Tag Archives: Kurt Lewin

Dewey and Lewin: A Neglected Relationship and its Current Relevance to Psychology

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A forthcoming article in Theory & Psychology, now available online ahead of print, explores the relationship between John Dewey and Kurt Lewin.  Full details below.

“Dewey and Lewin: A Neglected Relationship and its Current Relevance to Psychology,” by Francesco Paolo Colucci and Monica Colombo. Abstract:

In this paper, we explore the neglected relationship between Dewey and Lewin. Adopting a historical and theoretical perspective, we offer an interpretative framework for explaining why both scholars and their legacies may have been insufficiently recognized or misunderstood within psychology. Their relationship is discussed with particular reference to a common theoretical basis and conception of activity. The connections of their work with the Cultural Historical School and with Gramsci’s thinking are suggested. We hold that from this perspective, Dewey and Lewin can be seen to contribute to contemporary psychology—action research in particular—by furthering its “emancipatory social relevance.”

Historiographic note on errors of attribution

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Bedeian_Art_250x350In the Journal of Management History, Arthur Bedeian uses the chronology of how an aphorism became, and continued to be, credited to Kurt Lewin as an historiographic illustration in order to critique how errors of attribution can be perpetuated by historians, and to model a method for correcting this tendency.

Titled “A note on the aphorism ‘there is nothing as practical as a good theory,’”  this piece traces “the history of the above-captioned aphorism back through its use by the General Electric Company in the 1920s to Friedrich W. Dörpfeld’s 1873 book Grundlinien einer Theorie des Lehrplans, zunächst der Volks- und Mittelschul.” While doing so, Bedeian provides commentary on the widespread challenge presented to historians by historical inaccuracies.

Theory & Psychology Online Firsts July 2015

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T & PTheory & Psychology has published a couple of articles from their upcoming issue online first.

By Michael Billig  a piece titled The myth of Kurt Lewin and the rhetoric of collective memory in social psychology textbooks. A rhetorical analysis is conducted in order to elucidate how texts have employed reductive tropes in a manner that mythologizes Lewin’s role in psychology rather than providing a historically accurate handling of his work and theory. A compelling assessment, which could be translated to ascertain other “fathers” of psychological subdisciplines have been caricatured.

Another work, by Ian Parker, Politics and “Applied Psychology”? Theoretical concepts that question the disciplinary community elucidates the practices by which psychology is substantiated as producer of concepts that get applied to the “real world” through political psychological movements, and inverts the acceptance thereof by applying political theoretical concepts to psychology as the object of inquiry.  Continue reading Theory & Psychology Online Firsts July 2015 →

Kurt Lewin Films on YouTube

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The Virtual Laboratory, a wonderful online resource on the history of experimentation, has posted excerpts from several of psychologist Kurt Lewin’s child development films on YouTube. The film featured above, Field Forces as Impediments to a Performance (1925), shows the difficulties encountered by several children as they attempt to sit down for the first time. Also featured on YouTube is Lewin’s The Child and the Field Forces (1925), illustrating his field theory of behaviour, as well as Lewin and Marjorie A. Leonhard’s Levels of Aspiration in Young Children (1940), which explores problem solving in young children.

A project of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Continue reading Kurt Lewin Films on YouTube →

Oral Histories Online

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The University of Oklahoma library has made available on its website the audio of the Bass Business Oral Histories. These oral histories consist of telephone interviews conducted by Professor Arthur G. Bedeian and his class of Ph. D. students. Among those interviewed are: industrial psychologist Frank Gilbreth, behaviorist B. F. Skinner, industrial psychologist Bernard M. Bass, and organizational psychologist Richard E. Boyatzis. Also interviewed are psychologist, and daughter of Kurt Lewin, Miriam Lewin, as well as business professor Alfred A. Bolton, whose work included research on the Hawthorne studies. In all, there are more than 25 oral histories freely available on the website.