Studying Long-Term Large-Scale Change: Concluding Reflections on the Relevant Unit of Analysis

When I first received the papers as discussant for the ASA panel, Methodology for World-Systems Analysis (the papers that would come to constitute this journal’s special issue), I didn’t quite know how to proceed. In large part, the papers used innovative methodology to answer interesting substantive questions, so quality was not a question. The author’s were rigorous in how this methodology was applied, and creative in searching for and manipulating worldwide data, so no need to comment there. The problem was semantic. Not in the “petty dispute over word choice” sense of semantic, but in the ontological relationship between distinctive concepts and their intended (in this case theoretical) meaning.