Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. (September 15, 1918 – May 9, 2007) was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School. His research area was 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).
Chandler graduated from 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 joining Harvard Business School in 1970.
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, for his Ph.D. thesis.
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. 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.
This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large-scale corporations was explained in more detail in "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)" for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. He pursued the research further and published "Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, (1990)" and co-edited an anthology with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, "Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997)."
Chandler continued to do research and write until the very end of his life. In 2001, he wrote “Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industry,” which focused on the fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the rise of Sony and Matsushita, as Japan conquered the worldwide consumer electronics market. That volume was followed in 2005 by “Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries.”
Management for Chandler was much more than the CEO, it was the whole system of techniques and included middle management as well as the corporate structure of the biggest firms, Standard Oil, General Electric, US Steel, and DuPont. 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 Chandler, 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, administrative structure and managerial coordination replaced Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (market forces) among perfectly competitive market system with large number of sellers and buyers 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.")
Along with economist Oliver E. Williamson and historians Louis Galambos, Robert H. Wiebe, and Thomas C. Cochran, Chandler was a leading historian of the organizational synthesis.
Chandler is also credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy.
In sociology, prior to Chandler's research, some sociologists assumed there were no differences between governmental, corporate, and nonprofit organizations. Chandler's work on corporations clearly demonstrated that there were differences, and this thesis has influenced organizational sociologists' work since the late 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_D._Chandler,_Jr.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/05/hbs-professor-alfred-chandler-jr-pre-eminent-business-historian-dead-at-88/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/business/12chandler.html?_r=0
Chandler graduated from 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 joining Harvard Business School in 1970.
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, for his Ph.D. thesis.
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. 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.
This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large-scale corporations was explained in more detail in "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)" for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. He pursued the research further and published "Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, (1990)" and co-edited an anthology with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, "Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997)."
Chandler continued to do research and write until the very end of his life. In 2001, he wrote “Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industry,” which focused on the fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the rise of Sony and Matsushita, as Japan conquered the worldwide consumer electronics market. That volume was followed in 2005 by “Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries.”
Management for Chandler was much more than the CEO, it was the whole system of techniques and included middle management as well as the corporate structure of the biggest firms, Standard Oil, General Electric, US Steel, and DuPont. 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 Chandler, 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, administrative structure and managerial coordination replaced Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (market forces) among perfectly competitive market system with large number of sellers and buyers 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.")
Along with economist Oliver E. Williamson and historians Louis Galambos, Robert H. Wiebe, and Thomas C. Cochran, Chandler was a leading historian of the organizational synthesis.
Chandler is also credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy.
In sociology, prior to Chandler's research, some sociologists assumed there were no differences between governmental, corporate, and nonprofit organizations. Chandler's work on corporations clearly demonstrated that there were differences, and this thesis has influenced organizational sociologists' work since the late 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_D._Chandler,_Jr.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/05/hbs-professor-alfred-chandler-jr-pre-eminent-business-historian-dead-at-88/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/business/12chandler.html?_r=0
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