Touraine, A. (1981; Originally published in French as La Voix et le Regard in 1978). Cambridge, MA(?): Cambridge University Press.
Touraine delineates the concept of social intervention in relation to social collective action and redefines sociologists’ roles. In particular, he sees society as a system of action and maintains that intervention is the method to define the analysis of social movements that such actions constitute. To him, it is also intervention that makes actors face their opponents, bring out their struggles and social movements. Thus, he writes, “intervention is not a technique but the implementation of a conception of society and of sociological knowledge” (p.219). In his caution of the danger of liberation, cultural and social movements becoming another ruling power, he emphasizes the importance of social intervention as a mechanism for the voice of the people to be heard against that of the new masters. In this regard, he defines the sociologist’s roles: he is a man without power, however, “if the sociologist’s intervention exerted an influence, this would mean that the ideas of society and collective behavior would again be interconnected, thus opening up the way for the renewal of social theory and the renaissance of social movements” (p.220). He writes that intervention aims to raise the level of conflicts and revivify historical action. Thus, “the social movements which are making their new voices heard are calling for a new type of analysis, a sociology of action, and a new method of study—sociological intervention” (p.222).
