“One test of good theory is that it have practical implications.”

—  Charles Perrow

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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One test of good theory is that it have practical implications." by Charles Perrow?
Charles Perrow photo
Charles Perrow71
American sociologist 1925–2019

Related quotes

George E. P. Box photo

“For the theory-practice iteration to work, the scientist must be, as it were, mentally ambidextrous; fascinated equally on the one hand by possible meanings, theories, and tentative models to be induced from data and the practical reality of the real world, and on the other with the factual implications deducible from tentative theories, models and hypotheses.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Science and Statistics (1976), p. 792

Anthony de Mello photo

“A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Cultivation
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

Mao Zedong photo

“If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)

Kenneth N. Waltz photo

“The implication of game theory, which is also the implication of the third image, is, however, that the freedom of choice of any one state is limited by the actions of the others.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VII, Some Implications Of The Third Image, p. 204

Rollo May photo

“The practical implication is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 235

Karl Popper photo

“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

As quoted in My Universe : A Transcendent Reality (2011) by Alex Vary, Part II

“There is as yet no unified theory of retrieval systems, and a good deal of retrieval practice is still an empirical art, unsullied by theory.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Preface (1961) p. vi; Partly cited by Stephen E. Robertson (2011) &quot; On retrieval system theory http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/robertson.pdf&quot;. <br class="br">On Retrieval System Theory (1961)

Kurt Lewin photo

“A business man once stated that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

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

Stephen Hawking photo

“The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

The Beginning of Time (1996)

Yogi Berra photo

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”

Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach

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

Related topics