Academy of Management Executive, 2004, Vol. 18, No.
.....................................................................................................................................................................
Men and Women of the
Corporation and The Change
Masters: Practical theories for
changing times
Commentary by Herminia Ibarra
Social psychologist Kurt Lewin once said there is
nothing so practical as a good theory. Rosabeth
Moss Kanter's two books Men and Women of the
Corporation and The Change Masters are classics
that continue to shape the thinking and research of
organizational scholars today precisely because
they have given us practical theories: theories we
can apply, use, build on, and adapt in an ever-
changing world, a world that is at the same time so
similar to, yet so different from, the world we knew
when Men and Women was first published.
Rather than attempt a thorough listing of Rosa-
beth Moss Kanter's contributions to scholarly re-
search, I will focus my commentary on two key
streams of organizational thought molded by Men
and Women of the Corporation and The Change
Masters, diversity and innovation, areas that today
are still at the top of the list of young scholars'
research agendas as well as those of more estab-
lished scholars. Also top priorities for educators,
managers, elected officials and the many others
concerned with making work organizations better
places, our understanding of diversity and innova-
tion owes a great debt to the pioneering work of
Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
Diversity: Minorities and Majorities
It is impossible to consider the status and experi-
ence of women in organizations today without ref-
erence to Men and Women of the Corporation. The
same can be said of investigations of the work-
place integration and mobility of a broad range of
diverse groups. Men and Women of the Corpora-
tion developed a theory about who gets ahead and
who doesn't, who gets heard and who doesn't, and
who has freedom of action and who doesn't. The
theory has been validated in myriad studies since
108
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and continues to guide both new empirical re-
search and theoretical developments.
It is impossible to consider the status and
experience of women in organizations
today without reference to Men and
Women of the Corporation.
Perhaps more importantly, Men and Women of
the Corporation framed the terms of a debate that
is still with us today, a debate about how gender,
or any other demographic characteristics for that
matter, shapes a person's experience at work and
structures the distribution of roles in organizations
and society. The insights garnered from Rosabeth
Moss Kanter's structural theory have been applied
in more recent years to a broader array of work on
the effects of race, ethnicity, and national culture
on life in organizations. As I will argue below, the
impact of Men and Women of the Corporation lies
not just in helping us understand the power of
numbers but also in giving us a framework that
enhances our understanding of leadership, human
resources, negotiations, organizational change,
and so many other fundamental topics in organ-
izational research.
At the heart of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's theory
are the notions of opportunity, power, and num-
bers. She argued that these three variables-in-
stead of the actual demographic characteristics
with which they are so often strongly correlated-
shape people's workplace experiences by affecting
their behavior, the nature of their interpersonal
interactions and, therefore, the formal and infor-
mal roles they play in organizations. Opportunity
is the likelihood that a person will get ahead.
 2004 Ibarra
Power is the potential for impact that derives from
a person's involvement in key activities and alli-
ances: the extent to which we work in areas of
strategic importance for our organizations and can
rely on information networks and cooperative ties.
And numbers refers to the relative quantities of
socially different people in any given setting. In
most work organizations, access to power and op-
portunity is differentially allocated to men and
women, racial majorities and minorities. The small
numbers of the latter, in turn, produce interaction
and perceptual dynamics that justify their contin-
ued exclusion. Because these processes are rooted
in unconscious cognitive processes, informal net-
works, and habitual routines, they are self-perpet-
uating, thus making systemic change both difficult
and necessary.
The theoretical contribution lies in the statement
that the effects of gender (or any other social char-
acteristic) must be understood from a social struc-
tural perspective, one that underscores the em-
beddedness of interpersonal interaction within
structural contexts that govern the nature and ease
of those interactions. Men and Women of the Cor-
poration departed from a strictly structural ap-
proach, in which men and women are viewed as
entering the occupational world with different
schooling, credentials, or human capital, and, as a
result, are distributed unequally, in different jobs,
hierarchical levels, occupations, firms, and even
industries. Remaining deeply structural in her
analysis, Rosabeth Moss Kanter reframed the
questions of the day, explaining why behavior that
conforms to gender stereotypes persists and is
even rewarded. By showing the powerful effects of
numerical distributions on perceptions and inter-
action patterns, she influenced a generation of re-
searchers concerned with how and why people
who begin their careers with similar human capi-
tal might still, over time, end up in very different
power positions.
Men and Women of the Corporation also took a
radically different view from prevailing psycholog-
ical theories which argued that men and women
approached the workplace with different objec-
tives and interaction styles, without exploring how
context might affect the observed objectives and
styles. If something was holding women back,
these theories suggested, it was intrinsic gender
differences, born of natural dispositions that pre-
disposed women to lack aggressiveness, disdain
competition, and favor relationships over task con-
cerns. Men and Women of the Corporation framed
this still-ongoing debate between sociological and
psychological research traditions and inspired a
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109
wealth of research that continues to support the
validity of a social structural perspective.
Today, the wealth of the evidence suggests that
Rosabeth Moss Kanter was right: Structural factors
including opportunity, power, and numbers ac-
count for most of the differences observed in men
and women's interaction patterns and mobility
outcomes.' So, our research attention has turned to
other questions, questions that continue to benefit
from the Kanterian approach. For example, organ-
izational demography, one of the most important
strands of organizational research and theorizing
of the 1980s, was clearly a product of the ideas
developed in Men and Women of the Corporation
and continues to be a topic of burgeoning research
attention. While pioneering scholars focused on
the direct relationship between demographic vari-
ables and organizational or individual outcomes,2
more recent statements call for specifying and in-
vestigating the intervening social processes by
which demography affects a range of organiza-
tional phenomena, from team dynamics to social
networks to the formation of professional identity.
Today, the wealth of the evidence
suggests that Rosabeth Moss Kanter was
right: Structural factors including
opportunity, power, and numbers account
for most of the differences observed in
men and women's interaction patterns
and mobility outcomes.
One of these intervening variables, social net-
works, became one of the most significant organ-
izational research streams of the 1990s.3 As schol-
ars became more interested in the problem of
women and other numerical minorities gaining en-
try into informal networks, it became apparent that
our theories of networks within and across organi-
zations did not sufficiently take into account the
numbers-the distribution of different types of peo-
ple, for example men and women, across levels,
functions, and groups. Understanding how net-
works affected individual effectiveness and career
advancement meant first asking how demography
affected opportunities, choices, and trade-offs in
building networks.4 The ideas and studies that
stemmed from Men and Women of the Corporation
contributed to the development of a contingent
view of social capital: the notion that minority
group members must build different types of net-
works to achieve the same career outcomes that
those in the majority achieve.5
Social identity is another mechanism that impor-
 110 Academy of Management
tantly mediates the effects of demography on indi-
vidual and organizational outcomes. Also in-
formed by the legacy of Men and Women of the
Corporation, social identity is an area of empirical
study and theorizing that is significantly shaping
our research agendas for the 2000s.6 The argument
is that people's conceptions of themselves-their
identities-have an important influence on their
behavior and interactions with others. Identities
are both social (i.e., shaped by opportunity, power,
and numbers), and individual, and therefore nego-
tiable and negotiated. Identities encompass what
is unique and distinctive, as well as what classi-
fies us as part of multiple social groups. Social
identity theory, therefore, is used to predict when
and how different dimensions of similarity and
difference are activated to shape behavior.7 Self-
conceptions affect not only what specific social
interactions people seek out but, just as important,
how they define the boundaries within which they
construct their networks and careers.
What is Kanter's relevance today, when the par-
ticipation of women in the workforce, particularly
in management positions, has changed so dramat-
ically over the last few decades? Work careers and
the organizations in which they unfold have
changed virtually beyond recognition since the
days of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Men and
Women of the Corporation. But, by any measure,
power and opportunity remain far from being
equally or equitably distributed in the corporate
world. We have widened the scope of the majori-
ties and minorities we study, and we have become
more sophisticated in exploring the motors of in-
equality. Yet we still fuel our theories with the
same dynamics: power, opportunity, and numbers.
Innovation: Roles and Resources
The conceptual bridge from Men and Women of the
Corporation to The Change Masters rests on the
importance of roles and the primacy of power in
explaining the success or failure of organized ac-
tion. Just as people in the numerical minority face
pressures to assume stereotypic informal roles that
do not correspond to work-role requirements in
skewed demographic contexts, would-be change
agents in segmentalist, rather than integrative,
organizational environments face turf-protecting
power games that impede them from playing the
boundary-spanning roles that are indispensable
for innovation. Again the explanation is social-
structural: people do not inherently resist or em-
brace change; rather, key innovation ingredients,
notably roles and resources, are present in differ-
ent measure in different organizationatl contexts.
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Executive May
The degree to which the opportunity to use power
effectively is granted to, or withheld from, individ-
uals is one operative difference between those
companies that stagnate and those that innovate.
The underlying premise of The Change Masters is
that innovating is political behavior and that power,
defined as the ability to get things done, determines
the roles people play in bringing new ideas into use.
From creativity research we knew that innovation
happens when people and organizations combine
ideas from unconnected sources. From research on
the diffusion of innovation, we also knew that people
in key roles fuel every innovation process: without
idea champions, early adopters, opinion leaders,
and so forth, ideas do not travel. Rosabeth Moss
Kanter innovated by putting these two research tra-
ditions together to explain successes and failures of
change and, in particular, the astounding lack of
innovation that caused the downfall of many an
American firm in the 1980s (and beyond).
The underlying premise of The Change
Masters is that innovating is political
behavior and that power, defined as the
ability to get things done, determines the
roles people play in bringing new ideas
into use.
The Change Masters argues that three sets of
skills or tools are required to manage effectively in
these "integrative," innovative organizations. First,
power skills include the ability to persuade others to
invest information (data, technical knowledge, re-
sources intelligence), political support (endorsement,
backing, approval, legitimacy), and resources (funds,
materials, space, time) in new initiatives. Second,
team-management skills involve mastering the use
of participation, including how to design and reward
teamwork. Third, change-agent skills imply under-
standing how innovations unfold from problem def-
inition, to coalition building, on to mobilization, in
order to design and implement change effectively. At
each stage, different roles and constituencies are
key: without idea champions, cheerleaders, allies,
and sponsors, even the best ideas founder. Ulti-
mately, change agents must also understand how
local or subunit change initiatives connect to orga-
nizational strategies and top-management direc-
tives, and are, therefore, better able to persuade oth-
ers to help their efforts (power skills) and energize
their teams (team management skills).
The theoretical and practical power of The
Change Masters lies in combining ideas about
power dynamics in organizations, developed in
 2004 Ibarra
Men and Women of the Corporation and else-
where, and combining these with current knowl-
edge on the invention, diffusion, and adoption of
novel ideas to identify the conditions under which
organizational innovation flourishes or withers. By
focusing attention on whether an organization's
formal hierarchy fully defines the allocation of
power tools or whether they can instead be
amassed through informal channels, The Change
Masters paved the way for an important wave of
research on social networks in organizations.8
Much of the impact of The Change Masters lies
as well in nudging our field to better bridge theory
and practice. Despite a wealth of knowledge about
innovation processes, organizational scholars were
at a loss in helping troubled organizations improve
their chances of survival. Rosabeth Moss Kanter
aimed to provide a model for ways in which innova-
tion could be stimulated, thereby encouraging entre-
preneurial behavior and employee involvement as
ways of leading productive change. The Change
Masters taught us how to understand social systems
so that we may better change them.
Guides for Research in Changing Times
Together, Men and Women of the Corporation and
The Change Masters contribute to the field of organ-
izational studies in at least two major ways. First,
they paved the way for a vastly improved under-
standing of gender dynamics (and diversity, more
generally) and innovation processes in organiza-
tions. Second, they illuminate the mechanisms-
information transfer, social influence, cognitive
biases, and power-by which the interaction dy-
namics of people and groups produce the organ-
izational and societal outcomes we care most
about: mobility, diversity, entrepreneurship, inno-
vation, and organizational change.
The last decades have witnessed unprecedented
turbulence in the world of business and organiza-
tion, and in their relationship to society. Many giv-
ens have been challenged and traditions uprooted.
Competition became globalized, heralding changes
in the employee contract. Technological advances
created both a need for, and the possibility of, new
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ill
ways of working and organizing. Organizations and
careers became boundaryless. In such a world, peo-
ple and organizations alike face a constant need for
innovation, even reinvention. Rosabeth Moss Kant-
er's practical theories have been, and continue to be,
guides for conducting useful research, providing a
fresh, invigorating-even hopeful-perspective on
the myriad possibilities of our changing times.
Endnotes
'For reviews see Baron, J., & Pfeffer, J. 1994. The social psy-
chology of organizations and inequality. Social Psychology
Quarterly, 57: 190-209; and Ibarra, H. 1993. Personal networks of
women and minorities in management: A conceptual frame-
work. Academy of Management Review, 18(1): 56-87.
2See, for example, Pfeffer, J. 1983. Organizational demogra-
phy. In L. L. Cummings & B. M. Staw (eds.), Research in Organ-
izational Behavior, 5: 299-357. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
3 See Nohria, N., & Eccles, R. G. (eds.). 1990. Networks and
organizations: Structure, form and action. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard Business School Press, 216-239.
4 See, for example, Ibarra, op. cit., and Mehra, A., & Kilduff, M.
1998. At the margins: A distinctiveness approach to the social
identity and social networks of women and racial minorities.
Academy of Management Review, 41(4): 441-453.
5 Burt, R. S. 1997. The contingent value of social capital. Ad-
ministrative Science Quarterly, 42(2): 339-365.
6 Albert, S., Ashforth, B. E., & Dutton, J. E. 2000. Organizational
identity and identification: Charting new waters and building
new bridges. Academy of Management Review, 25(1): 13-17.
'See Mehra & Kilduff, op. cit.
8See Nohria & Eccles, op. cit.
Herminia Ibarra is the INSEAD
Chaired Professor of Organiza-
tional Behavior and Area Coordi-
nator for the Organizational Be-
havior Group. Her publications
include Working Identity: Uncon-
ventional Strategies for Rein-
venting Your Career (Harvard
Business School Press), as well
as numerous articles and chap-
ters in leading scholarly and ap-
plied publications. She received
her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale
University Contact: Herminia.
Ibarra@insead.edu.