Turner, Ralph H.: Deviant Roles and the Social Construction of Behavior

Elizabeth Griffiths

Ralph H. Turner served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1969 and is a founding faculty member of the Department of Sociology at UCLA. While Turner's academic contributions range across many subfields in sociology, including social movements, occupational stratification, and social psychology, his research on moral judgment, labeling, and role theory is most relevant to criminologists. Turner draws upon symbolic interactionism and structural-functionalism to explain the production and allocation of social roles, as well as the agency of individuals in continuously defining, redefining, accepting, and rejecting role assignments or labels. In doing so, Turner bridges micro-and macro-levels by linking the structural functional differentiation of roles and collective behaviors (e.g., rioting) with flexible labels produced and negotiated through symbolic communication in social interactions. Turner's (1952, 1954) research on moral judgment focuses on how role-specific ideologies are associated with responses to norm violation. In particular, he studies the social control ...

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