The richness of the contributions on which I am asked to comment – let alone the pioneering work of Alfred Chandler, which inspires most of them – makes the task of a general discussant very difficult and certainly prevents a thorough examination of the multiple lines of inquiry pursued in each chapter. More modestly, what I shall attempt to do in the following is to flag a few questions, conjectures, results, and puzzles that emerge from a comparative reading of the chapters concerning national experiences. Some of my observations are motivated by theoretical concerns while others have mainly an empirical nature: the link among all of them is the effort – common to all chapters – to disentangle the complex relationships between organizational change and the differential ability of nations to produce and accumulate wealth. Let me start from the basics.

SOME CHANDLERIAN HYPOTHESES REVISITED

As a sort of introduction, it might be useful to summarize my own interpretation of the Chandlerian analysis. As I see it, the most general propositions (which, indeed, I fully share) are the following.

1. Over the past century, organizational learning and organization-embodied technical change have increased their importance as sources of growth. This basically paraphrases Chandler's own statement at the beginning of his chapter in this book emphasizing the importance of “how streams of capital and efforts of the working force were organized and how technologies of production have been created or improved” and of “the ability of industrial entreprises to adopt and develop these technologies and to devise essential administrative structures to coordinate the flow of materials.”

2. […]