Alain Touraine and the sociological intervention method

History, analysis and perspectives of a method for studying collective actions

Abstract

Sociological intervention is a method of sociological inquiry created by the recently deceased French sociologist Alain Touraine. This is a research method developed since the late 1970s to study new social movements, as defined by Touraine himself, that are those forms of collective action (feminist, environmental, student, regionalist movements) that emerge with the rise of post-industrial society. Then, the method has been applied to the study of other forms of collective action, even outside the French context, leading the Centre d'Analyse e d'Intervention Sociologique(CADIS) to become a point of reference for a large international academic community. In this article, the history of this method is reconstructed, as well as its constituent stages and potential applications in social research on collective and conflict action. Indeed, sociological intervention can be considered one of the most significant innovations of the last four decades in the field of qualitative research, capable of posing central questions about the nature of sociological inquiry, including its purposes not only for exploration but also for intervention in social reality, the relationship between researcher and his or her research object, and the nature of the discipline of sociology itself.