Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory: a review and Re-evaluation

Lewinian topology: the Achilles’ heel of field theory

After his death in 1947, Lewin’s work on group dynamics, action research and his three-step model of change was taken up by other scholars and became the basis of OD (Burnes and Cooke 2012). However, his work on field theory went into decline (Back 1992; Deutsch 1968; Gold 1992; Wheeler 2008). This seems somewhat paradoxical, given that Lewin saw field theory as central to all his work and as the first stage or foundation of his Planned approach to

change (Burnes 2004a; M. Lewin 1998). For Lewin, the purpose of field theory was twofold. First, the construction of individual and group force fields allowed him to understand the forces that brought about certain behaviours. Second, it opened up the possibility that, by changing some of these forces, individual and group behaviour could be changed. However, in order to do this, he believed it was nec- essary to measure the strength of the psychological forces within a field and to be able to calculate the effect that changing the strength of one or more forces would have on the rest of the field (Kadar and Shaw 2000).
As his daughter explained, being able to establish the strengths of the forces that bring about or restrain movement, i.e. behavioural change, was central to his concept of field theory:

The most important dynamic concept in Lewinian theory was that of driving and restraining forces, which are the result of positive and negative valences [strength] of goals. With respect to any given goal, these forces have direction, distance, strength and point of application: the person. The person’s reaction to these forces is physical or psy- chological movement towards or away from a valenced region – an effect that Lewin called loco- motion. (M. Lewin 1998, p. 106)

As already observed, Lewin’s problem with topology was that it is useful for constructing static models, but he did not consider it suitable for constructing dynamic models. This is why he developed Lewinian topology, based on his own mathematical formulae borrowed from physics. This can be seen in many of Lewin’s articles and books (see for example the collection of his papers on Field Theory in Social Science edited by Cartwright (1952a)). Unfortu- nately, wherever Lewin replaces the elegance of his gestalt-based field theory and his topological life spaces with his own tortuous mathematical notation, his arguments become hard to follow. Indeed, some of Lewin’s closest supporters appeared unconvinced by his application of Lewinian topology to field theory (Marrow 1969). This was particularly the case with Dorwin Cartwright and Leon Festinger, who tried to convince Lewin to replace his own math- ematical system with more conventional statistical methods (Cartwright and Festinger 1943; Festinger 1949). Even his patron and biographer, Alfred Marrow (1969, p. 116), was moved to comment that Lewin’s writings on topology were ‘difficult reading’ and that ‘few psychologists were willing to devote

the time to the careful study of his complex system of concepts’. However, as Back (1992) notes, Lewin rejected any suggestion for modifying his approach, and so Lewinian topology and field theory remained inextricably linked.
Thus, Lewin’s commitment to topology became the Achilles’ heel of field theory. This is a point made forcibly by Rummel (1975, pp. 40–41) who praised field theory, but maintained that: ‘Lewin strode a gigantic misstep in formalizing his system in ugly topological pseudopods [hodological spaces]. He placed the theoretical emphasis on his topology – and not his conceptions, and his tool was inadequate to its task.’
The irony of this is that, in terms of rigour, Lewin believed that psychological theories must be based on mathematics if psychology was to be recognized a true science. Yet it was his pursuit of mathematics – and therefore of the apparent rigour so afforded – which jeopardized his theory (Lewin and Lorsch 1939). Even before his death, when he was in a position to mount a defence, Lewin’s topological approach was subject to severe criticism. Garrett (1939, p. 517) commented that: ‘Lewin contends that it [Lewinian topology] provides the basis for a truly scientific psychology. But many feel that it is merely a novel but cumbersome way of picturing simple psychological situations.’
London (1944, p. 289) went further, arguing that not only was it ‘impossible’ to use [Lewinian] topol- ogy as a method of mapping out the life space of human beings, but ‘that in any case, Lewin’s topol- ogy is not the topology of mathematics’. In effect, London is saying Lewinian topology cannot be used in the way that Lewin sought to use it.
If the rejection of Lewinian topology by mathema- ticians raised serious questions concerning its rigour, the difficulty even his colleagues had in understand- ing and applying it raised similarly serious questions concerning its relevance. The tragedy is that, where Lewin and his colleagues used field theory without drawing on Lewinian topology, the results were groundbreaking: see, for example, the autocracy– democracy studies with Lippitt and White (Lippitt 1939) and the Harwood studies with Bavelas and French (Burnes 2007).
As Deutsch (1968) and Martin (2003) both observed, the mathematical dimension of Lewin’s field theory was not well developed; in essence, it was a work in progress, which even he, with his pragmatic and ‘make do’ approach to methodology, did not always use. Unfortunately, Lewin’s early

death ended any progress that might have been made. Afterwards, few had the knowledge or motivation to defend or use Lewinian topology, and its rejection led inexorably to the decline in interest in field theory as a means of bringing about organizational change. Consequently, despite its undoubted value as a vehicle for understanding and changing individual and group behaviour, by the 1980s, it was largely ignored or misunderstood in the organizational arena (Danziger 1992, 2000; Gold 1992). Ironically, this was not the case in other areas of psychology. Lewin’s field theory, without the hodological math- ematics, influenced the work of a number of promi- nent psychologists, such as the neo-behaviorism of Clark L Hull, the ecological psychology of James Gibson (Kadar and Shaw 2000) and the child psy- chology of Jack Block (Block et al. 1981).