Prof. Alain Touraine

Director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris


Recipient of honorary degrees from seven European and American universities, Touraine is a member of several French and international academies and committees dealing with issues such as bioethics, immigration, teaching and research, and of the World Bank Commission on sustainable development. He is an officer of the Légion d'Honneur and of the Ordre National du Mérite.

The body of Alain Touraine's work constitutes a "sociology of action" - as the title of one of his books, published in 1965, puts it - and can be divided into three periods. The first was devoted to the sociology of labour and workers consciousness, mainly based on field studies in Latin America. The second was concerned with social movements: starting with studies of the events of May 1968, military coups in Latin America and the birth of Solidarnosc in Poland, he then gave more general consideration to the problems raised by development. The third and present period is mainly concerned with the subject as the fundamental agent of social movements, an area in which Touraine intends to continue working in the coming years

Touraine has written some twenty books, about half of which have been translated into English. These include "Workers Movement" (Cambridge University Press, 1987), "The Return of the Actor" (University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and "Critique of Modernity" (Blackwell, 1996).