John Adair (author) at the University of Exeter from 1990 to 2000. He is currently an Emeritus Fellow of the Windsor Leadership Trust where he regularly speaks on Leadership development programmes. Since 2006, he has been Honorary Professor of Leadership at the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong. In 2009 he was appointed Chair of Leadership Studies United Nations System Staff College in Turin. He is President of Adair International. John Adair (author) Professor John Eric Adair (born 18 May 1934) is a British academic who is a leadership theorist and author of more than forty books (translated into eighteen languages) on business,
Kurt Lewin discipline from basic research on scholarly problems – thus creating this false binary regarding for whom knowledge is created, whether it was for the perpetuation of the discipline or for application. Despite this debate within the social sciences at the time, Lewin argued that "applied research could be conducted with rigor and that one could test theoretical propositions in applied research." The root of this particular binary seemed to stem from the epistemological norms present within the hard sciences – where the distinction was much more pronounced; Kurt Lewin argued that this was contrary to the nature of the social