Alain Touraine

Who is Alain Touraine?

Alain Touraine is a French sociologist born in Hermanville-sur-Mer. He is research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux. He is best known for being the originator of the term "post-industrial society". His work is based on a "sociology of action," and believes that society shapes its future through structural mechanisms and its own social struggles. Touraine defined historicity as the capability of a society to take action upon itself, see The Self-Production of Society.

His key interest for most of his career has been with social movements. He has studied and written extensively on workers' movements across the world, particularly in Latin America and more recently in Poland where he observed and aided the birth of Solidarnosc, see Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement. While in Poland, he developed the research method of "Sociological Intervention," which had been outlined in "The Voice and the Eye" [1981].

Touraine has gained immense popularity in Latin America as well as in continental Europe. Yet he has failed to gain anywhere near the same recognition in the English-speaking world. Out of twenty or so books, only about half of them have been translated into English.