The sociological paradigm of modernization which began to disintegrate in the 1950s assumed that all societies develop according to a common pattern, and that traditional forms of organization are impediments to modernization, which was conceived as a continuous, covariant development of all the institutional spheres of a society toward some fixed endpoint. Criticism of this model has established that traditional and modem elements may coexist in a developing society, and that modernization is not a universal process characterizable in terms of Western European experience. This suggests that although modernization generates a set of common problems, it must be viewed as a process bound to historical conditions, and one which provokes different responses from different societies.