Touraine was a professor of sociology at Nanterre when the student movement of May 1968 broke out on its campus. Touraine observed the movement on the ground and wrote one of the first studies of it; 1968 marked a transition in his work away from labor and the working class toward social movements. Touraine, who in his 1960s work had been a major theorist of "industrial society," published one of the first books articulating a concept of "post-industrial society" in 1969, though the American sociologists Daniel Bell and David Riesman had already been using the term.