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But let us not forget John Collier

Commentary on David Bargal’s ‘Personal and intellectual influences leading to Lewin’s paradigm on action research’

Case Western Reserve University, USA

We propose that John Collier was integrally involved in the development of action research and deserves to be recognized as a cofounder of the field. We offer a brief biography of Collier, review the roots of his approach to action research, and then compare Lewin’s principles of action research as articulated by Bargal with excerpts from an article Collier wrote in 1945, a year before Lewin’s first writing on the subject. We conclude with a discussion of why Lewin did not give Collier more credit, even though the two were close friends. We hypothesize that Lewin’s version of action research was more science oriented, while Collier’s was more exclusively focused on democratic collaboration in the treatment of important social issues.

Key Words: action research • John Collier • Kurt Lewin • democratic collaboration

Action Research, Vol. 4, No. 4, 389-399 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1476750306070102


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