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KURT LEWIN'S ACTION-RESEARCH

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 KURT LEWIN’S ACTION-RESEARCH

Yue Caï HILLON Mark E. HILLON

Western Carolina University Lafayette Institute
(United States of America) (United States of America)

Pierre EL HADDAD
Saint-Joseph University
Sustainability & Development
Consultancy
(Lebanon)

ABSTRACT:

This study is a follow-up to a point made during the 2016 ISEOR/AOM

conference in Lyon that the problem with action research today is that there is no
action and no research. In our quest for understanding, we traveled back from
that statement, guided by comments from participants in the conference
discussion, to the beginning of organization development. Finding only partial
answers there, we continued back to Kurt Lewin’s era to learn how he would
have defined action-research had he lived to write about its supporting theory
and detailed procedures to guide its practice.

Keywords: Action-Research; Organization Development; Kurt Lewin; Gestalt;

Addison-Wesley

INSPIRATION

The 2016 ISEOR/AOM conference in Lyon presented a memorable drama

during one of the plenary sessions. David Boje stood up and emphatically stated
that the problem with action research is that there is no action and no research!
After disparaging some topics held near and dear to the hearts of the ODC
faithful, a curious thing happened. A red-faced Peter Sorensen who had been
quietly sharing the stage with David Boje for the session, agreed. Although he
did not pound the table to make the point, there was a message of “It’s about
time someone said that” in his insight. As perhaps the oldest OD field member in
the room, Peter Sorensen spoke of the six little Addison-Wesley books that
students of the first era of OD had studied to learn all there was to know of the
new field. He seemed to be suggesting that there had been action and research
during those early days. Perhaps there once was more hope and belief in our
abilities as scholar-practitioners to effect change, but during David and Peter’s
exchange, there was clear agreement that today, action research was no longer
viable or effective.

This article is a follow-up to that memorable day in June 2016. Our format
differs from the traditional approach of proposing hypotheses and devising a
means to test them, with findings, discussion, and conclusions. Rather, the article
has been written to take the reader along on our search for Kurt Lewin’s action-
research. We begin with a return to the beginning of OD to assess the state of
action research at that time and then we will travel back to Lewin’s era to learn
how it all began. Kurt Lewin was said to have begun using the term “action-
research” sometime in 1944 to describe his work in experimental social
psychology, but the term did not appear in print until his 1946 paper entitled
Action Research and Minority Problems. That paper presented a discovery, the
final concept to complete Lewin’s form of action-research, but he died early in
1947 before he could write a definitive explanation with supporting theory and
guidance for the practice of his creation. The ultimate purpose of this study is to
discover and elucidate Lewin’s version of action-research and to offer students,
scholars, and practitioners insight into their own understanding of creating
actionable knowledge.

THERE IS NO ACTION

There is a publishing genre of typologies and handbooks devoted to

characterizing the many varieties of action research and it might be possible to
search these works for signs of life. However, we will leave the meta-analyses to
other scholars and travel back in our search for Kurt Lewin’s action-research.
Our first stop is the set of Addison-Wesley books published in 1969, as this
marks the formal launch of OD as a separate academic sub-field. While the
authors all had prior experience as OD consultants, the common foreword to all
six books stated that “there was a growing theory and practice of something
called ‘organization development,’ but most students, colleagues, and managers
knew relatively little about it….the field is still emerging” (Bennis, 1969: iii).
The six books were:

Organization Development: Its Nature, Origins, and Prospects (Bennis)

Organization Development: Strategies and Models (Beckhard)

Building a Dynamic Corporation through Grid Organization Development

(Blake & Mouton)

Developing Organizations: Diagnosis and Action (Lawrence & Lorsch)

Interpersonal Peacemaking: Confrontations and Third Party Consultation

(Walton)

Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development (Schein)

Assuming that Kurt Lewin and his form of action-research were essential to the
founding and practice of OD, then one should find supporting evidence in the set
of Addison-Wesley books designed to introduce and teach the new and emerging
field to students and managers. Table 1 shows the frequency of references to
Lewin and action research in each book.

Table 1: References to Lewin and Action Research in First Six Addison-Wesley

OD Books

Author(s) Lewin Action Research

Bennis 0 0
Beckhard 0 3
Blake & Mouton 0 0
Lawrence & Lorsch 1 0
Walton 0 1
Schein 3 1

Lawrence and Lorsch (1969) focused their behaviorally-oriented OD consulting

at the interfaces of individual to organization, group to group, and organization
to environment. They noted that their work was similar to the participative and
socio-technical approaches advocated by Douglas McGregor, but their particular
goal was to match or realign the demands and characteristics on opposing sides
of these interfaces. Methods derived before the systems era could indirectly
assist with this balancing act “to change a field of forces, as suggested by Kurt
Lewin….[but] much of the diagnosis was done by drawing from the perceptions
of the managers….at some cost in the specificity of the diagnosis” (Lawrence &
Lorsch, 1969: 38). Thus, the reference to Lewin served notice of their belief that
his force field analysis had been surpassed by a more efficient systems approach
to change.

In discussing the historical development of process consultation, Schein (1969:

12) recognized group dynamics as developed “under the leadership of Kurt
Lewin” as an influence. However, Schein offered much more credit to scholars
in anthropology, sociology, psychology, human relations, within-and-between
group behavior, and management. Further, work that Schein (1969: 12) and his
Addison-Wesley colleagues had done at National Training Laboratories over a
20-year period “deriving from Lewinian concepts of action-research” actually
refuted those original concepts. In moving out of Lewin’s format for research at
an off-site retreat and into actual organizations for in situ problem solving, the
role of the T-group trainer changed from expert and teacher to that of a therapist.
This shift from training to therapy was ultimately responsible for the demise of
the T-group (Mcleod & Kettner-Polly, 2004).

The serendipitous T-group discovery noted in Lewin (1946) was that feedback as
a two-way communication between researchers and participants served to
validate data (Freedman, 1999). Until that project, a formal distance was
maintained between Lewin’s research staff and their experimental research
subjects. However, after several participants from the day’s workshop chanced
upon an evening staff meeting and challenged the facilitators’ interpretations,
Lewin realized that the group context and feedback discussions between staff
and participants offered a valid solution to the “eternal experimental problem of
trying to guess a subject’s thoughts” (Kleiner, 2008: 26). The T-Group broke the
barrier to allow interaction and discussion about what the subjects were thinking
about the group activity. Roles of researcher and subject did not change, but the
research process opened to allow data collection and validation in an activity-
feedback cycle over a series of workshops.

It is important to note that the “T” stood for training, not therapy, and that the
group activities were designed as an efficient means for an individual to explore
how social dynamics affected their life space or perceptual-behavioral force field
(Kleiner, 2008). These activities were carefully designed in advance as part of
the research process to address a given challenge requiring social change.
Specifically, participants were being trained or re-educated to accept or help
implement a change that had already been decided upon by higher authorities.
Topological psychology (Lewin, 1936) enabled researchers to map the life space
and determine which forces could be leveraged to greatest effect for behavioral
change. While producing a social good, the group format also enabled an
individual to focus on development of their own human potential.

The research functions of the T-group were lost in the OD turn away from
Lewin. Also, the transformation from training group to therapy group had given
the T-group such a negative image that the Addison-Wesley authors took pains
to distance themselves from it. For instance, “the process consultant should not
immediately become involved in discussing interpersonal processes with his
client. Indeed, the client may be quite fearful of such discussions and be
unwilling to proceed if he feels that he will inevitably find himself in a T-group”
(Schein, 1969: 88). Bennis (1969: 7) described their break with Lewin’s
generation after which, bluntly stated, “People wanted nothing to do with T-
groups or sensitivity training.” Blake and Mouton (1969) replaced the
researcher-participant interaction with self-reported grids to assess corporate
functions and managerial attitudes, thereby signaling another purposeful turn
from research to consultation.

Ironically, Schein’s (1969: 132) final reference to Lewin took inspiration from
the dictum that “if you want to understand something, try to change it” and he
related this to a satisfaction from consulting with benefits of enhanced research
skills and teaching. Thus, to the first generation of OD, consulting and research
were separate but complementary activities. Similarly, Walton’s (1969) only
reference to action-research was meant to describe his novel combination of
roles as a researcher-practitioner. Walton (1969: 9) noted that his “dual action-
research role” arose because he had decided to turn his experiences as a third
party confrontation consultant into written instructional exercises. In his
experience, it was not common for a practitioner to also be a researcher-theorist,
although he was accustomed to being both an actor and an observer in his
interventions. “Behavioral scientists often insist that responsibility for the
research and action aspects of a behavioral-science change project be assigned to
different persons. Thus, research and action would occur simultaneously in time
and place, but would involve two sets of behavioral scientists” (Walton, 1969:
9).

Walton combined the two roles into a participant-observation technique and

suggested that his “strategy of practitioner-researcher has the effect of increasing
the likelihood that theories are developed with high relevance to the world of
action” (1969: 11). Thus, the OD practitioner-researcher eliminated the
collective sense of participation and the validation that it offered. An OD action-
researcher worked alone, perhaps fitting for a sociotherapist engaged in
interpersonal relations and conflict. Walton (1969: 4) was the only author in the
six-book set to acknowledge that sociotherapy involved the treatment of
“pathologies or dysfunctions in social relationships.” He offered examples of
“persistent disagreement and emotional antagonisms that detract from the
productivity of the relationship and/or the organization” (Walton, 1969: 4-5).
Walton’s tenuous grasp on academic research was representative of the OD
founders’ ambition to cut ties to social science. Designating the group or team as
the basis of change was one clear way of breaking with Lewin’s psychological
social psychology and its scientific focus on the individual. Yet, they were not
shifting into any new sort of sociological approach. They were professional
change agents, gurus of humanistic leadership.

Schein’s process consultant had arisen from organizational psychology, a new

field that he had helped to launch. The process consultant’s role was not to solve
the client’s problems, but to work with managers to help them learn how to self-
diagnose their problems and then develop solutions that applied their own
specialized knowledge of the firm’s work. Schein described this role as a
sociotherapist, but not focused on pathology because “it is the healthy
organization that knows enough to expose itself to help to ensure its future
health. Sick organizations tend to resist the kind of help which process
consultation could perhaps offer them” (1969: 134) for all practical purposes, he
had created a managerial psychologist to help an otherwise capable organization
learn about the human barriers preventing it from using “its own resources
effectively” (Schein, 1969: 134).

The references to action research in Table 1 that we have yet to discuss are from
Beckhard. One of the references was a self-citation, while the other two were
general statements. In his description of an effective organization, one of
Beckhard’s (1969: 11) points was that “the organization and its members act in
an ‘action research’ way. General practice is to build in feedback mechanisms so
that individuals and groups can learn from their own experience.” To distinguish
action research as practiced with human relations laboratory training from “a
genuine OD effort,” Beckhard (1969: 21) stated that these action research
approaches (i.e. non-genuine OD) “are not specifically related to the
organization’s mission; they are not action-oriented in the sense of providing a
connecting link between the training activity and the action planning which
follows it. They are not organically part of a larger effort. This is not to say that
such training efforts are not very useful, but it is to say that they do not
necessarily produce organization change.”
Beckhard’s (1969) final note on action research was a redefinition of the term to
describe a generic process without the collaborative research functions for
collecting and validating data. “The basic building blocks of an organization are
groups (teams). Therefore, the basic units of change are groups, not individuals”
(Beckhard, 1969: 26). Within this context, he specified that OD interventions
tend to focus on team development, intergroup relationships, planning and goal
setting processes, and education to upgrade knowledge, skills, and abilities.
“Team-building activities usually use an action-research model of intervention.
There are three processes involved in the activity: collection of information;
feedback of the information to the team; action planning from the feedback”
(Beckhard, 1969: 28). With the OD consultant advising a change effort led by
top management, feedback within this generic process was merely a mechanism
to convey data to a team, not necessarily a two-way communication open to
question. Thus, Lewin’s action-research which OD had generically redefined as
action planning still had no action, as that was meant to follow in subsequent
stages of the intervention.

Since the change to be implemented was itself never open to debate in both
Lewin’s era and among the new generation of OD change agents, participation,
democracy, and collaboration were merely styles or superficial fashions worn by
a leader. A democratic style had been found to be more favorable to
implementation of pre-set objectives than autocratic and laissez-faire styles.
Lewin and Lippitt (1938: 294) described the democratic style as one in which
“the leader attempted to be a group member in spirit but not in the actual
work….a congenial extra-group relationship was maintained.” The question of
their experimental study was how best to encourage a group to achieve an
objective set by the leader. A leadership style had no substance in organizational
structures or behaviors, but rather, was part of the persuasive rhetoric to
influence “participants” to believe that they had had a voice in the change that
was required of them.

The lack of genuine participation in Lewin’s work may come as a shock because
he inspired the participative democracy research at Tavistock. However, Lewin’s
approach did not allow “participants” any role in determining the change that
they were required to undergo. A higher authority had made that decision and
Lewin and his research team stepped in to help make the change palatable to the
people who had to live with it. In his defense, his research interests involved
major social issues that probably were unquestionably good to resolve and he
apparently did not envision that his work would be applied beyond the public
governmental/community sector. However, when the OD generation moved
change consulting into organizations, the same paternal unquestionability of
corporate change was on much shakier ground. Blake and Mouton (1969) had
developed their approach while helping a company prevent workers from
unionizing as a defense against hostile management and unsafe working
conditions. Perhaps their solution was better than simmering institutionalized
conflict, but instead of gaining a share of power, workers may have been gently
persuaded to Taylorize their own jobs (Boje & Winsor, 1993).
Approximately 47 years before David Boje shocked the conference audience in
Lyon, Beckhard had already said that there was no action in action research. His
redefinition of the term for new OD practitioners failed to reinvigorate it with
action and also eliminated the research component. OD corporate change agents
may have also lost Lewin’s ethic of work for social good. Whether generally
defined as Beckhard’s action planning process, Schein’s managerial
psychologist, or as Walton’s practitioner-researcher, the Addison-Wesley authors
can be credited with the vagueness and all-encompassing nature of action
research today.

END OF THE LEWIN ERA

It is apparent from our analysis of the Addison-Wesley book set that the launch
of OD marked the beginning of the “no action and no research” form of action
research. Bennis (1969) noted that the break with Lewin’s generation actually
occurred a decade before the formal beginning of OD as a discipline. The decade
following Lewin’s death in 1947 was apparently pivotal as the end of his
influence, so events of that period should be explored.

Following the T-group concept discovery in 1946, Lewin sought grants to fund
studies of this new interactive participative approach to research. In order to
apply for and receive funding, he needed to form a non-profit institute. The
National Training Laboratories for Group Dynamics (NTL) was formed for that
purpose. Unfortunately, Lewin died during the planning phase for NTL’s first
summer session and “the timing of his death gave NTL’s birth a mythic stature,
even for people who never knew him. Lewin had been a prophet….and then he
had passed away just before reaching the promised land” (Kleiner, 2008: 27).

Lewin’s three main collaborators on the T-group research - Ronald Lippitt, Lee
Bradford, and Kenneth Benne - continued with the work and launched NTL as
planned in the summer of 1947. Specifically, the mechanism to study and clarify
under controlled “laboratory” conditions was the use of feedback to objectively
confront participants with data about their behavior. If the process could be
conducted rationally to preclude defensive reactions, the researchers found that
“participants achieved highly meaningful learnings about themselves, about the
responses of others to them, and about group behavior and group development in
general” (Freedman, 1999: 127). The successful completion of Lewin’s final
project to research the T-group concept freed NTL’s founders of further
obligations to his line of research and allowed them to follow their own
inclinations. It is perhaps a testament to Lewin’s hopeful nature and his belief in
human potential that none of his graduate students wanted to be him or to
assume his mantle. All went on to successful careers in their own right.

By 1952, use of the T-group was venturing beyond the strict controls of NTL’s
secluded retreat in Bethel, Maine and a new generation of clinicians were
moving it towards humanistic psychology for personal, interpersonal, and
organization therapy (Freedman, 1999). NTL soon lost control of how
consultants were using the T-group and by 1956, the grants that had allowed the
lab to function as an exclusive research and academic apprenticeship program
had run out. The sudden need for funding was solved by soliciting executives
and business trainees as paying guests (Kleiner, 2008). With the publication of
The Human side of Enterprise in 1960, Douglas McGregor became the voice of
this shift to business therapy groups, but by 1968, the fad had ended and this
post-Lewin NTL generation moved on to create new approaches to consulting.

The new OD principals recognized a tectonic shift underway in academia and

consulting. “Until recently, the field of business was unknown to, or snubbed by,
the academic establishment. There, management education and research were at
best regarded with dark suspicion as if contact with the world of reality -
particularly monetary reality - was equivalent to a dreadful form of pollution”
(Bennis, 1969: 24). As Warren Bennis’ mentor, it is not at all surprising that
McGregor was credited as the theoretical founder of the new OD generation of
consultants (Bennis, 1969). However, most of the Addison-Wesley authors also
acknowledged McGregor’s pivotal theoretical role as a founder of OD. In
ideological contrast, Kleiner (2008: 214) notes that NTL did not become “the
kind of democracy that Lee Bradford, Ken Benne, and Ron Lippitt had talked
about but never been able to achieve” until after a gender and racial diversity
initiative was responsible for the mass departure of the luminaries of the OD
movement. Therefore, we can locate the formal beginning of OD with the 1969
publication of the Addison-Wesley book set and recognize OD as a generational
change in influence and direction. Kurt Lewin’s era was clearly over.

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES

Our historical analysis has revealed to this point that the Addison-Wesley
authors recognized that there was no action in action research and they intended
for there to be no research in the consulting practice of OD. Yet, their generic
redefinition of the term propelled us so far away from Lewin’s original meaning
that “nearly every sincere effort to improve organizations from within can be
traced back to him” (Kleiner, 2008: 21). Lewin’s colleagues who carried out his
final project on the use of T-groups in research were likely the first to use flip
charts (Freedman, 1999). Therefore, anyone conducting planning or change
efforts in a small group workshop format with flip charts can claim a lineage to
Lewin. Substantial differences lie in the theory and practice beneath these
superficial resemblances. Therefore, the next phase of our study takes us back to
learn about the formative influences that would have specifically defined Kurt
Lewin’s original form of action-research.

Kurt Lewin was perhaps the most universally beloved social scientist of the 20th
century, thus he has been retroactively, but falsely, proclaimed as the founder of
social psychology, social change theory, and organization development (Billig,
2015). If we look beyond the simple spiral planning process overview of action-
research (Lewin, 1946) to the underlying theoretical support and formative
experiences (Lewin, 1936, 1937), our tenuous grasp of a common
methodological connection to Lewin quickly fades away into a history that most
of us have never shared. Like most of our distant ancestors in the field, he is a
mythical figure long detached from a firm grounding in real events and, to our
common understanding, all that remains of his memory are a few inspirational
quotes.

In the broader context of American social science, Lewin was an incursion from
German antipositivism and phenomenology that offered a brief hope to re-found
the social psychology of management and organization studies as a science.
House (1977) delineated three major varieties of social science and Lewin’s
work falls under psychological social psychology. This variety generally entailed
a negation or denial of subjectivity in pursuit of universal truths and was
described as predominantly experimental, neglectful of context, and focused on
individual perceptual and cognitive responses to social stimuli. Lewin’s Gestalt-
grounded approach to the study of individuals and small group dynamics in
“real” situations was a notable exception to the rigidity of perspective that
characterized most examples of psychological social psychology. In his version,
the subjectivity did not need to be negated or denied. It was simply not relevant
to his research interests because in his work, it was only of consequence that a
person had cognitive perceptions that could be mapped onto a psychological
topology. It made no difference to him whether information from the senses
could move directly to knowing without a cognitive step in between. Leaving
questions of subjectivity to others allowed him to focus on how perception is
linked to action.

Moreno (1953) writes that some of his methods of studying group dynamics
were borrowed into Lewin’s work. Lewin’s three main collaborators in the T-
group research had also been students of Moreno and they had imported his
sociometric role-plays and sociodrama techniques into Lewin’s work. Before
these imports, Lewin’s own inclination had been to design experiments that put
subjects into realistic situations to observe their behavior. Scholars evolve over
time, but Lewin was arguably very deliberate in his work and only accepted new
concepts after extensive testing. In Lewin’s (1946) view, action-research was the
basic social scientific research needed for effective social management and social
engineering. Action-research was to be a scientific process for learning
specifically what to do. Progress in social engineering

“Will depend largely on the rate with which basic research in the social sciences
can develop deeper insight into the laws which govern social life. This basic
social research will have to include mathematical and conceptual problems of
theoretical analysis. It will have to include the whole range of descriptive fact-
finding in regard to small and large social bodies. Above all, it will have to
include laboratory and field experiments in social change” (Lewin, 1946: 35-36).

Lewin’s formulation of action-research as a means for basic social science was

shaped by Carl Stumpf, his most influential professor, as Gestalt psychology,
phenomenology, and a physics metaphor of social science trace directly back to
Stumpf (Lewin, 1937). Lewin was said to have briefly flirted with behaviorism
at the start of his academic career, but a purely external environmental
determinant of behavior was deemed inadequate. Skinner (1975) characterized
the behavioral approach from a biological perspective on an organism in an
environment. Physical and social environments were considered to be observable
and open to change, whereas internal cognitive and introspective states were
inaccessible. Further, diversions into individualism, self-actualization, and self-
reflection were thought to be non-scientific paths that had hindered progress
toward a science of behavior. Thus, the behaviorist searched for environmental
determinants and thought it best to leave internal causal explanations for
behavior to physiology, as “the task is to change, not people, but rather the world
in which they live” (Skinner, 1975: 70). A human as a sentient being was
apparently viewed as an irrational scientific taboo that behaviorists would not
cross for fear of ostracism from the scientific guild (Lewin, 1947a).

Behaviorism took sensation and cognitive perception out of the equation

altogether, an untenable position for early Gestaltists. Carl Stumpf also advised
Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka (Neurotree, 2018) as they
created and developed Gestalt psychology. Lewin worked at the same
psychology research institute in Berlin and was influenced strongly by their early
work. The concept of a Gestalt was often misinterpreted, especially by systems
theorists, as a “whole greater than the sum of the parts.” The correct translation
of Koffka’s percept (i.e. an object of perception) or Gestalt is that the whole is
not more, but other than the parts (Heider, 1977). It was not an addition or
summation, as Gestaltists conceptualized perception as a cognitive processing of
information to construct a whole that was not actually present, that had an
independent existence with meaning that could not be extracted from the
surrounding stimuli alone (Dewey, 2017). In Lewin’s work, a social group
“existed” as a whole entity only because of the interdependence of its members.
Structure was due to constancy of relations among members, not due to the
members themselves (Lewin, 1947a).

Gestalt psychology may have inspired early systems theorists, but a Gestalt is not
a system in the later sense of open, closed, or cybernetic control thinking. Trist’s
(1992) chronology of relevant influential ideas strongly suggests that Lewin
could not have evolved from his early Gestalt frame of reference into any sort of
systems theory before his death in 1947. While systems theory emerged during
Lewin’s lifetime, Trist notes that Andras Angyal was the first social scientist to
advance the Gestalt concept of wholeness into a “dynamic holism” view of an
individual, specifically, the treatment of a human as a psychological, social, and
biological open system. Angyal (1941) cited this new dynamic understanding in
contrast with Lewin’s pseudo-static frame, and moreover, it became apparent
that Lewin’s Gestalt was psychologically contained within the individual,
including a mental perception of external environmental valences, field forces,
and other factors beyond the closed system life space (Emery, 1997). Thus,
Lewin viewed behavior as a function of a person (ality) and their perception of
their external environment. Consistent with this view, House (1977) described
Lewin’s psychological social psychology as less dependent upon context and
focused more on individual perceptual and cognitive responses to social stimuli.
The social and physical “facts” were noted, but descriptive data were thought to
only capture the observable symptoms of underlying psychological perceptual
phenomena (Lewin, 1947a).
Trist (1997) recollected that the collaboration between Lewin’s Research Center
for Group Dynamics and Tavistock that launched Human Relations in 1947 was
supposed to have held a joint meeting in England that same year. The two groups
carried through with that plan in 1949, but by then, Lewin’s former students had
split into two groups and neither was continuing his work in action-research.
Roger Barker and Herbert Wright had been studying with Lewin until his death,
but returned to the University of Kansas in pursuit of a psychological ecology to
add an objective component to the environment, beyond the perceptual
limitations of Lewin’s model. Lewin had also not kept current as Gestalt
psychology evolved. The Gestalt meaning of “values” is apparently the same as a
psychological ecologist’s sense of “affordances” in that both refer to the
usefulness of objects or features in an organism’s niche environment. The key
clarification for a Gestaltist is that these values or affordances are considered as
direct perceptions of an information-rich environment, without a cognitive
process of sensation, description, and interpretation (Jenkins, 2008). While this
sense of values may have remained consistent with Lewin’s understanding, he
had clearly rejected the later Gestalt concept of direct knowing (Emery, 1997).

In his pursuit of a specialization in experimental social psychology, Lewin

apparently held to the earliest formulation of Gestalt psychology as he combined
those ideas with mathematical topology to form topological psychology. Science
following the physics metaphor required a mathematical representation and
topology appeared amenable to the task. Carl Stumpf had experienced the rough
transition of German psychology from philosophy to science, and the apologetic
demeanor of the emerging science toward philosophy seemed to have made a
strong impression on Kurt Lewin (Lewin, 1937). Therefore, his version of
action-research would have been, by design, an interaction of philosophy and
science, not a conflict.

Lewin sought to merge the surfaces of topology with the wholeness of a Gestalt
in order to visually map an individual’s life space or socio-psychological force
field. As individuals are often not aware of such cognitive interactions, one could
think of a Gestalt and Lewin’s topological extension of the concept in the same
way that Bachelard (1994) speaks of an object as a primitive phenomenology of
the imagination prior to the enriched finish and order that transforms image into
metaphysical meaning. Bachelard (1994: 235) also notes that “when a
geometrician speaks of volumes, he is only dealing with the surfaces that limit
them.” Thus, topology seemed to present an intriguing form in which to explore
the life space. Further, Lewin’s topological and vector psychology would have
introduced an unmistakable, albeit qualitative, image of Newtonian physics to
his model of action-research. Thus, Lewin had found the math and physics to
make his work follow the metaphor of science.

As for an emphasis on individual perception from a primitive phenomenology,

Carl Stumpf pioneered just such a field (Lewin, 1937). His tone psychology
(1911/2012) likely provided fuel for another of his students, Edmund Husserl,
who developed phenomenology as a negation of positivism consistent with the
first Frankfurt School, another influential group in Lewin’s scholarship. At the
very least, this school of thought would have added a German version of
intersubjectivity and interactionism to the theory and practice of Lewin’s action-
research. Topological life space mapping offered a visual means to compare and
equalize divergent intersubjective perceptions among people, as well as to
manipulate the resultant combination of forces towards an objective (Lewin,
1947a).

IN SEARCH OF ACTION

The preceding section thoroughly explored the formative influences on Lewin’s

views of research and the theoretical foundations of his worldview. The
remaining question to address is what action meant to Lewin in the context of
action-research. Action and research are separately introduced as parts of a larger
planning cycle for change in Lewin (1946). Fortunately, Lewin’s (1947a & b)
posthumous publications offer a much clearer and more elaborate explanation of
his theory of action. A summary follows:

Perception is linked with action in a cycle of acting then perceiving how the
situation was changed by the action, and each subsequent perception steers the
next action. If all relevant forces and properties of the individuals collectively
comprising a group’s life space or social field are mapped, then experimental
social psychological research can be undertaken to understand the forces and
their distribution within the social field. As Lewin was mapping out a Gestalt, he
expected a few factors to emerge that had greater motive influence than others.
He labeled these as a “phase space” and the set revealed potential leverage points
to which force could be applied to produce action. Likewise, certain members of
a larger community or organization hold key positions of influence relevant to
the desired change, thus the phase space for a group also includes people as
leverage points. Lewin adds a further wrinkle in that the social life of any
organized institution flows through certain channels in a fashion similar to the
communication and material network analyses of later years. Channels often
have feedback loops to regulate flows and ultimately, social action. The research
findings from the model are then fed back into the actual social field to advise
the change re-education effort, and a cycle of research and action continues to
untangle hidden causal relationships. However, the discovery of a phase space
only points to what and who needs to be targeted instead of how to accomplish
the change.

A force field is likely maintained by strong historical customs, social habits, or

group standards that cannot simply be overcome or broken with greater force. A
Gestalt topology allows the action researcher to experiment with rearranging
elements of the social field in an attempt to direct other present forces toward
unfreezing the custom. However, change often depends upon adjusting the
relations that produce the phenomenon of a group whole. Specifically, the forces
governing how an individual relates to the group are pitted against the group’s
current and altered future standards and values (i.e. valences). If the change can
be framed as a group decision tied to an individual’s continued belonging to the
whole, then the new standard is likely to have greater permanence. This process
suggests that the previously held custom became so difficult to unfreeze because
it had passed from individual choice into group norm. There is a shared social
field, perhaps unconsciously buried so deep that people are not aware of the
force it exerts on stability. When Lewin died, he was just beginning to focus on
the difficulty of unfreezing customs. A casualty of his early departure was that
the unfreeze-change-refreeze process became a trivial slogan and lost any
connection to the anthropological approach needed to understand the very
difficult process of actually changing a social custom.

Lewin’s theory of action assumes that autonomy would be exchanged for

homonomy and that higher authorities would be trusted to set objectives that are
unquestionably good, healthy, and necessary for social permanence.
Interestingly, these trusted higher authorities do not necessarily have to be part of
the community or organization subjected to the desired change action. Lewin’s
preference for retreats on cultural islands acknowledges that a small group of
change workshop participants is usually drawn from a larger community or
organization whose values, culture, and ideology may be at odds with the desired
change. The isolation of the workshop assists in the development of a temporary
subculture favorable for the change, but upon their return home, the mechanism
for change permanence depends upon individual acceptance and reflection on T-
group feedback and validation. Without further contact among workshop
participants, it would be problematic to sustain their psychological bonds with
the Gestalt of the temporary subculture.

Lewin hyphenated his action-research to show that the two were intimately
linked in an ongoing cycle of perception to learn from our actions whether or not
we are moving toward an externally fixed objective. Without an open systems
principle, Lewin needed that objective to have an external “otherness” that could
not be corrupted by the internal inter-dependency and congeniality of relations.
The Gestalt model of an individual, community, or organization is somewhat like
a closed system viewed from the inside. While contained with a self-awareness
of its wholeness, the group is socio-psychologically open to one another and
capable of complex action. “What is missing is a link which steers the action by
its effect on the outside rather than the effect within the organization” (Lewin,
1947: 150).

Bachelard (1994:11) said that the unconscious is naturally at home and happy
until it is reflexively dislodged into an active awareness of its own inner space.
Imagination works to call it to action, giving “an exterior destiny to the interior
being” to seek adventures in the movement between the real and symbolic
topology of roads and hills and fields. There is a comforting naturalness to the
movement between Gestalt in theory and action in the world, but the reflexive
unrest must forever expand the whole as the being awakens to the knowledge of
perpetual incompleteness. A Gestalt must therefore be dynamic, but the
prevalence of triangular wholes in Lewin’s conceptual models suggests that he
preferred a static minimum of elements for simplicity, and perhaps also in
keeping with German idealism.
Kurt Lewin’s action-research was aptly named to describe the study of the nature
of group life and the social steering mechanisms responsible for change. It was
experimental in the sense that conditions had to be sufficiently controlled and
documented to record a specific change and the causal factors responsible for the
change. Further, assessing planned action against actual results necessitated a
longitudinal time scale and detailed historical reporting on the life space of large
social bodies. Finally, action-research was a cooperative undertaking. “Research
in group dynamics is, as a rule, group research. It requires the cooperation of
persons who steer group life and who record and measure various aspects of
group life” (Lewin, 1947b: 153).

This expansive theory apparently underlies the oft-quoted “learning how an

organization works by trying to change it” approach. However, when research is
removed from the cycle, action is blind and consulting practice becomes
reckless. Lewin believed that the deficit of research made practitioners incapable
of distilling their practical experiences into a science. He had hoped that a
continuous program of interdisciplinary action-research would contribute to a
coherent body of general knowledge on group action and change, but he did not
live to see his plans come to fruition.

CONCLUSION

We began our search for Kurt Lewin’s action-research within an OD context and
therefore, it is fitting to conclude there as well. A different branch of OD grew at
NTL after the founders of the field departed. One recent offshoot of this later
branch showed interest in Gestalt psychology as a theoretical base to support a
“new” approach to OD as a possible alternative to the planned, expert-driven,
and top-down leader model of traditional OD (Chidiac, 2017). While Gestalt
psychology and phenomenological approaches have changed substantially since
the earliest ruminations of Carl Stumpf, Lewin’s mentor, it is ironic that recent
scholars exploring Gestalt in OD can now only speculate that Lewin’s ideas
resemble Gestalt psychology. Granted, he did have his own peculiar form of
Gestalt topological psychology, but the history of social science is a distant
foreign land to 21st century scholars.

Lobb (2017: 30) comes closest to understanding Lewin in her questions on the
nature of a field: “Due to its being a perceptual (not an objectivised) field, we are
left wondering whether the field only belongs to the individual who perceives it,
or whether it may instead be considered as a shared reality.” The life space did
indeed belong to an individual, but bringing a group together helped each
individual become aware of their perceptual field and how it interacted with
others beyond. Social change was meant to follow from the intersubjective
realization that many of the areas of their life spaces overlapped and that they
could form a cooperative community governed by common ideals. This idea of a
shared social field was one of the inspired directions separately pursued by
Tavistock socio-technical researchers in the socio-ecological open systems era.
In our version of reality, Sanford (1970: 7) suggests that despite the exuberance
in the late 1940s, Lewin’s action-research “never really got off the ground, it was
never widely influential in psychology or social science,” and formal policy
which determined funding for the social sciences insisted on separation of
research from practice. Although scholars have used of some aspects of his
research and have drawn inspiration from his example as a scholar-practitioner, it
appears that Lewin’s action-research did not survive his death.

In a parallel timeline, we can imagine that Lewin lived into old age and
continued his work to bring his primitive distant branch of Gestalt psychology
into a fully formed topological science. Although he was not an OD scholar in
any reality, perhaps the mass departure of the OD founders from NTL would
have opened a receptive space for him to contemplate organizational change, on
his terms. We can therefore imagine an alternate reality in which his action-
research might have slowly advanced to meet the new generation of Gestaltist
OD consultants in stride.
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