French, John R. P., Jr. (1913–1995)

John R. P. French Jr. was a pioneer in the application of the field theory of Kurt Lewin to industrial and organizational settings, particularly in going beyond descriptive analysis to controlled experiments in field settings. French's name is associated particularly with the social psychological theory and research on the bases of social power and on the effects of the social environment on health.

As a doctoral student at Harvard just before World War II, French was part of a remarkable cohort of graduate students, including Dorwin Cartwright and Jerome Bruner, who later became [Page 266]leaders in the exciting development of social psychology. Cartwright and French were especially impressed with Lewin, who was a visiting professor at Harvard. From Harvard, French accepted a position with Harwood Manufacturing Company, headed by Alfred Marrow, who had been greatly influenced by Lewin. There, French and Lester Coch, a personnel manager, carried out a classic study of the effectiveness of worker participation and group decision in implementing change in production while maintaining and even increasing productivity. Following research by Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White that highlighted the problems of authoritarian leadership, French demonstrated the use of role playing and other devices in retraining an autocratic leader. During World War II, with a desperate labor shortage, manufacturers looked to older people and women to help fill the gap. In doing so, they had to deal with negative stereotypes that were resistant to change, particularly by supervisors. French again demonstrated the effectiveness of implementing change through the involvement of supervisors and managers in the education and change program.

When Lewin established the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, French immediately joined the staff as one of the program directors, along with Cartwright, Lippitt, and Leon Festinger. After Lewin's untimely death in 1947, RCGD moved intact to the University of Michigan, where a particularly productive period of theory and research continued. Among their many projects, Cartwright, as director of RCGD, led the center to focus its attention on social power. French and Bertram Raven, then a graduate student, worked together to develop a widely cited theory and research program on the bases of social power (see Social Power). After several successful years of collaboration in this area, French left it to Raven and others to continue with that analysis, while he began to concentrate on a program that examined the relationship between psychosocial environment and health. A most important product of that program was a set of concepts, measures, and hypotheses called the person-environment fit theory.