Concise Summary of Chandler’s Achievements

4 June 2007 at 11:42 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Louis Galambos, writing at EH.News:

When Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., entered the subdiscipline of business history, the field was producing very little scholarship of great interest, even to other historians. When Chandler, the world’s leading historian of business, died recently (May 9, 2007) at the age of 88, his legacy included a vibrant, influential body of scholarship and active scholars producing studies that intersected creatively with important developments in economics, sociology, and political science — as well as modern history. Chandler remade business history by publishing a long series of works characterized by meticulous, penetrating research; careful analysis of the data; and, above all, original, imaginative synthesis. Drawing upon the sociology of organizations and Schumpeterian economic analysis of innovation, Chandler reconstructed our understanding of the rise of large enterprise in America and Europe. The business bureaucracies he described were innovative and efficient. Economies of scale and scope, as well as aggressive, successful research and development, enabled them to hold their positions in a capitalist system that was changing rapidly in the second and third industrial revolutions. Their leaders were investors, not Robber Barons; they guided the evolution of the giant, multinational, multidivisional enterprises that have played a central role in capitalist progress since the late nineteenth century. Chandler left the politics of political economy, the labor relations of the firm, and the gender and racial themes of interest to many American scholars of late to other historians of business. His focus throughout his long, amazingly productive career was on the large, successful corporations that have played the central role in global economic development in the modern era.