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One of the major challenges facing APCS in its efforts to promote work that will help solve social problems is to find the most effective ways, both organizationally and intellectually, of integrating theory with social practice. Theorists are often tempted to pursue their theoretical truths, elaborate them, and promulgate them as ends in themselves, viewing practitioners who do not share their theoretical insights or devotion as misguided, naive, or hopelessly benighted. Practitioners, on the other hand, often get so caught up in the pragmatic demands and concrete details of their practice and its empirical realities that they view theoretical reflection as an academic luxury that serves only to advance the theorists' careers, gratify their narcissism, or defend them against the frustrating, painful, and even heartbreaking realities that the practitioners have to deal with on a daily basis.
It is important for both groups to recognize that if there is a certain truth to both views, there is also a certain amount of illusion, which functions to protect fragile egos against narcissistic injury by inflating the importance of the activity of one's own group relative to that of the other group. If theorists forget that their insights are only as valuable as the differences they make possible in other people's lives, and if practitioners forget that blind practice, without the insights of theory, can be ineffective and even counterproductive, then all of us—theorists, practitioners, and everyone else—will be the worse for it.
The need for us in APCS to recognize the mutual necessity of theory and practice is, as I suggested in my introduction to the first issue of this journal, fundamental and continuous. But it is particularly important to recall this mutual need now, at a time when a prominent theorist and his associates have issued a public statement of resignation from APCS in apparent frustration with the social-practice element