Personal and intellectual influences leading to Lewin’s paradigm of action research

Abstract

The idea of action research and social change was the last conceptual topic to engage Kurt Lewin’s attention and energy prior to his untimely death in February 1947. In this article we commemorate the 60th anniversary of his 1946 paper ‘Action research and minority problems’. In the present article, eight principles of action research which were extracted from Lewin’s writings are presented and discussed. We attempt to show that the action research paradigm derived from four aspects of Lewin’s personal and intellectual background: his personal history as a Jew and an immigrant to America; his field theory and its meta-theoretical principles; a deep commitment to the idea of democracy; and his theory of social change.