Alain Touraine (French: [alɛ̃ tuʁɛn]; 3 August 1925 – 9 June 2023) was a French sociologist. He was research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux. Touraine was an important figure in the founding of French sociology of work after World War II and later became a sociologist of social movements, particularly the May 68 student movement in France and the Solidarity trade-union movement in communist Poland.
In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy.
The term was originated by Alain Touraine and is closely related to similar sociological theoretical concepts such as post-Fordism, information society, knowledge economy, post-industrial economy, liquid modernity, and network society. They all can be used in economics or social science disciplines as a general theoretical backdrop in research design.