We study analogues, in the Lipschitz and Operator Spaces categories, of several classical ideals of operators between Banach spaces. We introduce the concept of a Banach-space-valued molecule, which is used to develop a duality theory for several nonlinear ideals of operators including the ideal of Lipschitz p-summing operators and the ideal of factorization through a subset of a Hilbert space. We prove metric characterizations of p-convex operators, and also of those with Rademacher type and cotype. Lipschitz versions of p-convex and p-concave operators are also considered. We introduce the ideal of Lipschitz (q,p)-mixing operators, of which we prove several characterizations and give applications. Finally the ideal of completely (q,p)-mixing maps between operator spaces is studied, and several characterizations are given. They are used to prove an operator space version of Pietsch's composition theorem for p-summing operators.
