The Lewin Legacy: Field Theory in Current Practice

296 Pages·1986·6.293 MB·English

by  Tamara Dembo (auth.), Eugene Stivers, Susan Wheelan (eds.)

Recent Research in Psychology
The Lewin Legacy
Field Theory in Current Practice
Edited by
Eugene Stivers and Susan Wheelan
Springer-Verlag
Berlin Heidelberg New York London Paris Tokyo
Editors
Eugene Stivers
Susan Wheelan
Department of Psychoeducational Processes
College of Education, Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122, USA
ISBN-13: 978-0-387-96352-5 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4615-8030-0
DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4615-8030-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. The Lewin legacy. (Recent research in psy
chology) Bibliography: p. 1. Lewin, Kurt, 1890-1947. 2. Field theory (Social psychology)
I. Stivers, Eugene H. II. Wheelan, Susan A. III. Series.
HM251.L47413 1986302'.0186-5756
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"Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort", Munich.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1986
281713140-543210
The Context of This Book
Kurt Lewin has influenced modern life as fully as John Dewey, Marx,
Darwin, or Freud. The ideas and practices of organizational development,
life space, leadership styles, force-field analysis, group dynamics, the
t-group, feedback, and action research were generated or developed by
this humane man and his students, both women and men.
On May 3rd and 4th, 1984 at Temple University the first Internation
al Kurt Lewin Conference was held. It brought together scho!ars, pro
fessionals and practitioners from the United states and abroad to cele
brate Lewin's ideas and work, and to talk about and demonstrate current
Lewinian theory and practice. Some local professionals, practitioners
and students joined them.
This book is a main outcome of the Conference, and represents most
of the presenters, unified by their lively common interest. A number of
the original papers have been reduced to their present size for the sake
of the book's clarity and coherence.
A large group of graduate students played a significant part in
planning the Conference. Alice Jackson typed the book manuscript, and
Claire Staffieri did the graphic work. Marcia Patton was editorial as
sistant.
Eugene H. Stivers, and
Susan A. Wheelan
Psychoeducational Processes,
College of Education
Temple University
A Personal Introduction
I have attended quite a few conferences and meetings devoted to the
ideas of Kurt Lewin. Among these the 1984 conference at Temple was out
standing for its high quality. What made it so successful? Several
things. The conference included a stimulating mix of generations. The
first generation of women who obtained their Ph.D.'s in psychology in
Berlin in the 1920's strike me as a remarkable group. Now in their 80's,
they are characterized by enormous vigor and energy. They are still
professionally active. Two of them - Tamara Dembo and Maria Rickers
Ovsienkina - joined us. Other participants in the Temple conference
had been in Iowa in the 1930's and 1940's, or at MIT. Of course there
were many who had learned about Lewin from their own teachers, and in
some cases, their teachers' teachers. There was a good mixture of ap
plied psychologists and academics.
Father said on several occasions that he did not want to found a
school of psychology as such. Rather he wanted to introduce the field
theoretical viewpoint and approach. I think he would have been stimulated
by and enthusiastic about the many diverse areas to which Lewinian analy
ses, ideas, and concepts are applied today, as illustrated by this volume.
He would have been pleased to see so many people applying basic theoreti
cal concepts to important social problems.
Father loved to discover new things about America. When he first
carne to the States he took many photographs of the car carriers which
transport eight new cars at a time across the country - apparently in
Germany there were no such animals. At Temple, at first he would have
been amazed to find T shirts in vibrant colors with his name boldly em
blazoned upon them. But then, with his usual fondness for the unexpected
inventions of the country he had taken to his heart, he would have been
amused and delighted.
I heartily recommend this collection of "work in progress" to the
reader. I look forward with anticipation to subsequent conferences spon
sored by the Society for the Advancement of Field Theory.
Miriam Lewin
Manhattanvi11e College
The Fertility of Kurt Lewin
The 1984 Kurt Lewin Conference at Temple University provided a rich
contemporary memoir to the many dimensions of Kurt Lewin's genius.
The first section of this volume will help many connect with the
historical roots of the Lewinian legacy, and help reconstruct some of
the intellectual ferment of this launching period.
Other sections provide samples of some of the major areas of utili
zation and development of the Lewinian initiatives - mental h~alth and
group therapy, classroom learning process, organizational development,
and community development and action.
Cutting across all these areas of applied group dynamics and field
theory are the contributions of research and change methodology as illus
trated by contributions on action-research, forcefield analysis, conflict
analysis, gatekeeping functions, and the dynamics of cooperation and com
petition.
This conference, and subsequent volume, are clear evidences of the
generational bridging and continuing vigor and fruitfulness of Kurt
Lewin's outreach.
Ronald Lippitt
Ann Arbor, Michigan
An Overall View
Kurt Lewin, whose scientific contributions 9rovided the background
for the theory, research and practice described in this book, has often
been called the major figure in the history of modern social psychology.
Edward C. Tolman, himself a giant in psychological history, expressed
such a view when he said that Lewin, the experimentalist, along with
Freud, the clinician, would be remembered as persons who first made psy
chology a science applicable to real human beings and to real human so
ciety.
My own a$sociations with Lewin began immediately after World War II.
The end of the war had freed him from war-related research and made it
possible for him to embark on an endeavor about which he felt deeply and
for which he had high expectations. This was to be an effort to extend
his theory and research to include the phenomena of group life, including
those of intergroup prejudice and discrimination, from which he and his
family had suffered in Germany.
The year, 1945, saw him preoccupied with establishing two research
institutes that were to be the primary instruments of his new scientific
thrust. One of these was the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT,
and the other was the Commission on Community Relations of the American
Jewish Congress. As research director of the latter 1 consulted with
hin on a regular basis from mid-1945 until his sudden death in 1947. In
these exchanges I had the opportunity to experience at first hand the
creativity for which Lewin was famous.
Lewin's growing concern with the psychology of groups and intergroup
relations had been stimulated in two ways. The first was his prewar and
wartime experience. He had left Nazi Germany as a result of discrimina
tion against Jewish scientists. He devoted extensive time and resources
to efforts to rescue family, friends and colleagues. In many instances
he succeeded, only to lose his own mother in a concentration camp. He
recognized that--however significant his studies of the dynamics of in
dividual psychology--the rise of Fascism, the world war and the Jewish
holocaust raised questions about human behavior that must be studied at
the level of groups and society.
The second stimulus was two sets of subsequently famous experiments
conducted in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of these grew out of a
dissertation on autocratic and democratic leadership by one of his stu
dents, Ronald Lippitt. This study and a follow-up experiment done by
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Lewin with Lippitt and Ralph White revealed differences in group atmo
sphere and behavior associated with differences in leadership styles.
The second set of studies occurred during the war. In collabora
tion with Alex Bavelas he carried out the well known experiments on pro
moting the use of organ meats to relieve food shortages. Out of these
wartime studies had grown a distinctly social-psychological concept,
namely, that of "group decision." Group decision, it was learned, had
more influence on individuals' actions than did decisions made separately
by the individuals themselves.
Lewin's commitment to the psychology of groups and community action
led him to seek university and organizational support to pursue further
research., MIT provided a home for the research on the psycholo0Y of
groups (the Research Center for Group Dynamics), and the American Jewish
Congress made similar provisions for the research on intergroup vrejudite
and discrimination (the Commission on Community Interrelations). The
research carried out in these institutes under the guidance of Lewin
(and, after his death, by those who continued the work he had initiated)
had considerable influence on the rapidly growing fields of social, or
ganizational, a~d developmental psychology. Empirical findings on such
topics as leadership, group cohesion, group goals, group standards, group
pressures, cooperation, and communication within groups and organizations
became the basis for the new field of group dynamics. Other studies
dealing with organizational and community action directed against reli
gious and racial discrimination added to knowledge of prejudice and in
tergroup hostility. Developments in "action research" methods concerned
with facilitating the practical application of social science findings
paralleled these substantive advances. A typology of varieties of action
research emerged.
Had Lewin lived, it is safe to assume that these empirical develop
ments would have been paralleled by an equally vigorous expansion of his
field theory of individual psychology to the social-psychological pheno
mena of face-to-face groups, large organizations, communities, and poli
tical entities. As Albert Pepitone notes in his chapter in this book,
the beginnings of such an extension were already evident. For example,
Lewin had begun to deal with the task of conceptualizing the paths that
objects and persons traverse through the social environment. He called
these "channels" and noted the presence in these channels of "gate
keepers." A second example, described in a posthumous article published
in the first issue of Volume 1 of the journal, Human Relations, is that
of "quasi-stationary equilibrium" of group processes. Lewin called
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attention to the implications of this phenomenon for methods of promoting
change in undesirable societal practices.
While such mini-theories are helpful in generalizing across a vari
ety of person-environment relationships, they fall short of the goals
that Lewin set for himself in field theory. We can be sure that he would
have incorporated such mini-theories into a broader field-theoretical
framework. Such had been the course of his progress in individual psy
chology, where he had integrated into a single over-arching system such
components as individual goals, barriers to goal achievement, individual
personality characteristics, representations in the present of past ex
perience, sUbjective meanings of perceived environmental events, and
behavioral intentions, as well as the means for underst~nding the inter
action and interdependence of such components.
The recognition that Lewin's work had been cut short in the vital
area of social relationships and group life was one of the factors that
led the faculty and students of Temple University's Department of Psycho
educational Processes to convene an international gathering of social
scientists interested in the contemporary implications of his work. This
book records the proceedings of that meeting, the First International
Kurt Lewin Conference, held in the spring of 1984. As Eugene Stivers
and Susan Wheelan indicate in their Introduction, the range of topics
at the conference was broad: the discussions covered historical, theo
retical, research, and practical matters.
The success of the first conference stimulated two additional under
takings for the future. The first is to continue to hold biennial inter
national gatherings of social scientists whose work has been stimulated
in some way by that of Lewin. To this end a Second International Kurt
Lewin Conference is scheduled for the fall of 1986.
The second undertaking is to form an international network to foster
communication during the intervals between conferences. The general ob
jective of the network is"indicated by its title, Society for the Ad
vancement of Field Theory. The society's stated aims are to revitalize
and advance Lewin's field theoretical approaches to the development of
social science. These are ambitious objectives. Nevertheless, their
significance for social science and for the application of social science
to society justifies our best efforts to achieve them. Lewin died too
soon after shifting his focus to social-psychological phenomena to de
velop the full potential of field theory in this area. Hopefully, the
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efforts of the new society will provide social and intellectual support
to others to take up where Lewin left off.
Stuart Cook
University of Colorado