It is still a good question. I think the best way to answer it is to decide how do we measure the practicality of a theory?
Season 1, Episode 6
Kurt Lewin famously said “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” In the past two decades, this quote has been cited hundreds if not thousands of times in the literature, but in recent years there has been renewed attention to the problems of a theory-practice gap and how to resolve it. Yet since 2000 there has been a lot of attention paid to closing the ‘gap’ between theory and practice to limited avail? So was Lewin right, or is something else wrong?
In this talk, I argue the latter — mainly that we are being misled by the very metaphors we use to describe the differences between theory and practice. I offer a different metaphor from the ‘gap.’ This alternative metaphor — that of the ‘rheostat’ — suggests some theories are simply not meant to be practical, but they are still good theories. Meanwhile, the inverse is also true in that certain matters of practice have little business being theorized. Below is a graphic, referenced in the episode, that shows how the rheostat metaphor works.
Works Referenced:
Bansal, P., Bertels, S., Ewart, T., MacConnachie, P., & O’Brien, J. (2012). Bridging the research–practice gap. Academy of Management Symposium Paper.
Bartunek, J. M. (2007). Academic-practitioner collaboration need not require joint or relevant research: Toward a relational scholarship of integration. Academy of Management Journal, 50(6), 1323-1333.
Crozier, D. (2015, October 13). Perkins provides Class 66 clarity on the future Army. The NCO Leadership Center of Excellence. Note: This is an example of former Army General David Perkins’ use of accuracy vs. clarity referenced in the episode (I used the term ‘precision’)
Schön, D. A. (1995). Knowing-in-action: The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27(6), 27-34.
Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Van de Ven, A. H., & Johnson, P. E. (2006). Knowledge for theory and practice. Academy of management review, 31(4), 802-821.
From the Talking About Organizations Network:
TAOP Episode 41, “Images of Organization – Gareth Morgan,” covering Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization, Updated Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
