The article highlights a study which demonstrated how the concept of civil society could be used to comprehend the dynamics related to agricultural sustainability. Sustainability is challenging both modernization and dependency as the dominant organizational paradigm for sociologists concerned about social and economic development processes. Sustainable development widened the narrow productionist/economistic foci of modernization and dependency by explicitly incorporating environmental and social dimensions into the development matrix. When applied to agriculture, a sustainable system of production should achieve economic viability for farmers and others engaged in agriculturally related enterprises. For development sociologists, agricultural sustainability represents a perspective that fits within an emerging body of theory and research on civil society that has demonstrated the relationships among size, scale, organizational and contextual characteristics of production, and socioeconomic welfare. The civil society perspective postulates that small to medium-sized, craft-based production enterprises are more organizationally flexible than large-scale, industrial-like enterprises. Consequently, they are better able to adapt to changing market conditions. Agricultural sustainability represents a fundamental shift away from the narrow focus on production and efficiency endorsed by the conventional agriculture community.