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Stephen Park Turner (born March 1, 1951) is a researcher in social practice, social and political theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Florida, [1] where he also holds the title Distinguished University Professor. [2] He has held a NEH Fellowship, was Simon Honorary Professor at Manchester University and has twice been the Advanced Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies
Turner was born in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1968 and then attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He received his undergraduate and his two master's degrees (one in philosophy and one in sociology) and his Ph.D. in sociology, with a dissertation on a philosophical topic, later published as Sociological Explanation as Translation (1980) by Cambridge University Press in the Rose Monograph series of the American Sociological Association. He later studied with Richard Rorty and Edward Shils. He began his long affiliation with the University of South Florida in 1975. In 1987 Turner was appointed Graduate Research Professor in Sociology; since 1989 he has held the same title, now Distinguished University Professor, but in Philosophy. He has had visiting appointments at Virginia Tech, the University of Notre Dame, and Boston University. He is on the editorial board of some 15 journals, and is the longest serving "Collaborating Editor" of Social Studies of Science.
Practices: Turner has published in the overlapping fields of sociology and philosophy, particularly on the notion of practices. In The Social Theory of Practices as well as in other writings Turner argues against collective concepts like culture: what we call culture (and similar concepts), he argues, needs to be understood in terms of the means of its transmission. There is no collective server by which it is simply downloaded and "shared". What we take as "collective" is really produced through experiences of interaction which are different and produce different results for different individuals but which also produce a rough uniformity through mechanisms of feedback rather than "sharing". He has extended this argument in various places, most recently in relation to the philosophical idea of "normativity" which he argues is an explanation of "facts" which are the product of an unnecessary and mystery-producing redescription motivated by an attempt to take back ground from social science explanation.
Political theory: In the area of political theory, Turner has argued that the rise of expert knowledge has altered the conditions of liberal democracy by increasing the importance of a new form of politically relevant inequality: epistemic inequality. But, Turner does not argue that inequality justifies the reliance on experts. Instead, he argues that this is only one solution among many to the problems produced by the fact that knowledge is distributed unequally. Turner uses examples such as the claims in economics and the debate over climate change to show that reliance on experts can go wrong, and that the mechanisms of self-policing attributed to the scientific community are often ineffective. Deciding whether or not to accept the products of experts or expert communities is a political decision. To the extent that such decisions replace democratic deliberation or become the content of democratic deliberation, liberal democracy itself becomes transformed from government by discussion among the equally informed into contestation over expertise itself.
History of Sociology: Turner is also recognized for his contributions to the history of sociology, especially in The Impossible Science, a contemporary overview of the history of American sociology. He has published on the methodology of the social sciences, including the notion of causality. In particular, he focuses on the problems in statistical causality and the process of selection. This is connected to Turner's work on Max Weber's theory of causality, which Turner has shown is derived from law and legal probability, most notably in Max Weber. Lawyer as Social Thinker. He has also stressed Weber's use of empathy (Einfühlung) to solve the generic problem of the under-determination of description.
Turner is also editor or co-editor of an additional 11 books and author of some 60 articles, 44 book chapters, and 36 review essays and published exchanges.
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies, the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities. He has academic appointments in approximately twenty different universities throughout the world and has received numerous honorary degrees.
S. Barry Barnes was Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter.
In social science, antipositivism is a theoretical stance which proposes that the social realm cannot be studied with the methods of investigation utilized within the natural sciences, and that investigation of the social realm requires a different epistemology. Fundamental to that antipositivist epistemology is the belief that the concepts and language researchers use in their research shape their perceptions of the social world they are investigating and seeking to define.
Philosophy in this sense means how social science integrates with other related scientific disciplines, which implies a rigorous, systematic endeavor to build and organize knowledge relevant to the interaction between individual people and their wider social involvement.
Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
Claus Offe is a political sociologist of Marxist orientation. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt and his Habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he has held chairs for Political Science and Political Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld (1975–1989) and Bremen (1989–1995), as well as at the Humboldt-University of Berlin (1995–2005). He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and The New School University, New York. Once a student of Jürgen Habermas, the left-leaning German academic is counted among the second generation Frankfurt School. He currently teaches political sociology at a private university in Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance.
There are varying interpretations of Max Weber's liberalism due to his well-known sociological achievements. Max Weber is considered an eminent founder of modern social sciences, rivaled by the figures of Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx. Some students of Weberian thought have paid less attention to Weber's extensive and often passionate engagement with the politics of his day, particularly in the United States. However, European intellectuals have given more attention to his political thought. Most of Weber's political writings have not been published in translation, or have been translated only recently in a piecemeal form.
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
The sociology of law, legal sociology, or law and society is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging "necessarily" to the field of sociology, but others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it as neither a subdiscipline of sociology nor a branch of legal studies but as a field of research on its own right within the broader social science tradition. Accordingly, it may be described without reference to mainstream sociology as "the systematic, theoretically grounded, empirical study of law as a set of social practices or as an aspect or field of social experience". It has been seen as treating law and justice as fundamental institutions of the basic structure of society mediating "between political and economic interests, between culture and the normative order of society, establishing and maintaining interdependence, and constituting themselves as sources of consensus, coercion and social control".
Mark Bevir is a British philosopher of history. He is a professor of political science and the Director of the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches courses on political theory and philosophy, public policy and organisation, and methodology. He is also a Professor in the Graduate School of Governance, United Nations University (MERIT) and a Distinguished Research Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University.
Laurent Thévenot is a French sociologist Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).
Comparative historical research is a method of social science that examines historical events in order to create explanations that are valid beyond a particular time and place, either by direct comparison to other historical events, theory building, or reference to the present day. Generally, it involves comparisons of social processes across times and places. It overlaps with historical sociology. While the disciplines of history and sociology have always been connected, they have connected in different ways at different times. This form of research may use any of several theoretical orientations. It is distinguished by the types of questions it asks, not the theoretical framework it employs.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1990s.
Mark Olssen, FAcSS, a political theorist, is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Education Policy in the Department of Politics within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Surrey.
Alessandro Ferrara is an Italian philosopher, Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and former President of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Legal Theory at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome and of Political Theory at Loyola University Chicago.
Patrick Baert is a Belgian sociologist and social theorist, based in Britain. He is a professor of Social Theory at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.
(R.) Andrew Sayer is Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University, UK. He is known for significant contributions to methodology and theory in the social sciences.
Hall Thomas Wilson is an American and Canadian social and political theorist and political scientist who is Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. He has taught in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University (1963–1967) and at York in the Faculties of Graduate Studies and Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (1996–2017) and, earlier, in the Faculties of the Schulich School of Business (1967–1996) and Osgoode Hall Law School (1967–2006). He received his undergraduate degree in Government from Tufts University in 1962 and his Masters and Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University in 1964 and 1968. He was a former Director of the Social and Political Thought Program at York University(1988–1991), has supervised or been a member of numerous examining committees in ten graduate programs and is or was on the editorial boards of nine scholarly journals in the fields of political, social and legal theory and the social sciences. He has also been a visiting or adjunct professor at universities in the United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, Alfred Schutz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt and Ivan Illich are among Wilson's main intellectual influences.
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List of former SCAS Fellows. http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Fellows/Former_Fellows.html#t