Sociological research on Latin American societies has focused on the understanding of the causes and consequences of different patterns of development. In the past decades, this research has been guided by the counterpoint between two different theoretical approaches and the findings generated with their help. In the 1950s and 1960s, the field was dominated by what came to be known as the modernization approach. In the 1970s and 1980s, dependency and world-system theories became prevalent (Klaren and Bossert 1986; Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1978). Each of these paradigms spawned useful lines of research, but eventually they became unsatisfactory, either because some of their assumptions were inconsistent with the facts, or because they were incapable of encompassing important areas of social reality. The field is now ripe for a new conceptual framework, which could incorporate useful aspects of the previous ones. In the past few years, there has...