Honoring the life and works of Alfred Chandler (1918-2007)

Citation

Carraher, S. and Humphreys, J. (2009), "Honoring the life and works of Alfred Chandler (1918-2007)", Journal of Management History, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmh.2009.15815caa.001

Honoring the life and works of Alfred Chandler (1918-2007)

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Management History, Volume 15, Issue 3

Alfred Chandler has been described as “the world’s preeminent business historian in the second half of the twentieth century” and “dean of business historians, the man who more or less invented the history of the big corporation.” During World War II, he served as a naval officer. He later credited his experience in the Navy; close family relationships with the du Pont family, and the influence of leading scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Joseph Schumpeter with influencing his choice to study businesses. He subsequently earned a masters degree (1947) and PhD (1952) at Harvard University. His PhD thesis focused on the work of his great grandfather, leading business analyst and journalist Henry Varnum Poor. In addition, during his graduate studies, he was an active member of the, then, relatively new Center for Research in Entrepreneurial Studies, founded by economist Joseph Schumpeter and economic historian and Harvard Business School librarian Arthur Cole.

With his newly minted PhD in hand, he joined the faculty at MIT. Among his early efforts were assisting Alfred Sloan with his twentieth century classic “My Years with General Motors” and publishing his work on Henry Varnum Poor. That was followed in 1962 by Strategy and Structure, a towering achievement that remains influential in strategic management, history, economics, sociology, and political science, having been cited more than 6,400 times. His compelling thesis – that corporate structure follows strategy – documented the historical origins of the multidivisional firm.

He moved to Johns Hopkins University in 1963, where he served as editor-in-chief of the papers of President Dwight D. Eisenhower; as department chair; and as Director of the Center for Study of Recent American History. In 1971, he accepted the prestigious Isidor Straus Professorship of Business History at Harvard Business School. At HBS, He published two more great works of synthesis. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977) chronicled the rise of modern management in the USA in large, vertically integrated firms. Cited over 4,100 times), the book won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as the prestigious Newcomen Award and the Bancroft Prize. His work countered some basic assumptions, such as the Adam Smith emphasis on the “invisible hand”. He argued that the coordinating of economic activities passed from the marketplace to the visible hand of managers. Chandler’s Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990) applied his model comparatively to the USA, UK, and Germany. Cited in turn a relatively modest 2,200 times, this book was the winner of an American Association of Publishers Award and the University of Chicago’s Melamed Prize.

After becoming Professor Emeritus at HBS in 1989, he continued to publish prolifically, including major studies of innovation in the electronics, computer, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries. At the time of his death he was writing a biography of his maternal grandfather, Major William G. Ramsay, Dupont’s first chief engineer and a major contributor to the transformation of the firm into a global corporation.

The recipient of many awards and fellowships – including the Business History Conference’s first Lifetime Achievement Award (2002), the John F. Kennedy Medal, as well as numerous honorary degrees – Alfred Chandler is remembered by family, friends, students, and colleagues as a warm, accessible, generous, and astonishingly focused man, who did more than anyone to establish the legitimacy and importance of academic business history. His landmark books and articles have influenced generations of scholars in multiple countries and disciplines and, along with Dan Wren, helped lay the foundation for the history of management thought as currently researched in contemporary business schools.

Accordingly, it is fitting that the Journal of Management History has published a special issue devoted to the life and works of Chandler and his various contributions. Our goal in this special issue is to honor Chandler, better understand the value of his many contributions, and discover avenues of future research to further build upon the enormous foundation he left for all of us.

At the suggestion of Art Bedeian, this special issue begins with Chandler’s autobiography, written for Art’s Management Laureates series (Elsevier). In this autobiography he talks about his experiences and career for the first 70 years of his life and we think readers will find this fascinating, as well as excellent background material to better appreciate the ensuing works.

This is followed by “Globalization and Alfred D. Chandler’s Modern (American) Firm: An Essay” by W. Mark Fruin. Mark worked with Al as a post doctoral fellow at the Harvard Business School during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is a personal memoir and tribute to Al Chandler intended to add a more personal touch to Dr Chandler.

Next we present “Chandler as a Biographer: Content Thematic Analysis of Chandler’s Biography of Henry Varnum Poor” by Leigh Ann Bynum, Russell Clayton, Mario Hayek, Miriam Moeller, and Wallace Williams. They analyzed Chandler’s biography of Henry Varnum Poor in order to assess Chandler’s contribution to management history as a biographer. They used a content thematic analysis and Murray’s Manifest needs theory in order to explore Chandler’s writing about Poor’s career as a business editor, analyst, and reformer. Their examination showed that Chandler believed that Poor’s motivations were stable throughout his three professional roles and that Poor was primarily driven by power with a strong secondary need for achievement.

This is followed by “From a Family-Owned to a Family-Controlled Business: Applying Chandler’s Insights to Explain Family Business Transitional Stages” by Rosa Nelly Trevinyo-Rodríguez. Rosa utilized Chandler’s efforts to explain transitional stages for family firms. Drawing on Chandler’s (1977) work, and on that of Gersick, Davis, Hampton and Lansberg’s (1997) family ownership evolutionary model, she integrates a framework for the growth of family controlled organizations.

The fifth paper is “An Ideological Shift in Chandler’s Research Assumptions: From American Exceptionalism to Transnational History” by Milorad M. Novicevic, John H. Humphreys, and Duan Zhao. Using Tucker’s (2001) determinism/indeterminism classifying framework, they identified 1980 (the same time that he was working with Mark Fruin) as the turning point for Chandler’s ideological shift from American exceptionalism to a transnational comparative perspective. They outline the relevant implications for management history, calling for an emulation of Chandler’s pursuit of induction and comparative examinations of established concepts and management philosophy within the historical development of contemporary and past transnational firms and managers.

The final paper in this special issue is “Commemorating Chandler through the Lens of his Revisionists” by Milorad M. Novicevic, M. Ronald Buckley, Russell W. Clayton, Miriam Moeller, and Wallace A. Williams. The authors develop a classification system to analyze the work of researchers who have sought to critique Chandler’s interpretation of the role of managers in large organizations. They found that four classifications of researchers (champions, critics, skeptics, and opponents) contributed to both management history and memory in seeking to explain possible commissions and omissions from Chandler’s work in order to examine organizational science and management history research.

We trust that you shall find these articles compelling, enlightening, and enjoyable. Moreover, we expect to open up new venues for research and reinvigorate research on Chandler’s work.

Shawn Carraher and John HumphreysGuest Editors