Turner, Stephen P. 1951–

(Stephen Park Turner, Steve Turner)

PERSONAL: Born March 1, 1951, in Chicago, IL; son of Lawrence L. Turner (a real estate manager) and Natalie Stephens (a physician); married third wife, Kimberly Anne Wills (a homemaker), April 21, 1990; children: Evan Wills. Education: University of Missouri, Columbia, A.B., 1971, A.M. (sociology), 1971, A.M. (philosophy), 1972, Ph.D., 1975. Religion: "Slight residue of Calvinism."

ADDRESSES: Home—103 2nd Ave., St. Petersburg Beach, FL 33706. Office—University of South Florida,4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620-5550. E-mail—turner@shell.cas.usf.edu.

CAREER: University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, assistant instructor, 1974; University of North Florida, Jacksonville, adjunct lecturer in sociology, 1975; University of South Florida, Tampa, assistant professor, 1975–79, associate professor, 1979–84, professor, 1984–87, graduate research professor of sociology, 1987–89, graduate research professor of philosophy, 1989–, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture and Society, 1984–, director of graduate studies for department of philosophy, 1992–2000, chair of department, 2002–04. Visiting professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1982, University of Notre Dame, 1985, and Boston University, 1987.

MEMBER: International Sociological Association, American Philosophical Association, American Sociological Association, History of Science Society, Society for Social Studies of Science.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1991–92; Noel P. Gist Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Missouri, 1992.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Sociological Explanation as Translation, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1980.

(As Steve Turner; with Frank Weed) Conflict in Organizations: Practical Guidelines Any Manager Can Use, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1983.

(With Regis A. Factor) Max Weber and the Dispute Over Reason and Value: A Study in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1984.

The Search for a Methodology of Social Science: Durkheim, Weber, and the Nineteenth Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action, D. Reidel (Dordrecht, Holland), 1986.

(With Jonathan Turner) The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1990.

The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1994.

(With Regis A. Factor) Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker, Routledge (London, England), 1994.

Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2002.

Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts, SAGE Publications (London, England), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Science Bought and Sold, edited by Philip Mirowski and Miriam Sent, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2002; Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by Mark Murphy, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2003; and The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Post-disciplinary Age, edited by Charles Camic and Hans Joas, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2003. Contributor of articles and reviews to academic journals in philosophy, science studies, sociology, and politics.

EDITOR

(With Mark Wardell) Sociological Theory in Transition, Allen & Unwin (London, England), 1986.

(With Dirk Kaesler) Sociology Responds to Fascism, Routledge (New York, NY), 1992.

Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, Routledge (New York, NY), 1993.

Social Theory and Sociology: The Classics and Beyond, Blackwell Publishing (Cambridge, MA), 1996.

(With Vaughn R. McKim) Causality in Crisis?: Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN), 1997.

The Cambridge Companion to Weber, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Paul A. Roth) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Blackwell Publishing (Malden, MA), 2003

(With Alan Sica) The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Stephen P. Turner is an academic who often writes on issues concerning sociology and philosophy. In his The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions, for instance, "Turner offers a philosophical analysis of a family of concepts falling under the general heading 'social practice': the notion of a tacit set of rules, norms, or presuppositions that inform behaviour in a given cultural milieu and that are socially authoritative and causally influential," according to Daniel Little in Ethics. As defined, social practices include techniques, knowledge, skills, etiquette, and interpretations passed from a person to his or her subordinate. "Turner wants to show that we should reject the common picture of practices," declared James Bohman in History and Theory. "To the extent that almost all nineteenth-and twentieth-century social sciences are dependent on the guiding idea of practices or their conceptual kin, Turner criticizes some of the most basic and broad-reaching assumptions of social theory…. [He asserts that] practices and their substitutes do not explain, and the theories that are based upon them cannot solve." The basic weakness around which Turner's premise is formed, paraphrased Little, deals "with the difficulty of assuring that the 'same' practice is transmitted."

Despite believing that Turner's argument is "ultimately unpersuasive," Little stated that his book has merit and recommended it as a vehicle to "clarify" the concept of social practices. Bohman was more positive in his response, stating that "given the fundamental and thorough nature of his critical challenge, Turner's book could very well set the terms of the debate about social-scientific explanation for some time to come." Noting the author's "deceptively simple and yet powerful arguments," Bohman went on to point out that "many of Turner's criticisms … are not new; but what is unique about this book is the way in which it persuasively unites previous criticisms around the concept of practices." Despite such praise, however, Bohman concluded that "in the end Turner's arguments prove too much and too little; too much, because they imply that almost all social-scientific explanations refer in some way to the suspect category of practices and hence ought to be replaced by psychological ones; too little, because he does not discuss a subset of practice explanations in sufficient detail to press his case against the theory as a whole."

Turner once told CA: "I began publishing very young, and it seemed to me then that I had plenty of time: to write things that interested me, or that I could learn something from doing, or that served some immediate demand of academic life (of which there were far too many). I resolved that I would get serious after I turned forty—quit writing things I didn't like very much, or was writing for the wrong reasons. This was a difficult resolution to keep. There are many reasons to write—and especially to edit (an activity that I seem fated to, or cursed with)—that are compelling, even though the results may not be especially pleasing. Some topics are interesting, and writing is a chance to think about them in a disciplined way. One feels a responsibility to other topics, a need to speak for them. And writing is often done as a favor, or to return one. The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions and Max Weber: the Lawyer as Social Thinker, are my 'after-forty' books. I have tried to keep my resolution with these books, and think of them as a thing apart from my other writing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Sociology, September, 1995, Joachim J. Savelsberg, review of Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker, p. 497.

Canadian Journal of Sociology, spring, 1996, review of Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, pp. 289-293.

Contemporary Sociology, November, 1994, Jennifer M. Lehmann, review of Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, p. 907.

Ethics, April, 1996, Daniel Little, review of The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions.

History and Theory, February, 1997, James Bohman, review of The Social Theory of Practices.

Science, November 16, 1990, Bennett M. Berger, review of The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology, p. 1020.

Social Forces, September, 1994, Morris Friedell, review of Emile Durkheim, p. 323.

Times Literary Supplement, March 27, 1981, review of Social Explanation as Translation, p. 559.