action, movement, and intervention: reflections on the sociology of alain touraine

Action, movement, and intervention: Reflections on the sociology of Alain Touraine

ALAN SCOTT University of East Anglia*

Cet article examine les dkclarations qu’Alain Touraine fait pour sa sociologie de l’action. On argumente qu’alors que Touraine presente une critique puissante des assomptions des fonctionnels en sociologie, sa propre analyse de la societe ‘post-industrielle’ ou ‘programmee’ a des implications historiques et theologiques qui le ramenent a une analyse des fonctionnels plus conventionnelle. Nous continuons ensuite a examiner les implications de cette tension centrale pour sa mCthode ‘d’intervention sociologique’ et pour son analyse substantielle de la nature de ‘nouveaux mouvements sociaux’.

This paper examines the claims Alain Touraine makes for his sociology of action. It is argued that while Touraine presents a powerful critique of functionalist assumptions in sociology, his own analysis of the ‘post-industrial’ or ‘programmed’ society has historicist and teleological implications which lead him back towards more conventional functionalist analysis. We examine the implications of this central tension for his method of ‘sociological intervention’ and for his substantive analysis of the nature of ‘new social movements’.

INTRODUCTION

In its scope and ambition, but also in its concerns, Touraine’s project bears comparison with that of Habermas. That i t is not so influential in English- speaking countries owes more to fashion than to merit or to a neglect of issues which have absorbed the sociological imagination.’ Touraine, no less than Habermas, is concerned to offer a comprehensive analysis of contemporary society, to ground this in a method which can broadly be called ‘critical,’ and to work all this out by engaging the theories of major figures in the sociological tradition - not merely the ‘classics,’ but also more contemporary figures such as Parsons and Merton. In one respect at least his work is more ambitious than Habermas’s. Whereas the latter is concerned to develop a theory which promises a research program, Touraine has deduced a method of research which accords with his theoretical and historical speculations,

* This manuscript was received in July, 1989 and accepted in November, 1990.

Canad. Rev. SOC. & Anth. / Rev. canad. SOC. & Anth. 28W 1991

31 REFLECTIONS ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF TOURAINE

and which he has on several occasions applied to his major chosen subject: social movements.

I have drawn this brief comparison with Habermas, to which I shall later return, in order to suggest that in discussing Touraine we are dealing with a figure who, by the usual standards, makes a major contribution to debate, and who may easily come to exercise considerable influence on the shape and direction of sociology. Within the English-speaking sociological community this is especially t rue since from the early 1980s the rate at which his work is being translated has increased, and the discussion of ‘postmoder- nity,’ a topic to which his arguments are directly relevant, has come to occupy a central place.

Touraine’s analytical purpose is 1/ to develop a form of social action theory which is not methodologically individualist, but which remains opposed to all forms of functionalism, 21 to identify the unique characteristics of contemporary society; and 31 to identify agents of potential social transformation. In short, he wants to make good some of the claims of orthodox Marxism - especially the claim to have identified the emancipatory forces of society in a non-utopian fashion - without falling back on a formalistic and ultimately deterministic historicism.

The aim of this paper is not primarily expository. I shall argue that Touraine’s project does not constitute a coherent whole, and, specifically, that it is riven by a fundamental contradiction between its component elements. This contradiction can be traced to Touraine’s failure to develop his attitude towards an analogous tension in Marx’s work. I shall argue that Touraine’s sociology is interesting for its sceptical or deconstructive aspects rather than for its substantive, but much more conventional, theory of post- industrial society. Whereas his theory of social action is innovative and provides a powerful critique of remaining elements of functionalism and objectivism in sociology, his explanations of social transformation are always in danger of falling into those very traps. While generally sympathetic to many of Touraine’s intentions, particularly his critique of functional- ististructuralist assumptions in sociology and to his social action approach, I shall suggest that he is inhibited from developing the full implications of this critique by his adherence to a teleological periodization of societies, and by his insistence that we can identify a single social force, in the form of a social movement, ideally suited to an oppositional role within ‘post-industrial society’.

THE TOURAINEIAN PROJECT

The component elements of Touraine’s project are: 11 a theory of social action; 2/ a historical theory of the transition from ‘industrial’ to ‘post-industrial’ society (also known as the ‘programmed society’) and a sociological account of the latter; 31 a research method of ‘sociological intervention’; and 41 a sociological exposition of the role of social movements within industrial society ( the ‘workers’ movement’), and post-industrial society (so-called

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‘new social movements’). The contradiction lies in the relationship between the first and second components of the project. The third - the method - fudges this contradiction, and the account of new social movements is marred by it.

1 The Theory of Social Action Touraine’s attitude towards the problem of actor versus structure is more radical than that of many other contemporary theorists who are concerned with this issue. Unlike Habermas, Touraine is not content to graft a systems analysis on to a theory of the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) in a way which treats these entities almost as though they were autonomous objects of sociological investigation (see, for example, Habermas 1976: Pt.1: ch.1; and 1987). Unlike Giddens, he is not optimistic about the possibilities of developing a meta-theory to accommodate both aspects within a single conceptual framework of ‘structuration’ (Giddens, 1979). Instead, he simply abandons the category of structure altogether, or, collapses structure into action. Thus, with regard to class, he argues that ‘there can be no class without class consciousness~ (1981: 68). The effect is to deny simultaneously the distinction between classes - in and for - themselves, and to abandon the notion that social-structural location is a determinant of action and/or consciousness.

Touraine’s theoretical stance may at first glance appear closer to that of symbolic interactionism than t o any European school of social theory, especially those influenced by Marxism. Yet in contrast to symbolic interactionism, Touraine argues that the actors whose actions constitute society - if one can still use the term - are collectivities. They are social movements. ‘In concrete terms,’ he writes, ‘the role occupied by the concept of social system in functionalist analysis is occupied in action analysis by social movements’ (1974: 82). Viewing the collective actor rather than the individual as the subject of social action theory is Touraine’s distinctive, though deeply problematic, contribution to social action theory. It distinguishes his position from the methodological individualism inconsistently espoused by Weber and, more recently and more consistently, by rational choice theorists (for example, Elster, 1985).

In common with other critics of functionalism,2 Touraine argues that single-order theories which attempt to trace every manifestation within the ‘social field’ to a single set of structural categories within a single explanatory framework are simply not viable. The social field is too varied, too complex and too ambiguous to be accommodated within such a limited and rigid framework.

Whereas methodological individualism would replace structuralist explanations with a model of individual and collective actors whose choices are governed by preferences, Touraine substitutes a model of actors guided by norms and t r a d i t i ~ n : ~


Action is the behaviour of an actor guided by cultural orientations and set within social relations defined by an unequal connection with the social control of these orientations. (1981: 61).

The key terms here are ‘social control’ and ‘orientation’. The picture Touraine draws of society is that of a social field occupied by actors acting as collectivities by dint of a recognition of common interests and common cultural orientations. These actors compete, from positions of unequal strength, with other such groups for control over the systems of norms which govern, or (less strongly) influence, the rules of the game. Touraine is keen to stress that this swirling mass of conflicting collectivities has a common orientation without which the conflicting actors could not engage each other. This view is intended as a criticism of both Marxian models of society as consisting exclusively of zero-sum games, and of a Hobbesian solution to the problem of order. In relation to the latter, Touraine’s argument can be viewed as a form of the criticism commonly made of Hobbes’s notion of a social contract: without a prior contract to obey the social contract there can be no social contract. Conflict occurs, but i t does so within a common social or cultural field. Thus, he argues that ‘the historical actors are determined as much by a cultural field as by a social conflict’ (1981: 66). Touraine’s notion of a social or cultural ‘field’ attempts to accommodate the idea of shared norms and values found in functionalism with the emphasis upon struggle and divergence of interests found in conflict theory. The social field is not merely a sphere of shared orientations, it is also an object of contention between competing and conflicting social groups. To capture this sense of contention and struggle Touraine uses the term ‘historicity’.

Control over historicity is the aim of conflictual collective action. Social movements act out this struggle. In an early formulation Touraine writes of the students’ movement in 1968 (the May Movement):

4

The students’ movement is a true social movement, that is, an action carried out by particular social groups in order to take over control of social change (1971: 91).

Later this definition comes to include reference to the idea of ‘historicity’:

The social movement is the organized collective behaviour of a class actor strug- gling against his class adversary for the social control of historicity in a concrete community. (1981: 77).

Within this process repressive forces are those which attempt to freeze historicity and reify it into organization, and progressive forces are those which attempt to release organization once more into historicity. Thus, what sociologists have identified as ‘structure’ and ‘process’ are not givens. Whether or not society looks more like a homeostatic structure or fluid process is evidence of the state of the conflict between forces of stability and

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change. More simply, the degree of homeostasis or flux tells us who at any given point has the upper hand in the struggle for control over historicity. This distinguishes Touraine’s position quite sharply from that of Giddens, for whom the dialectic of structure and action (in the form of ‘structuration’) is a general sociological category and not, as it is for Touraine, socially and historically relative. For the latter it is always in principle possible to return institutions to the realm of historicity - i.e. to bring them once more under the control of social actors engaged in action aimed to bring about social ~ h a n g e . ~ In this respect Touraine’s break with structuralism is complete: the actors are not mere ‘bearers’ (Truger) of social relations; they actively produce and reproduce them. It is in the creative nature of social action in which society is ‘self produced’ that the possibility of potential control over historical processes rests.

This condensed account of Touraine’s theory of social action should at least give enough of the flavour of his position to enable me to move on to his theory of post-industrial society and then to the critical part of this paper. Even though it is possible to criticize the theory of social action itself, (Rey- naud and Bourdieu, 19741, I am more concerned to discuss its relationship to other components of Touraine’s project.

2 Post-Zndustrial Society Although Touraine has refined his account since the publication of La Socie‘te‘ post-industrielle in 1969, the basic features of his analysis have re- mained constant. Then, as now, he claims to have identified a transformation of society from manufacture-based to information-based production; a change which has profound consequences for the nature of social relations throughout the social field. Among the most profound effects of this transformation are the effects on class, and specifically on the origins and implications of class power:

The principal opposition between these two great classes or groups of classes does not result from the fact that one possesses wealth or property and the other does not. It comes about because the dominant classes dispose of knowledge and control information (Touraine, 1971: 61).

This constitutes a very fundamental revision of Marxism; indeed one which takes Touraine beyond a point where many Marxists would still accept that he falls within the tradition. His analysis entails a rejection of the labour theory of value in the same way, and for similar reasons, that Hab- ermas’s analysis does (1976: Pt.11: ch.11, and it implies too that the major social conflicts occur not between producers and owners, but between those with information (above all the ‘technocratic state’) and those excluded from it (‘the public’). Within the programmed society ‘the conflicts which are specific to merchant society and industrial society are gradually becoming institutionalized’ (Touraine, 1981: 11). In this process the workers’ move-


ment - now entrenched in unions, social democratic parties, and corporate arrangements - is being replaced by new social movements which take on the mantle of being the major source of resistance to domination, and now bear the responsibility of producing alternatives to a technocratic modernity.

Not merely the source, but also the focus of conflict has shifted away from production and the state, and towards civil society and culture. New social movements are, for Touraine, first and foremost movements resisting the psycho-cultural effects of modern production techniques and the psycholo- gical, social and environmental demands which emanate from them. Cru- cially, the new social movements of the post-industrial society tend towards a rejection of the values of industrialism upon which both capitalism and the workers’ movement are based, and above all towards the rejection of the value of economic growth. Touraine takes this development to be well il- lustrated by a meeting of anti-nuclear activists and the French Communist Party:

The behaviour of the two groups showed that the anti-nuclear movement had very much left behind the ideological categories of the working-class movement. It showed a rejection of the political model represented by the Communist Party, but above all it conveyed a declaration: the intention of an actor to become a social movement, to return to a radical critique of society to which the Communist Party would become increasingly alien (‘I’ouraine ct al., 1983a: 37).

A crucial aspect of this shift of emphasis away from the workers’ movement is that new social movements are less concerned with power than with creating alternative life-styles within the dominant society, and with defending civil society against its subordination to the state and to technocracy. Touraine is thus a pioneer of what might be called ‘culturalist’ interpretations of new social movements which stress their cultural rather than political aims, locate them in civil society rather than the state, and identify their aims with life-style and quality of life issues rather than political and economic issues of distributive justice and rights.6 Like other new social movement commentators (e.g. Melucci, 1988; 1989), Touraine stresses the distance between new movements and the state on the one hand, and older movements located within economic and political sub-systems on the other.7

To draw out the main features of Touraine’s critique of the ‘programmed society,’ it is interesting to compare it to Habermas’s more familiar critique of modernity to which it hears a striking resemblance. So as not to make the comparison too drawn out, I shall make it in point form below:

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TOURAINE ‘Programmed society’

1. Mode of production is knowledge based. Monopoly over information and knowledge production (rather than over the ‘means of production’ in the traditional sense) is the source of social inequality.

HABERMAS ‘Modernity’

1. The labour theory of value ren- dered redundant by the growing subordination of manual to mental labour.

2. Civil society is increasingly sub- ordinated to the ‘technocratic state’. It is as citizens (as ‘the public,’ etc.), rather than as class members or producers, that we encounter the repressive nature of the programmed society.

3. Social movements are located in civil society. Their aim is not to make demands of the state, but to protect civil society against the technocratic state, and to develop alternative life- styles within civil society.

4. Consequently, conflicts are more likely to occur around, in a broad sense, cultural issues rather than, as in industrial society, more narrowly economic and political issues (in fact the expansion of the state has under- mined these older distinctions).

2. The ‘lifeworld’ is increasingly dominated by the systems logic of efficiency and instrumentalism. Cul- ture, including traditional values, is being eroded by the expansion of administrative rationality and systems logic from the economic sphere and from the bureaucratic apparatuses of the state (‘internal colonialization’).

3. New social movements a re ascribed an essentially defensive role: they defend t h e lifeworld against encroachment by economy and state.

4. The focus of conflict has shifted from the economic to the political, and especially, the cultural sub-system. Life-style and cultural values (including the values around work motivations 1 become central objects of contention.’

‘Civil society’ (Touraine) and ‘ lifeworld’ (Habermas) are roughly equiv- alent concepts. They identify that social sphere most under threat from modernity, and within which progressive resistance to modernizing processes may take place. It is within civil societyhhe lifeworld that the cultural and normative resources for a better modernity can be found.

I shall return to this comparison later to draw out some of the methodological implications of this type of analysis.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS

Touraine’s theory of post-industrial society is open to both empirical and theoretical objections. Although I wish to concentrate on the latter, I shall briefly mention two of the more obvious empirical difficulties.


First, those countries in which the ‘new politics’ and new social movements have had most impact are in many ways conventional industrial societies with their core industries still in the manufacturing sphere - shipbuilding, steel, car industry, etc. West Germany was perhaps the best example of a country which was both a major industrial society and had an influential new social movement sector in the form of ‘citizen’s initiatives’ (Burgerinitiativen), an active peace and anti-nuclear movement, and an influential Green Party.’

Secondly, it is by no means clear that information-based technology will replace manufacturing as the core force of production even within the most advanced societies. Touraine’s scenario of the programmed society is not our only possible future. It is, as dual economy theorists suggest, at least possible that we are heading for a society in which single economies will be characterized by a number of more or less independent sectors, enjoying highly varied fortunes, and whose workforces have highly divergent degrees of security, union protection, etc. In contrast to Touraine, who believes such diversity to be primarily the result of residues of industrial and pre-industrial societies, the dual economy theory suggests that there are no a pri- ori grounds for expecting diversity to be eventually replaced by a unified system of production. At the very least, the extent to which modern societies will become totally ‘programmed societies’ must remain open.

Beyond these empirical considerations lies a deeper contradiction: the theory of action and the theory of post-industrial society have diametrically opposed implications. They constitute two projects with two quite distinct sets of implications for the theory, and consequences for the analysis of social phenomena. On the basis of Touraine’s quite radical version of the theory of action, it may still be legitimate to identify broad social changes, but i t cannot be legtimate to think of such structural changes as a causal determinant of the nature and content of action in the way that his use of the concept of post-industrial society suggests.

Wherein lie the residues of functionalism in Touraine’s analysis of the programmed society? By functionalist explanations I mean (a) the tendency to explain social facts in terms of their consequences for the social totality, (b) an emphasis on the beneficial character of these consequences; (c) the use of teleological forms of explanation:

Intentional explanation cites the intended consequences of buhaviour in order to account for it. Functionalist explanation cites the actual consequences. More specifically, to explain behaviour functionally involved demonstrating that it has beneficial consequences for someone or something (Elster, 1985: 27).

Although not strictly entailed by functionalist explanation, teleological explanation is often associated with historical teleology: i.e. social evolution- ism.

In the following discussion I shall suggest that Touraine reifies the ‘programmed society,’ explains its characteristics with reference to their benefi-

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cia1 consequences, and retains a teleological periodization of societies into industrial and post-industrial. I shall develop this argument by schemati- cally characterizing the quite distinct substantive and methodological principles which underlie the two theories.

11 Social Action Theory: (a) ‘Society’ is an open system - there are no pre-defined ends towards

which it moves. Explanation is context specific, historical and non-tel- eologcal.

(b) Social action does not have fully foreseeable outcomes, nor can its content be deduced from social-structural factors such as class location.

(c) There is no logic of the system, or parts of the system ( e g , a ‘logic of capital’), which exists over and above that of the individual or collective social actors.

(d) Specialist - e.g., social scientific - knowledge of society has no prior claim to privilege over the interpretations offered by the social actors.

21 The Theory of Post-Industrial Society: (a) Society is a closed system which moves towards pre-defined ends; the

explanation is teleological. (b) Action is constrained by social-structural factors; its content and out-

come are, in part at least, determined by social structure - e.g., by ob- jective interests; pre-established class relations, etc.

(c) Social developments accord with a systems-logic which works inde- pendently of the specific context of action.

(d) To have knowledge of this systems logic is to possess epistemologically privileged knowledge of factors beyond, and not necessarily apparent to, social actors.

The contrast between the two theories may be summed up in a few words: the theory of social action is context specific, historical and restricted; the theory of post-industrial society is general, teleological and historicist.

While Touraine’s social action theory is quite radically sceptical in its treatment of conventional sociological categories of explanation, the theory of post-industrial society is highly conventional in both its structural determinism and its historicism. The latter rests on that most conventional of all assumptions of a mechanistic reading of Marx: an unreconstructed baselsuperstructure distinction. It traces social change back to changes in production technique. This approach may even presuppose technological determinism in its ascription of the causes of social change to changes within the forces of production.

Neither the baselsuperstructure distinction, nor forces of production are terms Touraine would employ as part of a causal explanation, but their pre- sence is still felt in an analysis which asserts:

Society’s bulwarks, whether built in the name of a skilled craft, lofty principle, professional independence, or a particular conception of ‘human nature’ or cul-


tural heritage, are reinforced by a system of production in which everyone has his place and his set roles within a regulated, hierarchical community, concerned mostly with its own cohesiveness, the condition essential to its effectiveness (Touraine, 1971: 7) .

Remarkably, given his own critique of functionalism, the assumptions of such a claim are strictly functionalist. The social order appears as a smoothly working system allocating actors to their pre-assigned places, able to main- tain its own ‘cohesiveness’ and ‘effectiveness’. It is a view which has more in common with Parsons than with Touraine’s own theory of social action.

But the theory of post-industrial society is not merely deterministic, it is also teleological. That is, it assumes a logic of historical development from simple to complex social forms in which the organizing principles which de- fine society react to internal social tensions, and perhaps also an external environment (e.g., ‘nature’) through adaptation towards greater hetero- geneity. The shift from manufacture to knowledge-based production can be seen as the highest existing form of this adaptive process. In other words, Touraine assumes the possibility of the kind of project developed by Haber- mas in his reconstruction of historical materialism (Habermas, 1979) - i.e. identifying an evolutionary process which is not the mere sum of historical change, but which obeys a history-independent logic.

If we return briefly to the comparison with Habermas, we can see the functionalist overtones of Touraine’s analysis more clearly. In contrast to Touraine, Habermas is well aware that his understanding of modernity as the internal colonialization of the lifeworld by the system is functionalist. He justifies this historically: under modern conditions we can understand societal sub-systems in functionalist terms because they come to develop the qualities of a system in the course of the expansion of instrumental rationality from the economic, through the political, and eventually to the cultural sphere. I t is thus legitimate to use functionalist explanation as long as we are aware that 1/ its applicability is historically limited; and 2/ the justification for functionalist explanation is ultimately emancipatory - the restora- tion of the lifeworld on the basis of a non-systems logic. In Touraine’s theory this level of methodological self-reflection is lacking. Functionalist explanation is grafted on a methodology which is itself highly critical of functionalism without further justification.

There is a well-established critique of such teleological general theories of social development which focusses on the assumptions they share with modernization theory, and on the lack of plausible parallels with evolutionary theories in biology.’’ For our purposes it is sufficient to note that if we accept Touraine’s theory of social action any such historicist theory is excluded on similar grounds to functionalism: i.e. within the social field it is the actions and perceptions of actors which are the determinants of social development, and not any mechanism working behind their backs to which we can appeal to justify our evolutionary theory.

Touraine’s sociology contains, and develops to their logical conclusions, two contradictory elements within Marxism: Marx’s historical material ism,

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and his theory of the development of capitalism which is both teleological and historicist. Those elements in Touraine’s argument which are most critical of trans-contextual and trans-historical interpretation - his opposition to functionalism and structuralism - carry through that element of Marx’s work which is critical of philosophical attempts to interpret human life with reference to externals and absolutes, be they moral imperatives or the historical Geist. Touraine is rigorous in his opposition to attempts to divorce interpretation from what Marx would call ‘real sensuous activity’. But Touraine is no less rigorous in developing a general model of societal development which violates just those principles. His analysis reproduces vividly both sides of the fundamental tension within Marxism: its humanism and its scientism.

SOME METHODOLOGICAL AND SUBSTANTIVE CONSEQUENCES

The problem which I have identified in Touraine’s sociology has an impact on both his method of investigation, and the results of that investigation. In this final section I shall discuss these points briefly with reference, firstly, to Touraine’s research method; and, secondly, to his understanding of new social movements.

Touraine’s method of sociological research is meant to accord with his social action approach. It does this in a number of respects. ‘Sociological intervention’ marks a radical break with objectivism, External descriptions of actions or ideologies do not bring us close enough to an understanding of social phenomena: ‘We cannot remain contented merely with studying actions or thoughts; we must come face to face with the social movement itself (Touraine, 1981: 142). The researcher must engage hisher subject not as mere observer, nor even as participant-observer, but as interlocutor and activist. In the field, the sociologist has the task of engaging activists within the social movement being examined in a prolonged series of discussions aimed at making the subjects reflect upon the meaning of their actions, and ultimately raising those actions to a ‘higher level of struggle’. In their intervention and documentation of Solidarity, Touraine’s team repeatedly asked questions of principle, sometimes pulling debate away from practical details of action and strategy:

When a problem as central as self-management was not spontaneously brought up by a group, the researcher introduced it. In this case, they put to the Gdansk group the following question: could they not accept the idea which was predomi- nant in the Warsaw group of a movement which, once it had obtained the recognition of free trade unions, moved on to a higher level of the struggle and set as its objectives the freeing of the enterprise, and perhaps ultimately the whole of the economy, from the grip of the Party? (Touraine et al., 1983b: 110).

The researcher became both activist within the group and analyst to it. Touraine is careful to emphasize that the researcher must balance these two potentially conflicting roles. If the researcher becomes too exclusively


militant, helshe will become a mouthpiece of the group and remain caught in narrow practical concerns. The researcher owes a double debt: to the movement and to theory. This difference of interest stems from the diverg- ing orientations of theorist and activist: ‘the group’s categories of analysis remain linked to those of action, while the sociologist transcribes his obser- vations into the categories of the theory of social action’ (Touraine, 1981: 143-44).

If we compare this approach to what C. Wright Mills called ‘abstract empiricism,’ although this may weigh the argument somewhat, Touraine’s method is in many respects attractive. I t recognizes the special nature of social scientific, as opposed to natural scientific, knowledge. For example, the feedback which exists between social scientific ‘data) and social action, considered a ‘problem’ within stricter forms of positivism, is employed by Touraine as a positive feature of sociological investigation. Similarly, actor’s knowledge is not the ‘raw data’ of explanation, but part of the knowledge sociological explanation produces.”

Nevertheless, Touraine is prevented from fully realizing a non-positivist methodology because of his adherence to a general theory of social development. If his method can be compared to a psychoanalytic method, a comparison suggested by his own terminology, then it may best be compared to cases where the analyst has a given interpretation, where the patient’s understanding of hislher motives receives a somewhat cursory hearing and is itself viewed as a symptom. The researcher goes into the field already armed with a general sociological theory and an already existing explanatory framework. This is, on all but the most naively empiricist of assumptions, unavoidable. But the crucial question is whether those assumptions could be modified in the light of the researcher’s encounter with the social movement. In questions of interpretation, the answer is yes. But the general theory itself has an existence quite independent of these interactions.

This becomes a problem for the research because it is that theory which provides Touraine and his co-workers with the criteria by which they judge when a social movement has developed an adequate ‘self-analysis,’ and when it has moved the struggle on to a ‘higher level’. This can be seen most clearly in the account of what constitutes a true social movement within the theory. The formal features which characterize a social movement are: 11 identification of the subject in whose name the movement acts and constitutes itself; 21 identification of the opposing forces; and 31 identification of the ‘stakes’ involved in the struggle. A true identification of these aspects is one which coincides with the dominant features of post-industrial society as Touraine identifies them. Insofar as a group orients itself towards the political system, it fails to recognize that the new loci of conflict within a programmed society are civil society and culture, and thus it fails to develop into a true social movement. Similarly, insofar as a social movement identifies its enemy as other than the technocracy, it will fail to lift its struggle to the highest plane, and will not offer an adequate alternative model for social transformation - i.e. a modern critique of modernity. In other words, there is a strong judgemental purpose behind ‘sociological intervention’.

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In some respects Touraine seems to get the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, his theory of social action leads him to ignore, or at least to treat as of littie significance, problems of social movement organization. The im- plication seems to be that movements will more or less spontaneously develop effective forms of action once the stakes and the enemy are ade- quately identified. Likewise, because Touraine is little interested in ‘institutions,’ he tends to ignore those movements which are concerned with institutional reform, and shows little interest in estimating the potential for social transformation in other than ideological terms. More precisely, he largely disregards any attempt to estimate the chances of the movement at- taining its goals by examining the nature and reactions of the dominant institutions - particularly the state. On the other hand, his commitment to the notion of post-industrial society leads him to underestimate the diversity of social movement activity, and to impose a narrow meaning on the movement. Both factors lead Touraine to equate social movement with social movement ideology.

The restriction on the scope of legitimate social movement activity ultimately stems from a view made quite explicit at the beginning of Touraine’s analysis of the French anti-nuclear movement: ‘there is only one social movement for each class in each type of society’ (Touraine et al., 1983a: 4). This assumption, never fully justified, is also the source of Touraine’s insistence that the new social movements replace the workers’ movement as the central progressive agency in post-industrial society. But this closing off of social movement options does justice neither to the new social movements nor the workers’ movement.

In the case of the former, it excludes quite arbitrarily most of the activities in which such movements engage: civil rights activities, for example, are too exclusively orientated to political integration; while consciousness- raising activities are too narrowly concerned with the movements’ ‘iden- tity’. Of course, there is a sense in which as long as social movements concentrate on these aspects they will never become sources of total resistance, or coherent forces. But then it is only the teleology of the argument which leads us to assume that they should do so in the first place; or indeed that doing so represents the only real form of resistance to the dominant institutions - defined as technocracy.

In the case of the working-class movements, Touraine’s insistence that there is only one movement for each class in each epoch leads to an exag- geration of the differences between so-called new social movements and the workers’ movement, and equates the latter with its most ‘labourist’ manife- stations. The cultural element in labour movement activity (e.g., workers’ education), the broader demands of even the most corporate of unions (e.g., for a social wage), and the diversity existing within and between trade unions are played down in order to play up the uniqueness of new social movements. The motivation here becomes quite transparent: to substitute the new movements for the old labour movement as a revolutionary subject.

The diversity of new social movement demands and forms, and the plu- rality of social conflicts, suggest that an interpretation of contemporary


societ which stresses the potential unity of social movements is highly sus- pect.” In light of the present diversity of movement demands, and of the terrain upon which they make those demands, it is hard to imagine the development of a single all-encompassing opposition based upon social movements alone.

Touraine is inhibited in asking the question which stems from this diversity - how will political parties react to this situation? - because he assumes another highly conventional distinction: that between movements which are non-institutionalized and radical and parties which are integrated and limited. Ironically, it is the way in which the social movements themselves have developed, and in particular their growing tendency to form political parties and pressure groups, which may most radically challenge Touraine’s interpretation.

NOTES

1 Touraine’s work has received sympathetic discussion in English. See, for example, Bauman (1983) and (1985). Those working within rival traditions of social movement theory have not always been so complementary, see Gamson (1983).

2 Here I have in mind the so-called ‘analytical Marxists’ such as Jon Elster (1985) and Adam Przeworski (1985) who, from the position of methodological individualism (not shared by Touraine) make similar criticisms of functionalism in sociology and in Marx- ism. See below.

3 Though the problems of norms and social bonds have recently come to occupy rational choice theorists; see Elster (1989), especially ch.3.

4 In this respect, Touraine’s analysis h a s much in commnn with that of his rival Bourdieu for whom society similarly consists in a struggle for legitimacy and domination around cultural practices and values. See Bourdieu (1985).

5 There is a parallel here with Habermas’s notion of ‘virtualization’. For Habermas, the norms presupposed in communicative action can, a t least in principle, themselves become the object of critical reflection. No norm is so absolute and embedded in discourse that it cannot be suspended, ’virtualized’. See Habermas (1974), especially pp. 18-19. Similarly, for Tnuraine, social institutions even if taken for granted can in principle become objects of contention and struggle between competing actors. All institutions and social structures are in this sense ‘virtual’.

6 For a more extended critique of culturalist interpretations of social movements, see Scott (1990).

7 A succinct version of the culturalist interpretation can be found in Juteau and Maheu (1989), especially pp. 382-3.

8 This, highly condensed, account of Habermas is largely based upon Habermas (1987) where he breaks from the Weberianicritical theory tradition of accounting for modernity exclusively in terms of the extension of administrative and technical rationality into all social spheres, and replaces this with the notion of ‘systems logic,’ to which is ascribed a similarly imperialistic role.

9 This is particularly problematic in Touraine’s analysis of Solidarity (Touraine ct al., 198313). Poland can hardly be considered a ‘post-industrial’ society, yet Touraine ascribes to it many of the characteristics of the new social movement of Solidarity.

10 With regard to Habermas, see McCarthy (1985). 11 In this respect Touraine’s method can be viewed as a methodologcal realization of the

attempt to develop a critical reading of the Ceisteswissenschaffen which has so occupied critical theorists. See, for example. Ape1 (19801, especially chapters 4 and 5.

44 AL4NSCOTT

12 This case is argued in greater detail by Hirst (1986), and by Laclau and Mouffe (1985).

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action, movement, and intervention: reflections on the sociology of alain touraine

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