The myth of Kurt Lewin and the rhetoric of collective memory in social psychology textbooks

This paper examines how social psychology textbooks represent Kurt Lewin and his contribution to social psychology. Many textbooks describe Lewin as the father of social psychology, using a conventional, passive voiced trope to do so. The rhetorical meaning of this trope is analysed to show that textbooks are invoking a collective memory, which closes down views of the past, rather than making a historical argument, which opens up the past for examination. This depiction of Lewin typically involves forgetting his critical views about statistics and experimentation. When textbooks cite Lewin’s famous motto “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”, they tend to ascribe it a special status. In doing so, they change its meaning subtly and treat it as a truth that needs no empirical validation. By their rhetoric, omissions and avoidance of historical sources, textbooks recreate Lewin as a mythic figure rather than a historical one

Big words in small circles: bad writing in the social sciences

Big words in small circles: bad writing in the social science

John Shotter, uniqueness and poetics: parallels with Ernst Cassirer

John Shotter, uniqueness and poetics: parallels with Ernst Cassire

Kurt Lewin’s leadership studies and his legacy to social psychology: is there nothing as practical as a good theory?

This paper re-examines Kurt Lewin's classic leadership studies, using them as a concrete example to explore his wider legacy to social psychology. Lewin distinguished between advanced “Galileian” science, which was based on analysing particular examples, and backward “Aristotelian” science, which used statistical analyses. Close examination of the way Lewin wrote about the leadership studies reveals that he used the sort of binary, value-laden concepts that he criticised as “Aristotelian”. Such concepts, especially those of “democracy” and “autocracy”, affected the way that he analysed the results and the ways that later social scientists have understood, and misunderstood, the studies. It is argued that Lewin's famous motto—“there is nothing as practical as a good theory”—is too simple to fit the tensions between the leadership studies and his own views of what counts as good theory

Learn to write badly: how to succeed in the social sciences

Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use - 'reification' or 'nominalization' rather than the corresponding verbs 'reify' or 'nominalize'. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work

Positive psychology: humour and the virtues of negative thinking

Positive psychology: humour and the virtues of negative thinkin

The language of critical discourse analysis: the case of nominalization

This article examines the way that critical discourse is written. It does so by considering the concept of nominalization. Critical discourse analysts have suggested that nominalization (along with passivization) has important ideological functions such as deleting agency and reifying processes. However, the language used by critical analysts, as they explore nominalization, is revealing. They tend to use, and thereby instantiate, the very forms of language whose ideological potentiality they are warning against – such as deleting agency, using passives and turning processes into entities. The concept of ‘nominalization’ is itself a nominalization; it is typically used in imprecise ways that fail to specify underlying processes. If critical analysts take seriously their own ideological warnings about nominalization and passivization, they need to change the standard ways of writing critical analysis. We need to use simpler, less technical prose that clearly ascribes actions to human agents

How to be inspired by John Shotter

How to be inspired by John Shotte

The politics and rhetoric of commemoration: how the Portuguese parliament celebrates the 1974 revolution

In recent years there has been much interest in collective memory and commemoration. It is often assumed that when nations celebrate a historic day, they put aside the divisions of the present to recall the past in a spirit of unity. As Billig and Marinho show, this does not apply to the Portuguese parliament's annual celebration of 25 April 1974, the day when the dictatorship, established by Salazar and continued by Caetano, was finally overthrown. Most speakers at the ceremony say little about the actual events of the day itself; and in their speeches they continue with the partisan politics of the present as combatively as ever. To understand this, the authors examine in detail how the members of parliament do politics within the ceremony of remembrance; how they engage in remembering and forgetting the great day; how they use the low rhetoric of manipulation and point-scoring, as well as high-minded political rhetoric. The book stresses that the members of the audience contribute to the meaning of the ceremony by their partisan displays of approval and disapproval. Throughout, the authors demonstrate that, to uncover the deeper meanings of political rhetoric, it is necessary to take note of significant absences. The Politics and Rhetoric of Commemoration illustrates how an in-depth case-study can be invaluable for understanding wider processes. The authors are not content just to uncover unnoticed features of the Portuguese celebration. They use the particular example to provide original insights about the rhetoric of celebrating and the politics of remembering, as well as throwing new light onto the nature of party political discourse

Political rhetoric

The topic of political rhetoric concerns the strategies used to construct persuasive arguments in formal public debates and in everyday political disputes. The study of political rhetoric therefore touches upon the fundamental activities of democratic politics. As Kane and Patapan (2010, p. 372) observed, “because public discussion and debate are essential in a democracy, and because leaders are obliged to rule the sovereign people by means of constant persuasion, rhetoric is absolutely central”. Going further, Dryzek (2010) noted that rhetoric is also central to grass-roots political action: “Rhetoric facilitates the making and hearing of representation claims spanning subjects and audiences … democracy requires a deliberative system with multiple components whose linkage often needs rhetoric” (p. 319-339)1. Since the previous edition of the Handbook in 2003, academic writing on political rhetoric has greatly increased in volume and diversified in perspective. This work now spans a range of disciplines, including linguistics, political theory, international relations, communication studies and psychology. At the time of writing, there existed no integrative accounts of this body of literature. The task of summarizing the field is complicated by the fact that dialogue between academics working in different disciplinary contexts is often limited. In addition, the topic of political rhetoric is not always clearly demarcated from cognate constructs including political narrative (Hammack & Pilecki, 2012), framing (Chong, this volume), communication (Valentino & Nardis, this volume), conversation (cf. Remer, 1999), discourse (e.g. Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012), or deliberation (see Myers & Mendelberg, this volume)... (continues)