Introduction: Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Men and Women of the Corporation and The Change Masters

Abstract

These are the words that Rosabeth Moss Kanter uses in this Retrospective to describe her goal in 1977 for Men and Women of the Corporation. That book and The Change Masters, which followed in 1983, have indeed had a tremendous impact on academic research as well as on management practice and policymaking. They were among the first to focus on organizational culture as well as on empowerment, topics that have seen an explosion of research and application in the past two decades. Common themes are woven through the two books. Both are about organizations in a time of dramatic change from an industrial and manufacturing economy to an information and services one. Also, both books explore how the structures of organizations as well as their cultures and systems shape behavior and how they affect productivity and people's contributions in the workplace. Men and Women of the Corporation focused on how behavior is affected by the structure of opportunity, the structure of power to mobilize resources, and the proportional distribution of different kinds of people in various positions. Observing that these structural factors stifled the potential of so many people and left them virtually powerless to advance or fulfill their aspirations, Professor Kanter sought to learn how organizations could create cultures to empower people and make them more productive and innovative in products as well as work methods. She found such cultures primarily in new high-technology and informationsystems firms. In The Change Masters the features of these new organizational cultures were analyzed and compared to those in old-style industrial companies.