[PEN-L:3883] Re: World System Holistic?

["Ricardo Duchesne" <RDUCHESN@xxxxxxxx>]

Sam,
Some of the questions you raised I touched on last month in the WS
list. So here is another rewrite of an earlier post (sorry for this
but my time to prepate the paper on Re-Orient is running out).
Serious macro theorists know that structures can only be produced and
reproduced through the intentional action of groups or individuals.
But world-system theory has a rather poor grasp of
micro-rational action. Gunder Frank's *Re-Orient* does recognize
rational actors who can calculate their position within
the world market, who can calculate, for example, that in a high-wage
region it may be rational to reduce costs by introducing
labor-saving technology. A crucial claim of Re-Orient is precisely
that Asians were just as rational as Europeans in their calculation of
economic interests. But in the end Re-Orient adopts that old
structuralist approach which sees actors as pushed or compelled to
act in accordance with the autonomous logic of the world system: "In
a global economy, however, even such local and or sectoral
microeconomic incentives anywhere were related to and indeed derived
from competitive participation in the macroeconomic world economic
structure" (297).

Having said that, Frank reduces rational action per se to microeconomic
actions, actions which he confuses with Weber's concept of  rationality.
I should mention S.K.Sanderson's *Social Transformations* as  perhaps the
most serious attempt, by someone who follows world-sytem theory, to
resolve this problem of  rational agency and macro-structures. But
Sanderson's solution suffers from two major flaws: 1) it misses, even
though it knows, Giddens's basic point that structures, if define as
rules and resources, can be seen as both constraining and  *enabling*.
So, in the end Sanderson cannot overcome  the dualism of the micro
and macro: "Social evolution is driven by purposive or intended
human actions, but is to a large extent not itself a purposive or
intended phenomenon." (13)