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The purpose of this paper is to summarize the life and works of Alfred Chandler and highlight the impact of his thoughts on organizational theory, strategy and history.

The paper analyzes Alfred Chandler's life and the lasting contributions his works have provided to many disciplines as well as the work of his revisionists. Furthermore, the paper analyzes his contributions to the understanding of US business history and global business history.

Chandler's conceptualization of the growth of large business and management practices have shaped business history by transitioning from an American exceptionalist view to a more global comparative perspective.

The paper provides Chandler's insights as well as those of his revisionists regarding USA and comparative global business history.

The paper highlights Chandler's cross‐disciplinary impact and analyzes Chandlerian and revisionist perspectives in both the American exceptionalist as well as the global comparative eras of Chandler's life.

This paper aims to present Alfred Chandler's works as one of the main authors to face the business and society field. It synthesizes his conceptual achievements though national capitalisms that he has identified.

Alfred Chandler's works are summarized analytically. His historic comparative method pinpointed different types of capitalism through managerial hierarchy that enabled firms. National leaders were grounded in their society, and Chandler's works explain economic dominance of big business by organization form they developed.

Over his intellectual career, Alfred Chandler has conceptualized different types of capitalism related to national business history: the process of visible hands internalization, managerial hierarchy, organizational capability and path of learning; that reflect, respectively, USA, British, German and Japanese type of capitalism according to their own business history. History, society matters, due to Alfred Chandler's considerable influence could open alternative and valuable ways for management and economic studies.

This paper presents management and economic theoretical implications of a prominent leader of the business history field. Arguing why Alfred Chandler's concepts are unique and have opened the crucial importance of implicating management studies to society matters. These preoccupations constitute also – this paper would stress on this point – the core of Society and Business field.

Alfred D. Chandler was the most important business historian of the twentieth century, who described and analyzed how large industrial firms are organized and managed in the USA from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries.

This paper is a personal memoir and tribute to Dr Chandler and examines his methods, selected writings, and his legacy.

His concepts and models are widely accepted and applied to North America, Western Europe, and most advanced industrial economies, taking on an air of universality. At the close of the twentieth century, however, a rise of high‐tech industries and rapidly growing, non‐western economies challenged many of the universalistic assumptions embedded in Chandler's work. At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, Chandler's writings suggest nothing more than how much time, place, and people matter.

This paper adds a more personal touch to Dr Chandler.

This paper analyzes Chandler's biography of Henry Varnum Poor to assess Chandler's contribution to management history as a biographer.

Using Winter's content thematic analysis, measure Poor's motivational needs for achievement, affiliation‐intimacy, and power, as they are depicted by Chandler throughout the stages of Poor's career as a business editor, analyst, and reformer.

Our analysis shows that Chandler views Poor's motivation as stable throughout Poor's three professional roles. This paper found that Chandler views Poor as primarily driven by his need for power, followed by a significant need for achievement, and a minor need for affiliation throughout his working life.

This research is unique because it provides the first social‐scientific assessment of Chandler's contribution to management history as a biographer.

This piece is a republished autobiography of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

Chandler reflects on his life and career as a management historian.

Chandler reflects on his life and career, in particular how he came to write Strategy and Structure and its impact on him as a historian. He also discusses his life at Harvard Business School, the editing of the Roosevelt letters, and the writing of The Visible Hand.

This is excellent background material for the other papers in the issue, as well as a valuable personal insight into Chandler's own thinking.

The purpose of this paper is to commemorate Alfred Chandler, a truly outstanding business historian, through the unique lens of his revisionists.

By developing a classifying framework, Chandler's revisionists is analyzed based on the extent to which they critique Chandler's interpretation of the role of managers in large organizations.

The revisionist critiques of Chandler's works is traced and examine how they can contribute to the intent of commemorating Chandler and his works.

The most relevant revisionists of Chandler's works are highlighted in a manner that might be valuable for the understanding of how Chandler's revisionists can be interpreted within both functional and critical paradigms.

The unique contributions of this study is its focus on providing a specific form of commemoration through the lens of Chandler's revisionists and thus putting “Chandler in a larger frame” of management history.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a meaningful, integrated, and re‐interpreted framework of Chandler's ideas regarding corporation's growth, offering an understandable conceptualization of how these insights are applicable to explain family firm's transitional stages – even when, in 1977, Chandler was not aware of it.

Grounding ideas on Chandler's insights regarding corporate firm's growth, and drawing on Gersick et al. family ownership evolutionary model, this paper develops an integrated framework of family‐controlled corporation's growth which allows family business researchers to reconcile with Chandler's perspectives, recognizing that his ideas contributed a lot to the family business literature.

Chandler's ideas regarding family firm's management are based on a narrow definition (and perspective) of family firm ownership. When allowing not only family‐owned firms, but also family‐controlled ones in his capitalism classification, his developmental stages make perfect sense when applied to family enterprises.

This paper intends to reinterpret Chandler's views on family firms, stating that the processes described for corporations are also applicable for family enterprises – when their definition becomes broader (including not only family‐owned, but also family‐controlled firms). The latter, bridges the gap between Chandler's envisioned historical evolution of corporations, and the development, professionalization and survival of family firms.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze Alfred Chandler's ideological shift from American exceptionalism to transnational history in research assumptions to identify significant corollaries for the study of management history.

Using the determinism‐indeterminism classifying framework proposed by Tucker, the paper classifies Chandler's works based on the extent to which they reflect Chandler's ideological commitment to exceptionalist versus transnational perspective.

The paper found that the year of 1980 was the turning point for Chandler's ideological shift from American exceptionalism to a more transnational comparative perspective.

The paper outlines the relevant implications of our findings for management history, calling for an emulation of Chandler's pursuit of comparative examinations of established concepts and management philosophy within the historical development of contemporary and past transnational firms and managers. It believes this holds great importance to furthering a historical perspective in relative management history, and global management, which, in turn, will further illuminate the history of American business and management as well.

The unique contribution of this paper is that it provides the first historical analysis of the ideological assumptions underpinning Chandler's works.