"world systems analysis"

World-systems analysis is not a theory, but an approach to social analysis and social change developed principally by Immanuel Wallerstein, with major contributions by Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank. World-systems analysis is derived from two key intellectual sources, the neo-Marxist literature on development and the French Annales School and Fernand Braudel.

In Wallerstein’s 1987 publication, World-System Analysis, he disavows the term "world-system theory." He proclaims that "World-systems analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of it. It is a protest against the way in which social scientific inquiry was structured for all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century." He goes on to lay out seven common assumptions of modern social science challenged by world-systems analysis.

Assumptions:
(1) The 'disciplines' of modern social science are intellectually coherent groupings of subject matter that refer to discrete 'logics.
(2) History is the study of events (the ideographic approach) and social science discovers universal rules of human/social behavior (the nomothetic approach).
(3) Modern countries or 'states' are societies, or there is a society underlying each state.
(4) Capitalism is a system based on competition between free producers using free labor with free commodities, 'free' meaning its available for sale and purchase on a market. Situations in countries that deviate from this definition, such as the communist or socialist countries, and Third countries, are not yet capitalist.
(5) The late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a great turning point in the development of capitalism in that capitalists achieved state-societal power in the key states which furthered the industrial revolution marking the rise of capitalism.
(6) Human history is progressive and inevitably so.
(7) Science is the search for rules which summarize most succinctly why everything is the way it is and how things happen.