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Chandler and Global Business History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Mira Wilkins
Mira Wilkins
Affiliation:
MIRA WILKINS is professor of economics atFlorida International University.
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Extract

What was Alfred D.Chandler's significance in the study of business history throughout the world? How did his views evolve? Why was his approach so influential? How did his thinking contribute to comparative business history and to the history of international business? This essay is designed to answer these questions.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Alfred D. Chandler Jr. , Summer 2008 , pp. 251 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

1 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 10 (for the chart).Google Scholar

2 Quoted in McKenna, Christopher D., The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 2006), 300n52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in John, Richard R., “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand after Twenty-Years,” Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The original statement was in Chandler, Alfred D., “Comparative Business History,” in Coleman, D.C. and Mathias, Peter, eds., Enterprise and History (Cambridge, U.K., 1984), 16.Google Scholar The Anchor edition of Strategy and Structure was published in paperback in 1966: hence the cheap price.

3 Published by the Division of Research, Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration.

4 Published in London in 1976.

5 Editor's introduction, Williamson, Harold, ed., Evolution of International Management Structures (Philadelphia, 1975).Google Scholar

6 Published in Louvain in 1974.

7 Nakagawa, Keiichiro, ed., Strategy and Structure of Big Business (Tokyo, n.d, [1976]), v.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 121–47.

9 Chandler, Strategy and Structure, 322.

10 Wilkins, Mira, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970)Google Scholar; and Wilkins, Mira, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr and Daems, Herman, eds., Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 1.Google Scholar

12 Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 33 (August 1980): 396–410. Even earlier, he had published “The Development of Modern Management Structure in the US and UK,” in Hannah, Leslie, ed., Management Strategy and Business Development: An Historical and Comparative Study (London, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “The Place of the Modern Industrial Enterprise in Three Economies,” in Teichova, Alice and Cottrell, P. L., eds., International Business and Central Europe, 1918–1939 (Leicester, U.K., 1983), 3.Google Scholar

14 Alice Teichova and P. L. Cottrell, “Industrial Structures in West and East Central Europe during the Inter-war Period,” in Teichova and Cottrell, eds., International Business, 32.

15 Subsequently published in Teichova, Alice, Lévy-Leboyer, Maurice, and Nussbaum, Helga, eds., Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, U.K., 1986).Google Scholar

16 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 477.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 480.

18 Ibid., 483, 480.

19 The first sentence in Strategy and Structure indicated that the book began as an experiment in the “writing of comparative business history.” This was not a reference to comparisons across countries as the term “comparative business history” came to be generally used and is used in this article. In Strategy and Structure, the experiment in “comparative” history has to do with evolving forms of U.S. business administration through time. Chandler at times used the phrase “international comparative history” to differentiate the cross-country comparisons from those across time periods.

20 Chandler, “The Place of the Modern Industrial Enterprise,” 3.

21 Christopher McKenna, Comments prepared in February 2008 for a forthcoming issue of Enterprise and Society.

22 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Amatori, Franco, and Hikino, Takashi, eds., Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (Cambridge, U.K., 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of course, by 1994, Czechoslovakia and the former U.S.S.R. were no longer communist, but these were business histories.

23 See Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Hagström, Peter, and Sölvell, Örjan, eds., The Dynamic Firm: The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization, and Regions (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar Facets of technology within the firm were explored; strategy and organization included learning how to govern, problem solving, and a “three dimensional model of changing the internal structure of the firm.” Regional considerations included the impact of geography and the spatial dimensions of economic activities. Amatori, Franco and Jones, Geoffrey, eds., in Business History around the World (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), emphasized national business histories and themes in business. Chandler's contribution was a short concluding chapter, accenting his forthcoming work on the electronics industry.Google Scholar

24 Business History Review 68 (Spring 1994).

25 In Strategy and Structure, Chandler wrote, “In the large corporation, the stockholder, the legal owners, long ago abdicated this function. They had neither the time, information, nor (as long as the enterprise was paying dividends) the interest to make basic policy decisions.” Managers, not owners, made the policy decisions. Chandler, Strategy and Structure, 312–13.

26 Chandler, Alfred D., “Competitiveness and Capital Investment: The Restructuring of U.S. Industry, 1960–1990,” Business History Review 68 (Spring 1994): 19, 20, 21, 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar