ABSTRACT
Debates on the reconfigurations of the agrifood system have been characterized by several academic and political controversies. Until the late 1980s, sociology of agriculture was largely dominated by controversy between the rational-utilitarian modernization theory and its Marxist rival theory of commoditization. The notion of “order” is basic to understand the constitution of society, particularly the phenomena of institutional stabilization and legitimation. Social change depends on the destabilization of relatively stable orders, which entails movements of contestation, but also, and associated with it, circulation of social entities through the permeable boundaries of orders. In Brazil, a major discussion is related to the historical dependence of the country on an economic model based on production and export of agricultural commodities. An interpretative dispute about these phenomena has been in place in Brazil. On the one hand, based on data on land, production and income concentration, the old thesis of disintegration of peasant economy gained space in view of the advance of agribusiness.
