Integrated Civilizational Systems Theory (ICST): A Meta-Theoretical Framework for Macro-Social Analysis

• In Event: Theory Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5

Abstract

Integrated Civilizational Systems Theory (ICST) is a meta-theoretical framework for analyzing civilizational organization, stabilization, and long-term change. ICST conceptualizes civilizations as complex adaptive systems whose outcomes are shaped not by single causal factors but by interactions among multiple structural domains operating through feedback, substitution, and lock-in processes. Rather than competing with existing macro-social theories, ICST integrates them by providing an interactional systems architecture that orders their explanatory logics.

The macro-social canon contains traditions with substantial explanatory power—including political economy, institutional analysis, cultural sociology, and world-systems theory—yet these approaches are typically disciplinary in orientation. As a result, they often struggle to explain recurring cross-historical and cross-societal patterns such as institutional sclerosis, legitimacy decay, reform failure, and the long-term stabilization of harm. ICST addresses this limitation by shifting analytic focus from isolated causes to domain interaction, enabling synthesis across theoretical traditions without collapsing their distinct contributions.

Cross-domain integration has become more urgent as domains intensify their coupling. Faster information flows, digital media, AI-enabled knowledge production, compressed feedback loops: the world feels closer to connected. This may leave disciplinary theories logically consistent but ill-equipped to explain nonlinearity, threshold effects, and long-run stabilization dynamics across co-evolving civilizational systems.
ICST advances comparative macro-social analysis by identifying recurring interactional mechanisms that shape endurance and change. The framework highlights four core diagnostic fields—resource control, institutional lock-in, legitimizing narratives, and human capacity—and examines how these fields interact across political, economic, institutional, moral-religious, and cultural-psychological domains. Civilizational outcomes emerge from these interactions rather than from any single domain acting independently.
ICST foregrounds interaction across structural fields as a means of better explaining recurring dilemmas such as reform failure, durable illegitimacy, and nonzero harm. Rather than replacing extant sociological theory, it aims to complement established macro-social traditions by adding a systematic, comparative capacity for civilizational analysis.

Author

• Daryl W Scott, National University