Biography

Born Rosabeth Moss, Kanter began her academic career with a BA from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in 1964 before transferring to Michigan University where she obtained an MA in 1965, and a PhD in 1967.

In her junior year at Bryn Mawr she married Stuart Kanter, a psychology student who became a Harvard professor but who died in 1969. Since 1972 she has been married to Barry Stein, a management consultant.

She worked her way from Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University via Yale, where she was Professor of Sociology from 1978-1986. Since then she has been Professor of Management at Harvard, editing the Harvard Business Review from 1989-1992. She advised the Democrat Party and some of her ideas were adopted by President Clinton.

As a sociologist at Yale, she centred on work and the family, and her studies led her to conclude that corporations had a powerful effect on people's lives – especially in the developed world.

These deliberations resulted in her two most notable books, The Change Masters (1983) and Where Giants Learn to Dance (1989).

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