeling shed new light on the interrelationships that drive the social media representation of individual countries and delineated an integrated Model of Country Mentions on X. These findings have implications for global leaders, policymakers, and social media firms.

A world systems analysis of union membership and support for government spending on environmental protection

This article contributes to debates about trade unions and the environment by studying international variation in the association between union membership and support for government spending on environmental protection. Building on research which demonstrates a positive membership effect on support for environmental protection, the article extends the geographical scope beyond the more economically developed contexts studied previously. Using World Systems Theory as a comparative framework, distinguishing between core, semi-periphery, and periphery states, the article explores whether the positive membership effect extends beyond more affluent core states and reveals an intriguing empirical puzzle: while public support for environmental spending is substantially weaker in core states relative to non-core states, the latter being subject to more extensive environmental threats, the reverse holds for the membership effect on environmental spending support which instead tends to be more positive in core states. Union membership thus tends to have the largest positive impact on environmental spending support in countries where public support for such spending tends to be lower. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the global effort to address an ongoing environmental crisis are discussed by considering the notion of a solidarity effect.

Chinese embedded globalization: social-economic formations in dispute in world reordering

ABSTRACT This contribution focuses on a reconceptualization of the term globalization, drawing on world system theories and the dialectical concept of countermovement. The focus is the Social-Economic Formation (SEF) concept elaborated by the Marxist tradition to understand and analyse the contemporary ascendance of China and its power projection. Based on dialectic methodology, we argue that globalization is a contradictory process of interconnectivity between SEFs in different historical eras with substantive changes in the space–time relationship. Thus, the embryonic Embedded Chinese Globalization is emerging as a historical negation of Neoliberal globalization (NG)

Global sociology and its discontents

AbstractSociology emerged in the course of Western modernization; its major classical-era statements are preoccupied with modernity and its impact on national societies. After decolonization, ‘Third World’ modernization paved the way for the notion of globalization. The sociology of globalization is a current specialty within US and European sociological associations. The promise of global sociology has been on the agenda of the International Sociological Association since at least 1990. At a deeper level, global sociology requires un-thinking the role of core concepts such as modernity or religion or society vis-à-vis their Western origins. Global Studies and post-colonial sociology, two of the most widely known research fields claiming global intent, are examined with respect to whether they provide adequate conceptual resources for global sociology. While the research agendas of both offer promising insights, inquiry suggests that both suffer from important drawbacks. The sociological tradition is now facing an impasse; fragmentation may persist, but other possibilities also exist. No grand solution is perhaps possible. A truly global sociology may eventually emerge from the original interpretations that develop from non-Western historical paths.

The Informant Falls Silent. World-Systems Analysis and Debates over the Socialist Past

The Informant, a historical thriller series produced by HBO and distributed by HBO Max between March and June 2022, provoked heated debates about its representation of the 1980s Hungarian political climate, society and lifestyle. In the first section of this paper I will highlight the core aspects of the critical discourse around The Informant. What directions did the collective recollections and contemporary interpretations of the historical past take? What kind of controversial expectations were brought to surface by the question of authenticity, a central theme of the reviews about the series? In the second section I will argue that the production, the ensuing debate, and the incidental suspension of the discourse should be interpreted as a case study of world-systems analysis. After establishing the framework and contemporary relevance of this theory, I will connect it to the findings of recent papers in production studies regarding Central and Eastern Europe. In the last section I will argue that due to the semi-peripheral status of Hungary, the Western economic centre plays a key role in the local cultural production, and in this case, the reformation of national collective memory. However, this relationship between centre and periphery is originally organized by economic interests, thus it is generally insensitive about the symbolic values of cultural productions. This means that it cannot fulfil the progressive social role that the local intelligentsia is expecting from it.

Modern world-system, market economy, and contemporary Brazil formation

Resumo O presente artigo discute o processo de formação do Brasil contemporâneo nos quadros do sistema-mundo moderno através da instituição da economia de mercado como mecanismo de regulação social. Para tanto, exploram-se as formas de sociabilidade herdadas do período colonial e, então, analisam-se as tensões desestabilizadoras que envolvem o processo de homogeneização dos diferentes modos de vida através do impacto da formação do Estado brasileiro e da organização dos mercados de terra e de trabalho. Argumenta-se que o estudo da economia de subsistência é central para compreender a transição ao Brasil contemporâneo na medida em que a partir dela é possível apreender as tensões engendradas sobre e pelo Estado no processo de instituição do modo capitalista de produção da vida no Brasil.

Качественные характеристики школьного образования как показатель политико-географического положения стран

The correlations between the qualitative characteristics of school education and the human development index and its components, according to UN data, are examined using sets of countries. They take into account educational characteristics, indicators of schoolchildren’s performance, identified in various countries by the international programs TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and the number of gold medals at international olympiads in various academic disciplines. Components of human development – life expectancy, gross national income, average and expected years of schooling. Positive correlations, in most cases significant, between the phenomena under consideration have been established. The distribution of educational indicators taken into account by region of the world is considered. Using the world-system analysis, it was found that there is no complete correlation between the country's place in the international system and the level of schoolchildren's academic performance and medalists in school discipline Olympiads. It is noted that the Russian Federation and many countries geographically close to it are characterized by a gap between the quality indicators of school education and the level of development. It is suggested that the quality of school education is a strong and insufficiently implemented prerequisite for the development of the Russian Federation.

The impact of Levantine community on the westernization process of Ottoman Empire

The aim of this research is to understand the role of Levantines in the westernization process of Ottoman Empire. The scope of the study covers the second half of 19th and the first quarter of 20th century of İstanbul, specifically Galata and Pera regions which took on the appearance of a European city. The method is Center – Periphery Theory. According to the Modern World-System approach, the world is divided into two, center and periphery, and the center means both; the center in geographical sense, and also the center of the cultural values, symbols, beliefs, and behavioural patterns. In this system, above mentioned are demanded and imported by the periphery. The importation process is performed primarily by the privileged actors such as, elite class, tradesman and bureaucrats in the periphery. Within the case of Ottoman Empire and Istanbul at the time, the center was west, particularly France and the way of life was associated to the Belle Époque period. Ottoman elite living in the capital, desired a western lifestyle while the west was taken as a role model of progress during the 19th century and even later. In that period, the Ottoman elite was in a challenging attempt to westernize the Empire in every aspect of life, in collaboration with Levantines who were the European tradesman in İstanbul. Just as the West was recognized as the center of progressing and the Levantine community was the representation of west in the Ottoman capital, in other words, the West in the Orient, so Istanbul was the West in Anatolia as the center of progressing.

«Ядро-периферия» и периферийность в региональной науке

The article presents an analytical review of the development of the core-periphery and peripherality concepts in economic theory. The stages of formation of the core-periphery approach are marked by the contributions of the school of Latin American structuralism, theories of polarized development, dependency theory and world-system theory associated with the names of R. Prebisch, J. Friedmann, F. Perroux, S. Furtado, I. Wallerstein. The core-periphery concept has proved to be a useful analytical tool in studies of international trade and economic growth in the world economy. At the same time, uneven structures of distribution of economic activity in space, similar to the core-periphery structure, appear in many models of regional economy, starting with the model of agricultural production location by I. Thunen and ending with the core-periphery model by P. Krugman. These structures emerge without the help of the core-periphery concept, but as a result of the interaction of two fundamental factors – transport costs and economies of scale – and represent various combinations of dispersion and agglomeration. With regional inequality growing worldwide, the combination of the core-periphery approach and basic concepts of regional economics allows us to analyze the complex mechanisms of spatial polarization of economic space. Over time, the periphery has gone beyond the core-periphery dichotomy and developed into an independent category defined, defined by a combination of low accessibility of large markets, low population density and remoteness from decision-making centers. The concept of peripherality allows us to understand the processes of peripheralisation of previously prosperous territories through the interaction of power asymmetry and agglomeration effects

Some issues of global problems in the changing system of values of the modern world

The article analyzes the peculiarities of global problems in the modern world system, their transformation, identification of more acute issues, taking into account the urgent issue of the security of each country, food security against the background of the growth of the total population of the planet. Issues of environmental protection and climate change. Modifications of global problems, taking into account wars and their consequences, along with the active phase of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the development of artificial intelligence, which leads to the emergence of new professions, new forms of employment of the population, the development of humanity in general and, of course, affects the changes in the values of every society. The article analyzes the historical perspective of economic and social changes and the influence of technological processes, assesses the impact of the war on the economic and demographic components of society. It is noted that the results of the fourth industrial revolution, the emergence and development of artificial intelligence are a breakthrough for the survival of mankind. Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming various industries, and environmental protection and climate change are no exception. The modern world transforms a person's way of life, forms of communication, changes the characteristics of relationships, views on the same things, manners of communication, and ultimately, values. In the articles of philosophers, economists, and psychologists who are engaged in researching the problems of forming the society of the future, the emergence of the technological structure of psychotechnologies and technologies related to moral responsibility is noted. Changes in the technological stages of society are accompanied by changes in society itself. Values influence people's desire to realize themselves and, accordingly, the sphere of employment. In the context of world transformations, there are changes in the values of society. Values can be divided into groups and everyone determines their priority (material, spiritual values (vital, moral, aesthetic), social, family values, the value of pleasure, health. Each person takes his place in society, which determines social values that depend from the environment, from needs, from goals, and they can change during life.Self-discovery is the deepest way of assessing one's values.

The Political Economy of Class Formation and Class Structure in the Southern Kurdistan: 1991-2021

This article examines the dynamics of class formation from a historical sociology perspective after the formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), roughly from 1991 to 2021. It then reviews the KRG period (1991-2021) to trace the process of class formation in the newly-born government. After that, the researchers explore the pattern and nature of class structure and the state in the Southern Kurdistan from 1991 to 2021. This article presents the role of the world economy and the Southern Kurdistan political parties in class formation. For example, the government relied on the selling of natural resources such as crude oil, and a small proportion of people received a tremendous amount of wealth from the government by utilizing political power, and their class position changed to a new one, which is a bourgeois class. As this is a historical sociology study, the following theories will be used: Dependency theory and the world-systems theory are essential in this article because they will evaluate the relationship between classes and compare the Southern Kurdistan with other countries in the capitalist world system. The qualitative methods which have been used in this article include critical analysis of written sources and secondary data, including official statistics of the KRG.

1918-2018. La literature nationale comme projet unificateur

"1918-2018. National Literature as a Unifying Project ● Abstract (original): This paper offers a new approach on the topic of the identity of Romanian Literature as National Literature. I will discuss the case of the referential History of the Romanian Literature from its Origins until Present Day (1941) written by the most important Romanian literary critic and historian G Călinescu. This holistic historical narrative sends to a particular strategy of legitimizing the national literature as a history of literary values. I will argue that his focus on Romanian language as a trademark of Romanian literary identity proves insufficient as there are too many examples which invalidate Călinescu’s theory. I will propose in exchange an alternative, rather relative, but dynamic and integrative perspective: national literature as a concept with a variable geometry. That means, among others, the outcome of a historical metamorphosis, with its multiple borders and changing statutes, also with its modern and pre-modern avatars. We know that the challenges and new conflict between national and supranational brought by globalisation radically reformulate literary national identities and particularly peripheral and semi-peripheral identities, which need to update their roles and strategies of affirmation and preservation. This approach regarding National Literature will open a new dialogue with concepts like Regional Literature and even World Literature (in terms of world system analysis)"

Oceanic irrealism. Danish petrofiction below the surface

This article ventures seaward to examine how two contemporary Danish novels paradoxically uses irrealist features to make visible the existent opacity and mythology of oil. Respectively, the novel På ryggen af en tyr (2014; On the Back of a Bull ) by Kristina Stoltz employs gothic sentiments to reveal a ‘realer, if darker,’ oil reality, while Aftenstjerne (2019; Night Star ) by Aske Juul Christiansen uses Nordic seafarer and explorer mythology to display and displace a dialectic of oil invisibility and materiality at sea. Thus, this article concludes that these novels contribute to a regionally specific critique of the modern world-system of fossil capitalism. I suggest designating this corpus of oceanic irrealism as Danish North Sea World Literature.

Regarding the resilience of market entities on the example of enterprises in the extractive industry

The last period (starting with the pandemic) cataclysms determined the importance for the macro- and microeconomies resilience as the ability of ecosystems, business, society to cope with shocks and continue to function in approximately the same way. The topic of resilience is extremely important for mining companies, because they cannot afford any relocation and industrial repurposing. The goal of this work is to clarify the essence of resilience and identify the factors that determine it for subjects of the market system. Research methods: general scientific – abstraction, analysis, synthesis, observation, generalization; the microcosm-system approach, which is an extension of the world-system approach to microeconomics; cumulative cost curves; single-factor production functions; methods of mathematical and statistical analysis; Zipf-Pareto law. The base of observations is the global coking coal market, production and economic indicators of the Ukrainian iron ore mining company. It is shown that the unprofitability of industrial and commercial activity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the microcosm-economy to lose resilience. The loss of resilience is a process whose active actors, along with the direct subjects of the market, are their owners, the state and other subjects and authorities. The final stage of resilience loss occurs after the market subject crosses a certain point of no return. A model of a certain market is a cumulative cost curve. The final part of the cumulative cost curve`s graph, where the elements with the worst economic characteristics (high-risk group) are located, is significantly non-linear. The rank of the element position on the curve mathematically determines with the Zipf-Pareto law the cost value and identify the zone of market entities profitable functioning according with the market price of products. The application of the logit-regression model makes it possible to estimate the probability of a market subject's profitability loss at its inherent cost and the confidence interval of prices observed during a certain period. The risk degree of resilience loss is determined not only by the factors of the market itself, but also by the production function characteristic of the subject of market activity. The article provides an example of a one-factor logarithmic production function of a Ukrainian iron ore mining company.

A Critical Analysis of the Fulbright Program from a World Systems Perspective

The Fulbright Program is the United States’ flagship educational exchange program. Since 1946, the program has been heralded as a program that promotes mutual understanding across cultures. However, the Fulbright Program’s role as a U.S. Department of State initiative warrants further examination of how this educational exchange program functions as a foreign policy effort on behalf of the United States. This mixed methods study uses data presented in five years of data available in the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board’s Annual Reports of the program. The study finds seven themes present in the written content of the annual report: Human rights, peace and security; access, diversity, and opportunity; collaboration and partnership; mutual financial investment; excellence as a result of Fulbright; program impact; and solving global problems.

A Comparison of the Historical Methods of Max Weber and I. Wallerstein: The World-Systems Analysis as a Contribution to the Development of Weberian and Weberian Historical Sociology

A Comparison of the Historical Methods of Max Weber and I. Wallerstein: The World-Systems Analysis as a Contribution to the Development of Weberian and Weberian Historical Sociology

Roundtable discussion: World-culture and social reproduction feminism

This dialogic roundtable discussion elaborates the possibilities opened up by the use of social reproduction theory in intersection with world-literary, materialist feminist, queer Marxist and world-systems approaches to literature and culture. In particular, contributors consider how the analysis of social reproduction might illuminate the politics of everyday life, the representational challenges accompanying the banality or ubiquity of women's work, the potential gaps of social reproduction feminism, and the aesthetic challenges accompanying or following from an interest in social reproduction. Topics covered include digital media as foundational operating mode of Hindu nationalism, the sexuality- and race-based exclusions of employment in higher education, Philippine literature as ‘reproductive fiction’, the Latin American novel vis-à-vis its registration of domestic service, the short story as bellwether for global issues surrounding women’s labour, and questions of complicity in the kinds of labour some women and sexual minorities enact for larger authoritarian, patriarchal projects. If women do much of the work of producing the everyday then we must also ask how women might re-make the everyday along more radical, and radically egalitarian lines.

Cumulative Processes in the Modern World-System in the Prism of Dialectics and Laws of Synergetics: to the Problem of Transition to Egalitar Society under Conditions of Multipolarity

Introduction. The paper examines the state of the modern world and the prospects for its multipolarity from the standpoint of synergetics, dialectics, the world-systems analysis and geopolitics. The world-systems approach substantiates the crisis and finiteness of the modern world-economy, the impossibility of its modernization and the emergence of a demand for the formation of an egalitarian world order. The idea of multipolarity is one of the answers to this request.Methodology and sources. Ideas of social synergetics in the works of E.N. Knyazeva, S.P. Kurdyumov and V.V. Tuzov made it possible to describe the state of the modern world system as a state of a non-equilibrium system at the stage of self-organization. Hegelian dialectical laws were used to describe the most general characteristics in the logic of the historical stages in the formation of a social system. The ideas of I. Wallerstein and the geopolitical theory of R. Collins made it possible to designate the properties of attractors that lead to the emergence of poles in the world-economy.Results and discussion. From the point of view of synergetics, multipolarity in the world-system is a state of chaos; from the point of view of dialectics, this is a state of a leap, a transition to a new quality. A geopolitical-world-system typology of attractors that can lead to the formation of poles is proposed. It is shown that the multipolar world contains different options for development, depending on what kind of economic relations will develop between the participants. Within the framework of the existing economic system (capitalist relations, relations of self-organization), multipolarity acts as an intermediate state from which a unipolar world is born. The authors came to the conclusion that for a new result, it is necessary to change the economic paradigm from a self-organizing world-system to one organized by the will of people and based on science. The requirements of a multipolar world on the part of the BRICS, SCO, and EAEU states are within the framework of the existing development paradigm, so the formation of egalitarian relations on this basis is problematic.Conclusion. Humanity gets a chance to overcome the spontaneity of self-organization processes and form a more egalitarian society in the course of the bifurcation of the existing system. Multipolarity can act as a stage of such a transition. However, if the issue of a qualitative change in social relations is not resolved, then multipolarity will turn out to be only a stage in the return to a unipolar world.

The Problem of State Sovereignty in the Context of World-System Analysis

Based on the analysis of research literature, regulations and policy documents of the Russian Federation, the paper examines the problem of sovereignty of the modern state. The author analyzes the current state of the theory of sovereignty in the context of one of the most promising doctrines of international relations — the theory of world-system analysis. The author suggests taking into account the theoretical and methodological significance of this concept when developing practical measures to implement the sovereignty of the Russian Federation in the political, economic and technological sectors. The author substantiates the relevance of this theory to ensure the real sovereignty of a modern state in a transforming world order, taking into account the challenges that require immediate response and control. The paper elucidates modern models of implementation of state sovereignty in the context of its place in the world system and focuses on indicators for assessing the sovereignty of a modern state, namely: self-sufficiency, resistance to the influence of external factors and state control over internal assets. The author substantiates the fundamental importance of taking into account the methodology of the world-system approach in the implementation of the economic security strategy of the Russian Federation.

Modern slavery disclosure regulations in the global supply Chain: A world-systems perspective

This study provides a linguistic analysis of three modern slavery disclosure regulations, the California Transparency in the Supply Chain Act (CTSCA) 2010, section 54 of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Australian Modern Slavery Act 2018. These regulations require companies to report their actions to tackle labour exploitation within global supply chains. Based on World-System Theory (WST: Wallerstein, 1975, 1979, 2015) and by relying on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we examined the disclosure regulations and found that the texts of and discourses around the regulations are not neutral and allow social wrongs to continue in global supply chains. Although regulators claim modern slavery disclosure regulations to be a step in the right direction, our investigation reveals a different picture: the linguistic features of the regulations support the perpetuating risk of modern slavery in global supply chains based in the periphery countries. We argue that changing the current global power structure/system is necessary to address the grand challenges of regulating modern slavery. There is a need for disclosure regime that can protect vulnerable communities, including workers in the global supply chains.