The Pfeiffer Library Volume 16, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer
50 ❘❚
Table 1. From K.D. Benne, 1976
4
The Cognitive World of Behavioral
Scientists
The Cognitive World of Social Practitioners
and Action Leaders
1. People and human systems are not of interest as
particular cases but as instances to confirm or
disconfirm generalizations about people and human
systems. Knowledge is organized around verbally
(and/or mathematically) articulated generalizations.
1. People and human systems are clients or
constituents. The concern is with particular cases,
situations, and practical difficulties in order to help,
improve, or change these. Knowledge is organized
around kinds of cases, situations, and difficulties and
effective ways of diagnosing and handling them.
2. The occasion for inquiry is some gap or discrepancy
in a theory or conceptual scheme. “Success” in
inquiry is measured by attainment of more
warrantable statements of variable relationships that
fill the gap and/or obviate the discrepancy.
2. The occasion for inquiry is some difficulty in practice,
some discrepancy between intended results and the
observed consequences of actions or excessive
psychic and/or financial costs of established ways of
working. “Success” in inquiry is measured by
attainment of ways of making and/or doing that are
more effective in fitting means to ends and/or in
reducing costs of operation.
3. Scientists try in the course of their research to reduce
or eliminate the influence of extraneous values (other
than “truth” value) from the processes of collecting
data and determining and stating the meaning of the
data within the research context. Knowledge is
relatively independent of the uses to which it may be
put.
3. Practitioners and action leaders try to find and
interpret data that enable them to serve the values to
which they are committed: productivity, health,
learning (growth), and—in more political contexts—
the power, freedom, and welfare of their clients or
constituents. Knowledge is consciously related to
specific uses.
4. Scientists set up their research to reduce the number
of variables at work in the situations they study, by
controlling the effect of other variables. Experimental
results take the form of statements about the
relationships of abstracted and quantified variables.
4. Practitioners and action leaders work in field settings
where multiple and interacting variables are at work.
Their understanding of situations tends to be holistic
and qualitative, though they may use quantitative
methods in arriving at their “estimate of the situation.”
They do not attend to all the variables involved in the
full understanding of a situation but rather to variables
that are thought to be influential and accessible to
their manipulation in handling the situation in the
service of their chosen values.
5. Time, in the form of pressing decisions, does not
influence their judgments and choices directly. They
can reserve judgment, waiting for the accumulated
weight of evidence. A longer time perspective
operates in their judgments of what needs to be done
now and later. Their statements of what they know
are more qualified, less impregnated with their own
hunches and insights as to what incomplete evidence
means for purposes of action.
5. Time presses practitioners to decide and act;
judgments cannot wait. They must judge in order to
meet deadlines, whether the evidential basis for
judgment is “complete” or not. They must depend on
their own hunches and insights in attributing meaning
to incomplete or contradictory evidence, so their
knowledge is impregnated with these hunches and
values. It is more personal, more dependent on their
ability to read a situation than the more impersonal
knowledge that the scientist professes and
communicates.
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From K.D. Benne, “Educational Field Experience as the Negotiation of Different Cognitive Worlds.” In W. Bennis, K.D. Benne, R.
Chin & K. Corey, The Planning of Change (3rd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. Used by permission of Holt, Rinehart and
Winston (CBS).