Economists have seldom drawn knowledge from sociology in their analysis of the development process. In this paper I attempt to evaluate the contributions of sociologists who have worked within the traditions of modernization theory and of dependency and world systems theory in terms of their potential contributions to research by development economists. I conclude that metatheory in sociology has little to offer economists at this stage and that I should extend my review to cover a number of "middle range" theories that are more directly related to applied research by development economists.