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The myth of Kurt Lewin and the rhetoric of collective memory in social psychology textbooks

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-07-08, 13:39 authored by Michael Billig
This paper examines how social psychology textbooks represent Kurt Lewin and his contribution to social psychology. Many textbooks describe Lewin as the father of social psychology, using a conventional, passive voiced trope to do so. The rhetorical meaning of this trope is analysed to show that textbooks are invoking a collective memory, which closes down views of the past, rather than making a historical argument, which opens up the past for examination. This depiction of Lewin typically involves forgetting his critical views about statistics and experimentation. When textbooks cite Lewin’s famous motto “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”, they tend to ascribe it a special status. In doing so, they change its meaning subtly and treat it as a truth that needs no empirical validation. By their rhetoric, omissions and avoidance of historical sources, textbooks recreate Lewin as a mythic figure rather than a historical one.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Theory & Psychology

Citation

BILLIG, M., 2015. The myth of Kurt Lewin and the rhetoric of collective memory in social psychology textbooks. Theory & Psychology, 25(6), pp.703-718.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

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 paper was accepted for publication in the journal Theory & Psychology and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959354315594255

ISSN

0959-3543

Language

  • en