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Sociologie et sociétés

Le système d’actionThe System of ActionEl sistema de acciónAlain TOURAINE

Volume 1, Number 2, novembre 1969

URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/001800arDOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/001800ar

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Publisher(s)Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal

ISSN0038-030X (print)1492-1375 (digital)

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Cite this articleTOURAINE, A. (1969). Le système d’action. Sociologie et sociétés, 1(2), 221–248.https://doi.org/10.7202/001800ar

Article abstractThis paper presents the principles of analysis of a society's historical actionwhich, whilst engaged in some creative work, ensures its own developmentand manifests its historicity. This historicity is a dialectical tension between amodel of creativity and a material situation. The starting point of such ananalysis can only be the very praxis of a society, that is, the structure of therelationships between various elements which forms in itself the constitutiveunity of the creative action of human work. This structure is called a system ofaction and its elements are in dialectical relationships according to three axes:the cultural and the social; movement and order; ends and means (or formsand resources). The very unity of a system of action may disintegrate ifrelations are no longer established between the dimensions of one same axisbut between the dimensions of two different ones. Such fusions producecounterelements which are identified less by their structural relations than bytheir content of expected types of behavior. A system of action can thereforeundergo crises which are ruptures at the level of the axes composing it; suchruptures, whether they be partial or complete, are a constant aspect of thefonctioning of any system of action.