Alain Touraine

First published in 2004. The seventeen essays in this volume discuss the work of Alain Touraine and consider his contribution to the social sciences. The text includes his most recent thinkings on the market and communities. Alain Touraine - a pioneer in the New French Sociology, Michel Crozier; Alan Touraine - Sociologue du Travail, proudhonian, pessimist, Michel Rose; skills flexibility and effort in a post-factory world - evidence from Britain, Michel Rose; Touraine and the method of sociological intervention, Francois Dubet and Michel Wieviorka; movements of modernity - some questions of theory, method and interpretation, Alan Scott; the sociology of Alain Touraine - a modernist look at post-industrialization and the ambivalence of social movements, Louis Maheu; social movements in a comparative perspective - situating Alain Touraine, T.K. Oommen; the study of solidarity and the social theory of Alain Touraine, Luke Martell and Neil Stammers; discource as power - a second look at confrontational adaptation, David E. Apster; politics, the political and the theory of social movements, Andrew Arato, Jean L. Cohen; collective action, culture and civil society - secularising, updating, inverting, revising, and displacing the classical model of social movements, Jeffry C. Alexander; Alain Touraine's conceptions of modernity, Danilo Martucelli; social action and the production of society, William Outhwaite; Touraine's subject versus Rawl's Homo Politicus and Habermas' Homo Commicans, Raymond Boudon; modernity, the subject and the supervision of sociology, Andre Gorz; a scoiology of the subject, Alain Touraine.