Touraine, Alain

Alain Touraine (b. 1925) is a French sociologist and engaged public intellectual in the democratic socialist tradition. He has been involved in a long-term project that seeks to assess the transformative potential of collective social actors, particularly in the advanced industrial nations. In so doing, Touraine has sought to articulate an antifunctionalist and post-Marxist theoretical perspective that he has described as both a “sociologie actionnaliste” and the sociology of the “selfproduction of society.” His work reflects a distinctive engagementwith the sociological classics, resulting in a unique blend of Marxist and non-Marxist social theory. Unlike contemporary theorists who have sought to unite agency and structure into one comprehensive theoretical framework, Touraine has tended to simply ignore structure because he is convinced that action is antecedent to structure and thus the latter is to be understood within the framework of action. His perspective is thus a version of social constructionism, although unlike most interpretive theories, one that is preoccupied with the collective actor rather than the individual.

[Page 846]Educated at the École Normale Supèrieure, he has taught at the University of Paris-Nanterre and worked for both the French National Research Council (CNRS) and as a senior researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He founded the Center for Sociological Analysis and Intervention in 1981 and is currently professor of sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Touraine has published over 20 books, about half of which have been translated into English. While he has had a major impact on French sociology, his reception in the Englishspeaking world is decidedly more mixed.

In his earliest publications, Touraine engaged in a series of empirical inquiries into the changing character of the class structure of postwar French society, which included studies of workers at Renault and agricultural workers. He sought to challenge the literature of the time that proclaimed the embourgeoisement of the working class and thus the end of the conflicts that have pitted labor against capital throughout the history of industrial capitalism. However, what separated him from those Marxists and neo-Marxists who sought to find in various sectors of the workingclass new potential locations for revolutionary vanguards, he does not consider the present to be a revolutionary era. Moreover, in the wake of the student movement that shook the foundations of French politics in May 1968, he began to view the university rather than the factory as an increasingly crucial locus of political and cultural conflict.

This perspective is connected to his claim that the advanced industrial nations were rapidly moving into a postindustrial era. In the late 1960s, Touraine was one of the key figures associated with discussions about the advent of postindustrial society, which focused on the shift from manufacturing-based economies to information-based ones. His contribution reveals his penchant for viewing the world in terms of sharp dichotomies. Thus, in an early formulation, he suggested that the transition from industrial to postindustrial society amounted to a developmental leap akin to the transition from agrarian to industrial society. He contended that we were entering societies “of pure change, without structure or nature” (Touraine 1977:6). Reflecting a particular moment in the history of the contemporary welfare state, he argued that the economic realm no longer functioned autonomously, but instead, economic decisions were increasingly made at the political level, and therefore the boundaries between the economic and the political increasingly dissolved, with political decision making being of paramount importance in shaping the economy. Under the influence of Weberian thought, he contended that these changes amount to the bureaucratisation of society as decision making became increasingly centralized in the state apparatus. It is in this sense that he suggests that a synonym for postindustrial society is the programmed society. In such societies, knowledge takes on a new importance, and as a consequence, universities come to play an increasingly pivotal role in training the new cadres of information elites necessary for the functioning of advanced industrial economics.

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