Turner, Jonathan

Over the last 35 years, Jonathan H. Turner (b. 1942) has advocated a positivistic view of sociological theory, arguing that the goal of sociology is ultimately the production of abstract laws or principles and analytical models that explain basic social forces operating in all times and places (e.g., Turner 1991). For many years, Turner engaged in metatheoretical analysis, formalizing both early and contemporary theories into propositions and models. The goal of these efforts was to highlight the scientific contribution of the classical theorists to explaining the operative dynamics of the social universe (e.g., Turner 2002b; Turner, Beeghley, and Powers 2002) and to argue that some contemporary theories are better than others as scientific theory. As this advocacy and metatheorizing was being produced, Turner also began to implement his strategy for developing scientific theory. This strategy revolved around formalizing existing theories to see what they had to say about a given topic, extracting the useful elements of these theories, and adding new elements in order to produce a more robust theory. Generally, Turner produced abstract models that displayed in visual space the causal flow of social forces, highlighting the direct, indirect, and reverse causal effects of forces in the social universe. Along side these models, Turner would also produce a list of abstract propositions that stated the fundamental relationships among forces in the social universe. The goal of these theories was to define concepts clearly, to specify precisely the nature of their relationship to each other, and to list the conditions that changed the value of each concept.

Turner's work is thus synthetic, pulling together diverse strands of thought, making necessary corrections and additions, and then presenting a theory in a formal way so that, in principle, it can be tested. Early work revolved around the process of conflict (beginning with Turner 1973), especially in the context of ethnic relations (Turner and Singleton 1978). These works became part of a general theory of societal stratification (1984) that conceptualized stratification along several dimensions (the unequal distribution of power, material wealth, and prestige; the formation of homogeneous subpopulations; the ranking of subpopulations; and mobility across subpopulations). For each of these dimensions, a formal law, stated mathematically, was formulated.

In the late 1980s, Turner produced a theory of social interaction that sought to synthesize existing theories into a series of analytical models on motivational, interactional, and structuring processes (e.g., Turner 1987). Motivational dynamics are those processes that energize actors to behave, interactional processes revolve around the mutual signaling and interpreting of people in face-to-face contact, and structuring processes are those dynamics that stabilize the flow of interaction in space and time. Over a decade later, Turner produced a new theory of interaction, incorporating some of the ideas of this earlier theory but adding an entirely new framework as well as ideas on emotional dynamics that he had developed during the course of the 1990s and into the new century (2000, 2002a). This new theory adopted a conceptual scheme developed in the course of work on more macro-social processes (Turner 1995), and it appears that this simple conceptual edifice is influencing all of Turner's current theorizing. The scheme simply argues that the social universe unfolds at three levels: micro, meso, and macro. These are more than analytical distinctions; in Turner's view, they are reality. For each level of reality, there are forces that drive the formation and operation of structures at that level. At the micro level, the key structure is the encounter; at the meso level, the generic structures are corporate units (with a division of labor organized to achieve goals) and categoric units (the social distinctions that people use to define others); and at the macro level, the units are institutional systems. Each unit is embedded in the other, as well as in human biology. Thus, institutions are composed of corporate and categoric units; the latter are built from encounters, and encounters are possible only because of the biological makeup of humans. But in contrast to much theorizing that seeks to connect the micro and macro, Turner argues that each level of reality is driven by its own distinctive forces, and these forces are to be the subject of theoretical principles (Turner 2002a). That is, the goal of sociological theory is to isolate those forces that drive each level of social reality, and for each force, theorists should be able to state an abstract principle about its dynamic properties and, if desired, to develop an analytical model that lays out the causal connections among those properties of the social world that influence values and valences of each force.

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