ABSTRACT
By the mid-1970s Alain Touraine had already published more than a dozen books. These publications tackled four major empirical domains of research: labour, social movements, dependent societies and the transition from an industrial toward a post-industrial society. His contribution to sociological theory was most clearly formulated in Sociologie de l’action (1965) and Production de la société (1973). However, his work did not yet manifest much concern with methodology, nor evince originality in this regard. His methods were drawn from the stock of the sociological trade. For instance, La conscience ouvrière (1966) resorted to statistical surveys with questionnaires. When writing about social movements, as in Le mouvement de Mai, ou le communisme utopique (1968) and Vie et mort du Chili populaire (1974), Touraine, owing to his initial education, relied heavily on a historical method that combined document analysis, interviews and observation.
