Contemporary Social Movements in Advanced Industrial Societies and Sociological Intervention: An Appraisal of Alain Touraine's Pratique.

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.