Kenneth J. Gergen (born 1935) is an American social psychologist and emeritus professor at Swarthmore College.
In an attempt to link his academic work to societal practices, he collaborated with colleagues to create the Taos Institute in 1993.
They publish the Positive Aging Newsletter with a readership of around 20,000[1] Gergen's earliest studies challenged the presumption of a unified or coherent self.
[clarification needed] He then raised questions about the value of altruism, by exploring the ways in which helping others leads to the recipient's resentment and alienation.
Yet, because patterns of human action undergo continuous change, support for any principle may wax or wane over time.
He argued therefore that social psychology was not fundamentally a cumulative science, but was effectively engaged in the recording and transformation of cultural life.
Here he proposed that, because theoretical suppositions were not so much recordings of social life as creators, theories should not be judged so much by their integration of "what is" as their potential to open new spaces of action.
This view was proposed as a successor project to what Gergen considered an inherently flawed positivist conception of knowledge.
This latter conclusion informed most of Gergen's subsequent work, in areas including therapy and counseling, education, organizational change, technology, conflict reduction, civil society, and qualitative inquiry.
[3] Most of these developments are summarized in Relational Being, Beyond the Individual and Community, which attempts to demonstrate that what are considered mental processes are not so much "in the head" as in relationships.