Abstract
At first glance, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s approach to change appears as eclectic, ranging from the study of utopian communities to corporations, non-profits, and governments to ecosystems. But look closer and there is a deeper coherence. Behind the witty turns of phrase, digestible frameworks, and punchy action lists lay theoretical subtlety and complexity. Kanter is a trained sociologist, who seeks to understand the structural determinants of individual behavior. She melds the sensibility of symbolic interactionism, and its emphasis on fieldwork, with attention to how structural relations, especially power, constitute social systems. Her mode and method are evident in her early work and, though later made less explicit, remain throughout. As such, she may be best understood, to borrow one of her phrases, as a kaleidoscopic thinker. She seeks to identify patterns and understand how people and elements relate, combine, and recombine in multiple ways and in multiple contexts to form new patterns. She then shares with leaders and citizens the emerging possibilities and suggests how to get there. Kanter thus does not study change for change’s sake – she links it to a utopian search for perfectibility.
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Further Reading
Rosabeth Moss Kanter has distilled her frameworks in books, articles, blogs, videos, and interviews. To understand her influential view of majority-minority relations within organizations, read Men and Women of the Corporation (1977a) and then watch the classic diversity training video The Tale of “O”: On Being Different. To delve deeper into her work on change, begin with The Change Masters (1983), considered one of the most influential business books in the twentieth century. To round out understanding of her core vision of corporate change, follow up with When Giants Learn to Dance (1989), Evolve! (2001), and Confidence (2006a). To explore her understanding of the relationship between business and society, read World Class (1995a) and SuperCorp (2009a), both of which develop her full vision of the twenty-first century global enterprise. Move (2015), on the other hand, is unique in that it offers a book-length focus on how to tackle a single social change issue. Finally, Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers of Management (1997) collects many of her classic Harvard Business Review articles. And if you want to understand the notion of perfectibility, return to where her system and vision began, Commitment and Community (1972).
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Bird, M. (2017). Rosabeth Moss Kanter: A Kaleidoscopic Vision of Change. In: Szabla, D.B., Pasmore, W.A., Barnes, M.A., Gipson, A.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52878-6_45
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