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Kurt Lewin’s leadership studies and his legacy to social psychology: is there nothing as practical as a good theory?

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-11-04, 15:42 authored by Michael Billig
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.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour

Volume

??

Pages

?? - ?? (??)

Citation

BILLIG, M., 2015. Kurt Lewin’s leadership studies and his legacy to social psychology: is there nothing as practical as a good theory? Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour,45(4), pp.440-460.

Publisher

© John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: BILLIG, M., 2015. Kurt Lewin’s leadership studies and his legacy to social psychology: is there nothing as practical as a good theory? Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour,45(4), pp.440-460., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12074. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

ISSN

0021-8308

Language

  • en