Sam, Some of the questions you raised I touched on last month in the WS list. So here is another rewrite of an earlier post (sorry for this but my time to prepate the paper on Re-Orient is running out). Serious macro theorists know that structures can only be produced and reproduced through the intentional action of groups or individuals. But world-system theory has a rather poor grasp of micro-rational action. Gunder Frank's *Re-Orient* does recognize rational actors who can calculate their position within the world market, who can calculate, for example, that in a high-wage region it may be rational to reduce costs by introducing labor-saving technology. A crucial claim of Re-Orient is precisely that Asians were just as rational as Europeans in their calculation of economic interests. But in the end Re-Orient adopts that old structuralist approach which sees actors as pushed or compelled to act in accordance with the autonomous logic of the world system: "In a global economy, however, even such local and or sectoral microeconomic incentives anywhere were related to and indeed derived from competitive participation in the macroeconomic world economic structure" (297). Having said that, Frank reduces rational action per se to microeconomic actions, actions which he confuses with Weber's concept of rationality. I should mention S.K.Sanderson's *Social Transformations* as perhaps the most serious attempt, by someone who follows world-sytem theory, to resolve this problem of rational agency and macro-structures. But Sanderson's solution suffers from two major flaws: 1) it misses, even though it knows, Giddens's basic point that structures, if define as rules and resources, can be seen as both constraining and *enabling*. So, in the end Sanderson cannot overcome the dualism of the micro and macro: "Social evolution is driven by purposive or intended human actions, but is to a large extent not itself a purposive or intended phenomenon." (13)
