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WHILE STRUGGLING TO WORK OUT THE TENSIONS THAT ARE EVIDENT IN THE INTERPLAY OF DIVERGENT IDEAS ON WORLD SYSTEM, THE AUTHOR VENTURES A PRELIMINARY CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE WORLD SYSTEM IN TERMS OF "INTERSTRUCTURAL DYNAMICS", A CONCEPTUALIZATION WHICH CAN SERVE AS A CATALYST TO THEORY SYNTHESIS.

Contemporary social science needs to formulate a world sociology, and with regard to this problematic, world system theory occupies an important place. At an earlier stage world system theory has been criticised for overemphasising the world market while neglecting forces and relations of production. The present critique focuses on conceptual dimensions of world system theory and on the relationship between its conceptual structure and the way it theorises social change and action. World system theory is a theory of the world system without a system theory. Its actual conceptual units are `social systems', one of which is the `modern world system'. The assumptions which define these need to be examined as well as how they are thought to relate to one another and how one changes into another. This is one of the fundamental conceptual problems of world system theory. It shares this difficulty in conceptualising structure change with other `structural' approaches, such as structural history of the Annales school. In world system theory this is combined with neo-Marxist dependency theory and an, in other respects, conventional Marxism, replicating several of the deficiencies of these approaches-the centrism of dependency thinking and the materialism and determinism of conventional Marxism. To address the question of structure change, in particular how the `modern world system' can be transformed to a successor social system, world system theory revives the Marxist theory of the crisis of capitalism, i.e. one of the weakest theorems of Marxist thought.

Though Immanuel Wallerstein has been given much of the credit for developing the thinking behind the world-system approach, it must be remembered that Oliver Cox was the first person to theorize about a world-system perspective. In fact, he is responsible for the development of a descriptive framework for capitalism nearly 20 years prior to Wallerstein's own work on the same subject. Despite Cox's pioneering role, his contributions have been largely disregarded, while Wallerstein has been elevated to elite academic status. The stark contrast that continues to exist between Cox's & Wallerstein's standing can be attributed to the social & intellectual climate of their time. During the 1950s, when Cox was developing his theories, his Marxist-inspired analysis was not well received. By 1974, when Wallerstein's world-system work was published, the intellectual community was ready to embrace the concept. 36 References. K. A. Larsen