there are three major intellectuel building blocks of world-system theory, s conceived by wallerstein:the Annales school, Marx,and dependence theory . these building blocks are associated with Wallerstein's life experience and exposure to various issues, theories, and situations.
world-system theory owes to the annales school, whose major representative is Fernand Braudel , its histirical approach. wallerstein got from braudel's his insistence on the long term . He also learned to focus on geo-ecological regions as units of analysis, attention to rural history,and reliance on empirical materials from Braudel.The impact of the Annales is at the general methodological level.
From Marx Wallerstein learnrd that (1) The fundamental reality if social conflict among materiallt based human groups, (2) the concern with a relevant totality,(3) the transitory nature of social forms and theories about them (4) the centrality of the accumulation process and competitive class strugles that result from it (5) a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction. Wallerstein's ambition has been to revise marxism itself. world system theory is in many ways an adaptation of dependency theory. wallerstein draws heavily from dependency theory, a neo-marxist explanation of development processes, popular in the developing world and among whose figures are Fernando Henrique cardoso a barzilian.dependency theory focuses on undersyanding the periphery by looking at core-periphery relations and it has flourished in peripheral reqions loke latin america.it is from a dependency theory perspective that many contemporary critiques to global capitalism come from. other important influences in wallerstein's work still present in contemporary world system research are karl polanyi and joseph schumpeter. from the latter comes world system interest in business cycles from the former the nation pr three basic modes or economic organization