ABSTRACT
Sociologists “have regularly bemoaned their lack of knowledge concerning social change,” says Samuel Huntington, but “compared with past neglect of the theory of political change in political science, sociology is rich with works on the theory of social change.” International relations has not fared much better than its parent discipline. Integration theory offers a very useful explanation of process-level changes within the system, as well as some hypotheses concerning the environmental sources of system change. Systems transformations, however, have generally been neglected by integration theory, and are not particularly amenable to its incremental logic of explanation. Integration theory can be seen as having passed through three stages of development. The lack of concern with external influences on the integration process was another important theme of the 1960s criticisms of integration theory. A somewhat similar but analytically more useful distinction has recently been emphasized by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye.
