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This paper explores the critical potentials of Vietnamese social science. The research starts by looking at post-war political and social changes, and the present climate of debate to get at the meaning of party leadership and party ideology on the macro level. Section 4 analyzes two social science journals to ascertain the concrete outcome of party control and ideological steering. Section 5 discusses the talk with social scientists and representatives of the State Commission for Science and Technology (SCST) and the Vietnam Committee for Social Sciences (VCSS) to elucidate attitudes to social science exchange. The author held three seminars in the VCSS on a paper about Sweden to explore possible cognitive differences between Sweden and Vietnam as to presumptions and evaluations. To get an idea of the of the conditions for empirical and critical social science in Vietnam, for two months the author followed up a Swedish study of the living and working conditions of forestry workers, comparing this with a corresponding study made by a Vietnamese research team. These and other concrete explorations are the base for some concluding remarks concerning future social science exchange between Vietnam and Sweden.

The article relates the views of Alain Touraine regarding social movements in advanced industrial societies. Since May 1968, Touraine has sought to assess the transformative potential of incipient progressive social movements in post-industrial societies. He has done so by articulating a theoretical framework, described variously as a sociologie actionnaliste and a sociology of the self-production of society, which seeks to be at once anti-functionalist and post-Marxist. Although his political orientation and the contours of his critique of the programmed society often bear a marked resemblance to those of contemporary critical theorists, he differs from them insofar as he sees sociology as a praxiological resource for the new social movements. It is his view of the distinctive position of sociology in contemporary advanced industrial societies that has led him to undertake a large-scale project, which he refers to as sociological intervention. This has led to a series of studies which document the method of pratique in action: in the French student movement; the anti-nuclear movement; the ethnic revival among the Occitan population; the Solidarity movement in Poland; and the workers' movement in France.

The article summarizes the development of development theory from its early economistic and eurocentric phase to the present more interdisciplinary and global debate, particularly in the wake of the so-called dependency school. In this context a number of contemporary theoretical trends are distinguished and their relevance is briefly discussed. It is shown that many of these trends take as their point of departure the dependency problematique, and the article concludes that the questions raised by the dependency school were and still are relevant, although the answers arid remedies sometimes were less than adequate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]