“One test of good theory is that it have practical implications.”
Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. vii
Context: It is surprising how much discipline is imposed upon theory by requiring that it ‘make a difference’ and provide guidance or useful illumination. I learned long ago from students in professional schools that questions of ‘so what’ or ‘what relevance does this have’ do not signify impatience with theory per se, much less anti-intellectualism, but only impatience with the obvious, general, remote, and vague statements that often parade as social science theory. One test of good theory is that it have practical implications.
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Charles Perrow 71
American sociologist 1925–2019Related quotes
“A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.”
Cultivation
One Minute Wisdom (1989)
On Practice (1937)
Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VII, Some Implications Of The Third Image, p. 204
“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.”
As quoted in My Universe : A Transcendent Reality (2011) by Alex Vary, Part II
Preface (1961) p. vi; Partly cited by Stephen E. Robertson (2011) " On retrieval system theory http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/robertson.pdf".
On Retrieval System Theory (1961)
“A business man once stated that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.”
Lewin (1943, 118), as cited in Karl E. Weick, "Theory and practice in the real world." in: The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory, Tsoukas et al. (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 460; Also in Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers (D. Cartwright, Ed.). New York, NY: Harper & Row
1940s
The Beginning of Time (1996)
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”
Attributed in Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile - Things that Gain From Disorder (2012), p. 213.
The earliest known appearance of this quote in print is Walter J. Savitch, Pascal: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming (1984), where it is attributed as a "remark overheard at a computer science conference". It circulated as an anonymous saying for more than ten years before attributions to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut and Yogi Berra began to appear (and later still to various others).
Disputed, Misattributed