Compare methods

	World-Systems Analysis	Varieties of Capitalism Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1974	2001
Originator	Immanuel Wallerstein	Peter A. Hall & David Soskice
Type	Historical-structural macrosociological framework	Comparative institutional analysis framework
Seminal source	Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press. ISBN: 9780127859200	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	World-System Theory, World-Systems Theory, Wallersteinian Analysis, Capitalist World-Economy Analysis	VoC Analysis, Varieties of Capitalism Framework, Hall-Soskice Framework, Comparative Capitalisms Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	World-systems analysis is a historical-structural framework, founded by Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World-System (1974) and codified in his 2004 introduction, that takes as its unit of analysis not the nation-state but a single, integrated capitalist world-economy that has expanded since the long sixteenth century to encompass the globe. Within this world-economy a single axial division of labor binds together a hierarchy of zones — core, semiperiphery, and periphery — through which surplus flows unequally from peripheral to core regions. States, classes, and firms are understood by their position in this structure rather than as self-contained societies, and the system is read over the longue duree, attentive to long cycles of accumulation and to the rise and decline of successive hegemonic powers.	Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) analysis is a firm-centered comparative framework, set out by Peter A. Hall and David Soskice in their 2001 edited volume, for understanding why advanced capitalist economies are organized in systematically different ways. Its central move is to place the firm at the heart of the analysis and to ask how firms resolve the coordination problems they face with workers, owners, suppliers, and one another. The framework distinguishes two ideal types — Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) such as the United States and United Kingdom, where firms coordinate primarily through competitive markets, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) such as Germany and Japan, where firms coordinate strategically through non-market institutions — and argues that institutions in different spheres reinforce one another to produce distinct, durable, and internally coherent national models with their own comparative institutional advantages.