Abstract
The institutionalization of research in universities has progressed more in Argentina than in Mexico, and this basic difference is revealed through a historical analysis of the development of universities in these two countries. This dissertation highlights those factors outside the university system that encouraged or retarded the creation of modern universities. These factors have been identified through the use of the social structures of accumulation approach, which is utilized as a heuristic device to find explanations for the specific developmental patterns of universities of the two country case studies. These developmental paths (or the degree to which they approximated the paradigm of the modern university) in turn shaped the scientific research capabilities of both nations. Forces emanating from the state level condition the choices and policies of universities, while at the same time these macrostructures confront an environment within the universities that is the product of its own dynamics and inherited structures and traditions. The first force is the structure of the Latin American university, which was inherited from the colonial era. The second force encompasses the ideologies promoted by the state in its various historical stages of development.