1) Bibliographic Data
Weaver, Thomas. (2001) “Time, Space, and Articulation in the Economic Development of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region from 1940 to 2000”, Human Organization, V. 60-2, Summer:105-20

2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
The following topics are reviewed as commodities and articulatory mechanisms: agricultural development, urbanization, labor, the retail and tourism industries and the contraband trade, and the establishment of the Border Industrialization Program.
This essay applies World-System concepts to the analyses of the U.S.-Mexico border region. The binational border region, for example, shares characteristics of periphery and semiperiphery. These linked regions transform labor and resources into economic activity. The world economy is made up of “commodity chains”-forward and backward connections in the processing of a commodity within regions. These commodity chains encompass the exploitation of raw materials, labor reproduction, levels of processing, transportation, and consumption. The capitalist world-system in this context forces unequal exchange that simultaneously promotes core development and peripheral poverty and dependence. The collaboration of elite classes between and within core and periphery supports this transformation.

3) Conceptual references to transnational-transnationalism
Transnationalized, transnational interests.

4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
The author views articulations as mechanisms that facilitate the movement of capital and value from one part of the world-system to another. The use is similar to “mediating institutions” used by Lamphere (1992) and Hackenberg (1997). Hegemony or hegemonic cycles refers to the ascendance to dominance by one nation-state in periods that last 100 or more years. This has occurred with he Dutch, Great Britain and the United States. The hegemonic power dictates how the periphery responds because it controls economic activities such as finance, distribution, and consumption.
The author concludes: Is the process of migration the articulation or are the agents of this process the articulatory mechanism? The answer is both. At one level we can say that migration is an institution and process and an articulatory mechanism. At another level of abstraction, the agents of migration-labor contractors, coyotes, guides, employers, return migrants, and social networks- are also mechanisms.