World-Systems Theorizing

2006 ◽  
pp. 589-612
Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Keyword(s):  
World Systems

Coal's Persistence in the Capitalist World-Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. Gellert ◽  
Paul S. Ciccantell
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Coal Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

Predominant analyses of energy offer insufficient theoretical and political-economic insight into the persistence of coal and other fossil fuels. The dominant narrative of coal powering the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain's world dominance in the nineteenth century giving way to a U.S.- and oil-dominated twentieth century, is marred by teleological assumptions. The key assumption that a complete energy “transition” will occur leads some to conceive of a renewable-energy-dominated twenty-first century led by China. After critiquing the teleological assumptions of modernization, ecological modernization, energetics, and even world-systems analysis of energy “transition,” this paper offers a world-systems perspective on the “raw” materialism of coal. Examining the material characteristics of coal and the unequal structure of the world-economy, the paper uses long-term data from governmental and private sources to reveal the lack of transition as new sources of energy are added. The increases in coal consumption in China and India as they have ascended in the capitalist world-economy have more than offset the leveling-off and decline in some core nations. A true global peak and decline (let alone full substitution) in energy generally and coal specifically has never happened. The future need not repeat the past, but technical, policy, and movement approaches will not get far without addressing the structural imperatives of capitalist growth and the uneven power structures and processes of long-term change of the world-system.

Phenomenological Modelling

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Huffaker ◽  
Marco Bittelli ◽  
Rodolfo Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Nonlinear Dynamics ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Real World ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
False Positives ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Essential Services ◽  
Low Dimension ◽  
Convergent Cross Mapping

Detecting causal interactions among climatic, environmental, and human forces in complex biophysical systems is essential for understanding how these systems function and how public policies can be devised that protect the flow of essential services to biological diversity, agriculture, and other core economic activities. Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) detects causal networks in real-world systems diagnosed with deterministic, low-dimension, and nonlinear dynamics. If CCM detects correspondence between phase spaces reconstructed from observed time series variables, then the variables are determined to causally interact in the same dynamic system. CCM can give false positives by misconstruing synchronized variables as causally interactive. Extended (delayed) CCM screens for false positives among synchronized variables.

scholarly journals Higher-order temporal network effects through triplet evolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Yao ◽  
Bingsheng Chen ◽  
Tim S. Evans ◽  
Kim Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Link Prediction ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Prediction Algorithm ◽  
Interaction Patterns ◽  
Temporal Networks ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Order Interaction ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Pairwise Interactions

AbstractWe study the evolution of networks through ‘triplets’—three-node graphlets. We develop a method to compute a transition matrix to describe the evolution of triplets in temporal networks. To identify the importance of higher-order interactions in the evolution of networks, we compare both artificial and real-world data to a model based on pairwise interactions only. The significant differences between the computed matrix and the calculated matrix from the fitted parameters demonstrate that non-pairwise interactions exist for various real-world systems in space and time, such as our data sets. Furthermore, this also reveals that different patterns of higher-order interaction are involved in different real-world situations. To test our approach, we then use these transition matrices as the basis of a link prediction algorithm. We investigate our algorithm’s performance on four temporal networks, comparing our approach against ten other link prediction methods. Our results show that higher-order interactions in both space and time play a crucial role in the evolution of networks as we find our method, along with two other methods based on non-local interactions, give the best overall performance. The results also confirm the concept that the higher-order interaction patterns, i.e., triplet dynamics, can help us understand and predict the evolution of different real-world systems.

scholarly journals Asymmetry underlies stability in power grids

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferenc Molnar ◽  
Takashi Nishikawa ◽  
Adilson E. Motter
Keyword(s):  
Symmetry Breaking ◽  
Real World ◽  
Power Grids ◽  
Stable Operation ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Symmetric State ◽  
Network Systems ◽  
Additional Improvement ◽  
The Stability ◽  
General Method

AbstractBehavioral homogeneity is often critical for the functioning of network systems of interacting entities. In power grids, whose stable operation requires generator frequencies to be synchronized—and thus homogeneous—across the network, previous work suggests that the stability of synchronous states can be improved by making the generators homogeneous. Here, we show that a substantial additional improvement is possible by instead making the generators suitably heterogeneous. We develop a general method for attributing this counterintuitive effect to converse symmetry breaking, a recently established phenomenon in which the system must be asymmetric to maintain a stable symmetric state. These findings constitute the first demonstration of converse symmetry breaking in real-world systems, and our method promises to enable identification of this phenomenon in other networks whose functions rely on behavioral homogeneity.

The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Trade Flows ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slavery

This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights () can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.

scholarly journals Fuzzy stochastic differential equations driven by fractional Brownian motion

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hossein Jafari ◽  
Marek T. Malinowski ◽  
M. J. Ebadi
Keyword(s):  
Brownian Motion ◽  
Differential Equations ◽  
Stochastic Differential Equations ◽  
Fractional Brownian Motion ◽  
Approximation Method ◽  
Existence And Uniqueness ◽  
Financial Models ◽  
Stochastic Integral ◽  
Long Range Dependence ◽  
World Systems

AbstractIn this paper, we consider fuzzy stochastic differential equations (FSDEs) driven by fractional Brownian motion (fBm). These equations can be applied in hybrid real-world systems, including randomness, fuzziness and long-range dependence. Under some assumptions on the coefficients, we follow an approximation method to the fractional stochastic integral to study the existence and uniqueness of the solutions. As an example, in financial models, we obtain the solution for an equation with linear coefficients.

Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and Collaborations

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Human Impacts ◽  
Ecological Models ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Temporal Scales ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Historical Epoch

The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic governance. Others find the term helpful in drawing attention to disastrous environmental change, inspiring a reinvigorated attention to the ontological unruliness of the world, to multiple temporal scales, and to intertwined social and natural histories. New forms of noticing can be linked to systems analytics, including capitalist world systems, structural comparisons of patchy landscapes, infrastructures and ecological models, emerging sociotechnical assemblages, and spirits. Rather than a historical epoch defined by geologists, the Anthropocene is a problem that is pulling anthropologists into new forms of noticing and analysis, and into experiments and collaborations beyond anthropology.

On the Mutual Compatibility of Democracy and Marxian Socialism

1986 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Joseph Cropsey
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
High Politics

Much of the high politics of our time is affected by the hostility and suspicion that pervade relations between the Western democracies and the socialist world. Is it possible that the hostility and suspicion are misplaced, and that the two world systems can find a common ground on which to acknowledge each other as compatible co-denizens between whom there is no difference so potent that the being of one must be a reproach to the being of the other? With a view to this question, I wish to ask whether it is possiblefor a Marxist society to be democratic or for a democracy to elect Marxism or to elect to remain Marxist. Putting the question in the form, “Is it possible …” would enable us to answer it by pointing to even one example of a Marxist democracy, thus to dissolve what seems like a theoretical matter in an empirical medium.

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