K urt L ewin's Leadership Studies and His Legacy to Social Psychology

Is There Nothing as Practical as a Good Theory

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8975166
AutoresM Billig (0000-0002-0874-6419, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen45
Número4
Páginas440-460
Fecha de publicación2014-10-24
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jtsb.12074
OpenAlexW2141569745
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas42

This paper re‐examines Kurt Lewin's classic leadership studies, using them as a concrete example to explore his wider legacy to social psychology. Lewin distinguished between advanced “Galileian” science, which was based on analysing particular examples, and backward “Aristotelian” science, which used statistical analyses. Close examination of the way Lewin wrote about the leadership studies reveals that he used the sort of binary, value‐laden concepts that he criticised as “Aristotelian”. Such concepts, especially those of “democracy” and “autocracy”, affected the way that he analysed the results and the ways that later social scientists have understood, and misunderstood, the studies. It is argued that Lewin's famous motto—“there is nothing as practical as a good theory”—is too simple to fit the tensions between the leadership studies and his own views of what counts as good theory

Epistemology · Nothing · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Management and Organizational Studies · Management Theory and Practice · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology