Background
TOURAINE, Alain Louis Jules Francois was born on August 3, 1925 in Hermanville, France. Son of Albert Touraine and Odette Cleret.
TOURAINE, Alain Louis Jules Francois was born on August 3, 1925 in Hermanville, France. Son of Albert Touraine and Odette Cleret.
Lycees Montaigne and Louis-leGrand, Paris and Ecole Normale Superieure.
1950-1957, Member of research staff, Le Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Since 1958, Acting Director, then (1960) Director of Studies, École Pratique des Hautes Études. 1966-1969, Professor, Faculté des Lettres de Paris-Nanterre. 1970-1980, Founder and Director, Centre d’Étude des Mouvements Sociaux. From 1980, Founder and Director of Le Centre d’Analyse et d’intervention Sociologiques.
Main publications:(1965) Sociologie de Taction, Paris: Seuil.(1969) La Société post-industrielle, Paris: Denoëls (English translation. The Post-Industrial Society, trans. L. F. S. Mayhew, New York: Random House. 1971).(1973) Production de la société, Paris: Seuil (English translation. The Self-Production of Society, trans. Derek Coltman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).(1978) Sociologie permanente: vol. 1, Le Voix et le regard, vol. 2 (with F. Dubet, Z. Hegedus, and M. Wieviorka), Lutte étudiante, Paris: Seuil.(1984) Le Retour de l'acteur, Paris: Fayard.Secondary literature:Ansart, Pierre( 1990) Les sociologies contemporaines,Paris: Seuil.Durand, Jean-Pierre and Weil, Robert (1989) Sociologie contemporaines, Paris: Vigot.Eder. Klaus (1982) A new social movement?’. Telos 52: 5-20.
Touraine is one of the foremost theoreticians of contemporary French sociology. For many years he developed theories of social structure, but in his more recent writings (1984) few conventional Marxist structural-functional ideas remain and the emphasis is on social movements.
Touraine’s understanding of social movements connects with his view of ‘post-industrial society’, a term which he has made famous. According to him. technical rationality formerly helped society to produce.
Today, however, it also enables society to command its own social organization and reproduction. Thus ‘post-industrial’ societies are marked by what Touraine calls ‘historicity’, a power in which knowledge of social processes is used to reshape social conditions. Control of this power, he holds, has accrued to a new technocratic elite that is steering the entire social order towards the perfectly programmed society, an ‘impoverishing homogeneity’.
Touraine recognizes that this control can be countered only by social groups capable of initiating lines of protest which generate new social movements, such as the student movement in the 1960s and the environmental movement of today, that are quite different from the old forms of class conflict.
It is these movements, and their connections to the forces against which they are ranged, that Touraine has been concerned to study, thereby offering a critique of technical, bureaucratic ideology. Although critical opinion on his work varies it is generally acknowledged that Touraine has done much to advance basic sociological analysis.
College, de la prevention des risques technologiques since 1989.
Married Adrianna Arenas in 1957.