Ralph H. Turner

Ralph Herbert Turner (1919 to 2014) was an American sociologist who researched collective behavior and social movements. Born in Effingham, Illinois, to parents who had emigrated from England, he studied at Pasadena City College and the University of Southern California and completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1948. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became the first chair of the sociology department in 1963 and stayed until retiring in 1990, after forty-two years. He edited the journal Sociometry from 1962 to 1964 and the Annual Review of Sociology from 1981 to 1986, and wrote over 120 articles and reviews and eight books, among them three editions of Collective Behavior with Lewis Killian and a text on social psychology. He was president of the American Sociological Association in 1968 and 1969 and held a Fulbright grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.