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Alfred D. Chandler Jr.

January 24, 2023

For the Australian newspaper editor, see Alfred Thomas Chandler.

Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. (September 15, 1918 – May 9, 2007) was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University, who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.[1][2] He has been called "the doyen of American business historians".[3]

Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
Born(1918-09-15)September 15, 1918
Guyencourt, Delaware, United States
DiedMay 9, 2007(2007-05-09) (aged 88)
Massachusetts, United States
Alma materHarvard University
AwardsBancroft Prize (1978)
Pulitzer Prize for History (1978)
Scientific career
FieldsBusiness history
InstitutionsHarvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Johns Hopkins University
Doctoral advisorFrederick Merk

Family and life

Chandler was the great-grandson of Henry Varnum Poor. "Du Pont" was apparently a family name given to his grandfather because his great-grandmother was raised by the Du Pont family, and there are other connections as well.[4]

Chandler graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1936 and Harvard College in 1940. After World War II, he returned to Harvard, finished his M.A. in 1946, and earned his doctorate in 1952 under the direction of Frederick Merk. He taught at M.I.T. and Johns Hopkins University before arriving at Harvard Business School in 1970.

Publications

Chandler used the papers of his ancestor Henry Varnum Poor, a leading analyst of the railway industry, the publisher of the American Railroad Journal, and a founder of Standard & Poor's, as a basis for his Ph.D. thesis.[5]

Chandler began looking at large-scale enterprise in the early 1960s. His book Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962) examined the organization of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Motors, and Sears, Roebuck and Co. He found that managerial organization developed in response to the corporation's business strategy. The book was voted the eleventh most influential management book of the 20th century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management.[6]

This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large-scale corporations was expanded into a "managerial revolution" in The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977) for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. He pursued that book's themes further in Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, (1990) and co-edited an anthology on the same themes, with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997).

The Visible Hand

Chandler's masterwork was The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). His first two chapters looked at traditional owner-operated small business operations in commerce and production, including the largest among them, the slave plantations in the South. Chapters 3-5 summarize the history of railroad management, with stress on innovations not just in technology but also in accounting, finance and statistics. He then turned to the new business operations made possible by the rail system in mass distribution, such as jobbers, department stores and mail order. A quick survey (ch 8) review mass innovation in mass production. The integration of mass distribution and mass production (ch 9-11) led to many mergers and the emergence of giant industrial corporations by 1900. Management for Chandler was much more than the CEO, it was the whole system of techniques and included middle management (ch 11) as well as the corporate structure of the biggest firms, Standard Oil, General Electric, US Steel, and DuPont (ch 13-14). Chandler argued that managerial firms evolved in order to take advantage of productive techniques available after the rail network was in place. These firms had a higher productivity and lower costs resulting in higher profits. The firms created the "managerial class" in America because they needed to coordinate the increasingly complex and interdependent system. According to Steven Usselman, this ability to achieve efficiency through coordination, and not some anti-competitive monopolistic greed by robber barons, explained the high levels of concentration in modern American industry.[7]

Organizational synthesis

Along with economist Oliver E. Williamson and historians Louis Galambos, Robert H. Wiebe, and Thomas C. Cochran, Chandler was a leading historian of the notion of organizational synthesis.[8]

He argued that during the 19th century, the development of new systems based on steam power and electricity created a Second Industrial Revolution, which resulted in much more capital-intensive industries than had the industrial revolution of the previous century. The mobilization of the capital necessary to exploit these new systems required a larger number of workers and managers, and larger physical plants than ever before. More particularly, the thesis of The Visible Hand is that, counter to other theses regarding how capitalism functions, administrative structure and managerial coordination replaced Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (market forces) as the core developmental and structuring impetus of modern business.

In the wake of this increase of industrial scale, three successful models of capitalism emerged, which Chandler associated with the three leading countries of the period: Great Britain ("personal capitalism"), the United States ("competitive capitalism") and Germany ("cooperative capitalism.")

Despite the important differences in these three models, the common thread among the developed nations is that the large industrial firm has been the engine of growth in three ways: first, it has provided focal points for capital and labor on large scales; second, it became the educator whereby a nation learned the pertinent technology and developed managerial skills; third, it served as the core around which medium and small firms that supply and serve it grew.

Influence

Chandler's work was somewhat ignored in history departments, but proved influential in business, economics, and sociology.[9]

In the business field, Chandler, along with Kenneth R. Andrews and Igor Ansoff, has been credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy.[10][11][12][13]

In sociology, prior to Chandler's research, some sociologists assumed there were no differences between governmental, corporate, and nonprofit organizations. Chandler's focus on corporations clearly demonstrated that there were differences, and this thesis has influenced organizational sociologists' work since the late 1970s. It also motivated sociologists to investigate and critique Chandler's work more closely, turning up instances in which Chandler assumed American corporations acted for reasons of efficiency, when they actually operated in a context of politics or conflict.[14]

See also

Bibliography

  • Chandler, Alfred D. "The beginnings of 'big business' in American industry" Business History Review 33#1 (1959): 1-31.
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., 1962/1998, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (MIT Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. ed. 1964, Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry. Sources and Readings (Harcourt, Brace & World).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. "The railroads: pioneers in modern corporate management" Business History Review 39#1 (1965): 16-40. in JSTOR
  • Chandler, Alfred D. "Anthracite coal and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the United States" Business History Review 46#2 (1972): 141-181.
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. 1977, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Herman Daems, eds. 1980, Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise (Harvard University Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. "The emergence of managerial capitalism" Business History Review 58#4 (1984): 473-503.
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Richard S. Tedlow, eds. 1985, The Coming of Managerial Capitalism: A Casebook on the History of American Economic Institutions (R. D. Irwin).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. 1990, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. "What is a firm?: A historical perspective" European Economic Review 36#2 (1992): 483-492.
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and James W. Cortada, eds. 2000, A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford University Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. 2001, Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (Harvard University Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. 2005, Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries (Harvard University Press).
  • Chandler, Alfred Dupont Jr. 1988, The Essential Alfred Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business Thomas K. McCraw, ed. (Harvard Business School Press).

References

  1. ^ "Alfred Dupont Chandler". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
  2. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
  3. ^ "How technology and capitalism shaped America after the civil war". The Economist. 24 August 2017.
  4. ^ Carol May, "Alfred du Pont Chandler Jr.," Edmund's Community Courier (Edmund Chandler Family Association), March 2, 2010.
  5. ^ "Alfred Chandler". The Economist. 2007-05-17. Retrieved 2011-09-19.
  6. ^ Bedeian, Arthur G.; Wren, Daniel A. (Winter 2001). "Most Influential Management Books of the 20th Century" (PDF). Organizational Dynamics. 29 (3): 221–225. doi:10.1016/S0090-2616(01)00022-5.
  7. ^ Steven W. Usselman, "Still Visible: Alfred D. Chandler's The Visible Hand," Technology and Culture 47, no. 3 (2006), 584-596.
  8. ^ Galambos, Louis (2012). "Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis". Business History Review. 57 (4): 471–493. doi:10.2307/3114810. JSTOR 3114810. S2CID 145329211.
  9. ^ Thomas K. McCraw, "Alfred Chandler: His Vision and Achievement," Business History Review, Summer 2008, Vol. 82 Issue 2, pp 207-226
  10. ^ Schendel, Dan E., and Hofer, Charles W., 1979, Strategic management. A new view of business policy and planning, Little Brown, Boston, p. 9.
  11. ^ Hatten, Kenneth J., Schendel, Dan E., and Cooper, Arnold C., 1978, A strategic model of the U.S. brewing industry: 1952-1971, Academy of Management Journal, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 594.
  12. ^ Huff, Anne Sigismund, and Reger, Rhonda Kay, 1987, A review of strategic process research, Journal of Management, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 211.
  13. ^ McKiernan, Peter, 1997, Strategy past; strategy futures, Long Range Planning, vol. 30, no. 5, p. 792
  14. ^ Neil Fligstein, "Chandler and the Sociology of Organizations," Business History Review, Summer 2008, Vol. 82 Issue 2, pp 241-250

Further reading

  • John, Richard R. "Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s, The Visible Hand After Twenty Years." Business History Review 71#2 (1997): 151-200. online
  • John, Richard R. "Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians." Business History Review 82.02 (2008): 227-240.
  • Laird, Pamela Walker. "Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and the Landscape of Marketing History." Journal of Macromarketing 20#2 (2000): 167-173.
  • Sicilia, David B. "Cochran's Legacy: A Cultural Path Not Taken." Business and Economic History (1995): 27-39.
  • K.E. Aupperle, W. Acar & D. Mukherjee: “Revisiting the Fit-Performance Thesis Half a Century Later: A Historical Financial Analysis of Chandler's Own Matched and Mismatched Firms.” Business History (2013), doi:10.1080/00076791.2013.790369.
  • W. Acar, R.J Keating, K.E. Aupperle, W.W. Hall & R.A. Engdahl: “Peering at the Past Century's Corporate Strategy Through the Looking Glass of Time-Series Analysis: Extrapolating from Chandler's Classic Mid-Century American Firms?” Journal of Management Studies, (2003) 40 (5): 1225-1254.

External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Alfred D. Chandler Jr..
  • Martin, Douglas (May 12, 2007). "Alfred D. Chandler Jr., a Business Historian, Dies at 88". The New York Times. Retrieved March 6, 2019.
  • Summary of The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Max Olson
  • Works by or about Alfred D. Chandler Jr. at Internet Archive

Archives and records

  • Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. papers at Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School.
  • Poor family Papers, 1791-1921. Schlesinger Library 2012-05-09 at the Wayback Machine, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
  • Additional papers of the Poor family, 1778-2008. Schlesinger Library 2012-05-09 at the Wayback Machine, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

January 24, 2023
alfred, chandler, australian, newspaper, editor, alfred, thomas, chandler, alfred, dupont, chandler, september, 1918, 2007, professor, business, history, harvard, business, school, johns, hopkins, university, wrote, extensively, about, scale, management, struc. For the Australian newspaper editor see Alfred Thomas Chandler Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr September 15 1918 May 9 2007 was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work The Visible Hand The Managerial Revolution in American Business 1977 He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society 1 2 He has been called the doyen of American business historians 3 Alfred D Chandler Jr Born 1918 09 15 September 15 1918Guyencourt Delaware United StatesDiedMay 9 2007 2007 05 09 aged 88 Massachusetts United StatesAlma materHarvard UniversityAwardsBancroft Prize 1978 Pulitzer Prize for History 1978 Scientific careerFieldsBusiness historyInstitutionsHarvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Johns Hopkins UniversityDoctoral advisorFrederick Merk Contents 1 Family and life 2 Publications 3 The Visible Hand 4 Organizational synthesis 5 Influence 6 See also 7 Bibliography 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links 11 Archives and recordsFamily and life EditChandler was the great grandson of Henry Varnum Poor Du Pont was apparently a family name given to his grandfather because his great grandmother was raised by the Du Pont family and there are other connections as well 4 Chandler graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1936 and Harvard College in 1940 After World War II he returned to Harvard finished his M A in 1946 and earned his doctorate in 1952 under the direction of Frederick Merk He taught at M I T and Johns Hopkins University before arriving at Harvard Business School in 1970 Publications EditChandler used the papers of his ancestor Henry Varnum Poor a leading analyst of the railway industry the publisher of the American Railroad Journal and a founder of Standard amp Poor s as a basis for his Ph D thesis 5 Chandler began looking at large scale enterprise in the early 1960s His book Strategy and Structure Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise 1962 examined the organization of E I du Pont de Nemours and Company Standard Oil of New Jersey General Motors and Sears Roebuck and Co He found that managerial organization developed in response to the corporation s business strategy The book was voted the eleventh most influential management book of the 20th century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management 6 This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large scale corporations was expanded into a managerial revolution in The Visible Hand The Managerial Revolution in American Business 1977 for which he received a Pulitzer Prize He pursued that book s themes further in Scale and Scope The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism 1990 and co edited an anthology on the same themes with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino Big Business and the Wealth of Nations 1997 The Visible Hand EditChandler s masterwork was The Visible Hand The Managerial Revolution in American Business 1977 His first two chapters looked at traditional owner operated small business operations in commerce and production including the largest among them the slave plantations in the South Chapters 3 5 summarize the history of railroad management with stress on innovations not just in technology but also in accounting finance and statistics He then turned to the new business operations made possible by the rail system in mass distribution such as jobbers department stores and mail order A quick survey ch 8 review mass innovation in mass production The integration of mass distribution and mass production ch 9 11 led to many mergers and the emergence of giant industrial corporations by 1900 Management for Chandler was much more than the CEO it was the whole system of techniques and included middle management ch 11 as well as the corporate structure of the biggest firms Standard Oil General Electric US Steel and DuPont ch 13 14 Chandler argued that managerial firms evolved in order to take advantage of productive techniques available after the rail network was in place These firms had a higher productivity and lower costs resulting in higher profits The firms created the managerial class in America because they needed to coordinate the increasingly complex and interdependent system According to Steven Usselman this ability to achieve efficiency through coordination and not some anti competitive monopolistic greed by robber barons explained the high levels of concentration in modern American industry 7 Organizational synthesis EditAlong with economist Oliver E Williamson and historians Louis Galambos Robert H Wiebe and Thomas C Cochran Chandler was a leading historian of the notion of organizational synthesis 8 He argued that during the 19th century the development of new systems based on steam power and electricity created a Second Industrial Revolution which resulted in much more capital intensive industries than had the industrial revolution of the previous century The mobilization of the capital necessary to exploit these new systems required a larger number of workers and managers and larger physical plants than ever before More particularly the thesis of The Visible Hand is that counter to other theses regarding how capitalism functions administrative structure and managerial coordination replaced Adam Smith s invisible hand market forces as the core developmental and structuring impetus of modern business In the wake of this increase of industrial scale three successful models of capitalism emerged which Chandler associated with the three leading countries of the period Great Britain personal capitalism the United States competitive capitalism and Germany cooperative capitalism Despite the important differences in these three models the common thread among the developed nations is that the large industrial firm has been the engine of growth in three ways first it has provided focal points for capital and labor on large scales second it became the educator whereby a nation learned the pertinent technology and developed managerial skills third it served as the core around which medium and small firms that supply and serve it grew Influence EditChandler s work was somewhat ignored in history departments but proved influential in business economics and sociology 9 In the business field Chandler along with Kenneth R Andrews and Igor Ansoff has been credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy 10 11 12 13 In sociology prior to Chandler s research some sociologists assumed there were no differences between governmental corporate and nonprofit organizations Chandler s focus on corporations clearly demonstrated that there were differences and this thesis has influenced organizational sociologists work since the late 1970s It also motivated sociologists to investigate and critique Chandler s work more closely turning up instances in which Chandler assumed American corporations acted for reasons of efficiency when they actually operated in a context of politics or conflict 14 See also Edit Biography portalBusiness history Second Industrial Revolution James BurnhamBibliography EditChandler Alfred D The beginnings of big business in American industry Business History Review 33 1 1959 1 31 Chandler Alfred D Jr 1962 1998 Strategy and Structure Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise MIT Press Chandler Alfred D Jr ed 1964 Giant Enterprise Ford General Motors and the Automobile Industry Sources and Readings Harcourt Brace amp World Chandler Alfred D The railroads pioneers in modern corporate management Business History Review 39 1 1965 16 40 in JSTOR Chandler Alfred D Anthracite coal and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the United States Business History Review 46 2 1972 141 181 Chandler Alfred D Jr 1977 The Visible Hand The Managerial Revolution in American Business The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Chandler Alfred D Jr and Herman Daems eds 1980 Managerial Hierarchies Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise Harvard University Press Chandler Alfred D The emergence of managerial capitalism Business History Review 58 4 1984 473 503 Chandler Alfred D Jr and Richard S Tedlow eds 1985 The Coming of Managerial Capitalism A Casebook on the History of American Economic Institutions R D Irwin Chandler Alfred D Jr 1990 Scale and Scope The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Chandler Alfred D What is a firm A historical perspective European Economic Review 36 2 1992 483 492 Chandler Alfred D Jr and James W Cortada eds 2000 A Nation Transformed by Information How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present Oxford University Press Chandler Alfred D Jr 2001 Inventing the Electronic Century The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries Harvard University Press Chandler Alfred D Jr 2005 Shaping the Industrial Century The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries Harvard University Press Chandler Alfred Dupont Jr 1988 The Essential Alfred Chandler Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business Thomas K McCraw ed Harvard Business School Press References Edit Alfred Dupont Chandler American Academy of Arts amp Sciences Retrieved 2022 05 23 APS Member History search amphilsoc org Retrieved 2022 05 23 How technology and capitalism shaped America after the civil war The Economist 24 August 2017 Carol May Alfred du Pont Chandler Jr Edmund s Community Courier Edmund Chandler Family Association March 2 2010 Alfred Chandler The Economist 2007 05 17 Retrieved 2011 09 19 Bedeian Arthur G Wren Daniel A Winter 2001 Most Influential Management Books of the 20th Century PDF Organizational Dynamics 29 3 221 225 doi 10 1016 S0090 2616 01 00022 5 Steven W Usselman Still Visible Alfred D Chandler s The Visible Hand Technology and Culture 47 no 3 2006 584 596 Galambos Louis 2012 Technology Political Economy and Professionalization Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis Business History Review 57 4 471 493 doi 10 2307 3114810 JSTOR 3114810 S2CID 145329211 Thomas K McCraw Alfred Chandler His Vision and Achievement Business History Review Summer 2008 Vol 82 Issue 2 pp 207 226 Schendel Dan E and Hofer Charles W 1979 Strategic management A new view of business policy and planning Little Brown Boston p 9 Hatten Kenneth J Schendel Dan E and Cooper Arnold C 1978 A strategic model of the U S brewing industry 1952 1971 Academy of Management Journal vol 21 no 4 pp 594 Huff Anne Sigismund and Reger Rhonda Kay 1987 A review of strategic process research Journal of Management vol 13 no 2 p 211 McKiernan Peter 1997 Strategy past strategy futures Long Range Planning vol 30 no 5 p 792 Neil Fligstein Chandler and the Sociology of Organizations Business History Review Summer 2008 Vol 82 Issue 2 pp 241 250Further reading EditJohn Richard R Elaborations Revisions Dissents Alfred D Chandler Jr s The Visible Hand After Twenty Years Business History Review 71 2 1997 151 200 online John Richard R Turner Beard Chandler Progressive Historians Business History Review 82 02 2008 227 240 Laird Pamela Walker Alfred D Chandler Jr and the Landscape of Marketing History Journal of Macromarketing 20 2 2000 167 173 Sicilia David B Cochran s Legacy A Cultural Path Not Taken Business and Economic History 1995 27 39 K E Aupperle W Acar amp D Mukherjee Revisiting the Fit Performance Thesis Half a Century Later A Historical Financial Analysis of Chandler s Own Matched and Mismatched Firms Business History 2013 doi 10 1080 00076791 2013 790369 W Acar R J Keating K E Aupperle W W Hall amp R A Engdahl Peering at the Past Century s Corporate Strategy Through the Looking Glass of Time Series Analysis Extrapolating from Chandler s Classic Mid Century American Firms Journal of Management Studies 2003 40 5 1225 1254 External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Alfred D Chandler Jr Martin Douglas May 12 2007 Alfred D Chandler Jr a Business Historian Dies at 88 The New York Times Retrieved March 6 2019 Summary of The Visible Hand The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Max Olson Works by or about Alfred D Chandler Jr at Internet ArchiveArchives and records EditAlfred D Chandler Jr papers at Baker Library Special Collections Harvard Business School Poor family Papers 1791 1921 Schlesinger Library Archived 2012 05 09 at the Wayback Machine Radcliffe Institute Harvard University Additional papers of the Poor family 1778 2008 Schlesinger Library Archived 2012 05 09 at the Wayback Machine Radcliffe Institute Harvard University Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Alfred D Chandler Jr amp oldid 1131250834, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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