¹ For a brief introduction to Chandler's influence on nonhistorians, see McCraw, Thomas K., “The Intellectual Odyssey of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,” in McCraw, , ed., The Essential Alfred Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business (Boston, Mass., 1988), esp. 13–14.Google Scholar For various interpretations of Chandler's ideas by sociologists and political scientists, see Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, N.J., 1997)Google Scholar; Fligstein, Neil, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; Winner, Langdon, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago, Ill., 1986)Google Scholar; and Beniger, James R., The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).Google Scholar For Chandler's influence among economists, see Lazonick, William, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, and Williamson, Oliver E., The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

Though Chandler's influence among economists falls outside of the scope of this essay, Oliver Williamson's “transaction cost” interpretation of Chandler's ideas deserves a brief mention, since it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed to reflect Chandler's ideas. According to Williamson, Chandler claimed that the principal cost savings in the modern corporation derived from the ability of managers to economize on transaction and information costs. Chandler, however, always distinguished between the modest cost savings obtainable through reduction of transaction and information costs and the much larger cost savings obtainable through administrative coordination. “The savings resulting from such [administrative] coordination,” Chandler observed, “were much greater than those resulting from lower information and transaction costs.” To clarify this distinction, Chandler contrasted the cost savings obtainable through the establishment of a federation of otherwise independent business firms with the cost savings obtainable through the establishment of a moderm business enterprise. Federations, Chandler wrote, “were often able to bring small reductions in information and transactions costs, but they could not lower costs through increased productivity. They could not provide the administrative coordination that became the central function of modern business enterprise.” Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 7–8Google Scholar (italics added). See also idem, “Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 6 (Summer 1992): 79–100, and Lazonick, , Business Organization, 191–261. “By imposing a transaction cost interpretation on Chandler's historical material,” Lazonick declared, “Williamson failed to comprehend the nature of the dynamic interaction between organization and technology that is central to [Chandler' s] approach,” 195.Google Scholar

² Chandler's influence on management thought has been so pervasive that, according to Chandler, a manager once advised a colleague that he could save the $100,000 fee that McKinsey & Company was charging corporations to oversee their reorganization by reading a copy of Chandler's Strategy and Structure, which could be purchased for $2.95. Chandler, “Comparative Business History,” in D. C. Coleman and Peter Mathias, eds., Enterprise and History (Cambridge, 1984), 16.

³ For Chandler's influence on historical scholarship, see Galambos, Louis, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–493CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Brinkley, Alan, “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges,” Daedalus 113 (Summer 1984): 132–134.Google Scholar

⁴ Chandler is by no means the only economic historian to devise institutional models of economic development. So, too, has Douglass C. North. See, for example, North's Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990).

⁵ “Although mergers and acquisitions were carried out in a wide variety of industries for a wide variety of reasons,” Chandler explained, “these combinations remained profitable and powerful over the long haul only if they rationalized the facilities acquired or merged, completed the process of integrating production with distribution, and most important of all, created an extensive managerial hierarchy to coordinate, monitor, and allocate resources to the operations units acquired or merged. Even when this course was followed, an enterprise was rarely able to dominate, to become part of an oligopoly, unless it could benefit from lower unit costs achieved through administrative coordination—that is, unless the technology of that industry permitted the volume production of standardized products for national and international markets.” Chandler, “Historical Determinants of Managerial Hierarchies: A Response to Perrow” [1981], in McCraw, , ed., Essential Alfred Chandler, 460.Google Scholar For a critique see Maier, Charles S., “Accounting for the Achievements of Capitalism: Alfred Chandler's Business History,” Journal of Modern History 65 (Dec. 1993): 771–782.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “It is appropriate to ask,” Maier wrote, “as a historian, whether the organizational forces Chandler adduces were in fact the critical ones for successful development, as he claims, or whether other impulses—the state, the work force, entrepreneurial genius, or ‘animal spirits' — might not have been. With respect to this question, I believe, a level of indeterminacy remains despite the vastness of the scholarly enterprise,” 781.

⁶ Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., review of Noble, David, America by Design, in Technology and Culture 19 (July 1978): 572.Google Scholar

⁷ Chandler, , Visible Hand, 11.Google Scholar

⁸ Chandler's preoccupation with the administrative coordination of tangible resources is worth underscoring, given the significance that certain economic historians have assigned to informational economies as the key element in the functioning of the modern business enterprise. Whatever the merits of this position, it is quite distinct from, and incompatible with, Chandler's position in The Visible Hand. Temin, Peter, “Introduction,” in Temin, , ed., Inside the Black Box: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information (Chicago, Ill., 1991), 2.Google Scholar

⁹ Nelles, H. V., review of The Visible Hand, Labour/ Le Travailleur 4 (Winter 1979): 272.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Chandler, , Visible Hand, 491.Google Scholar

¹¹ Ibid., 483.

¹² Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism,” Business History Review 58 (Winter 1984): 474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).Google Scholar

¹⁴ An analogous logic helps explain why Chandler devoted so little attention in The Visible Hand to the concept of the industrial revolution. Had he given this concept more attention, it would have risked diverting his readers' attention from the managerial revolution that was his primary concern.

¹⁵ Chandler, , Visible Hand, 16Google Scholar, 49.

¹⁶ Ibid., 48.

¹⁷ Ibid., 84.

¹⁸ Ibid., 28.

¹⁹ Ibid., 49.

²⁰ Ibid., 455.

²¹ Chandler, , “Comparative Business History,” 17.Google Scholar

²² Chandler, , Visible Hand, 497–500.Google Scholar

²³ Ibid., 376. See also Chandler, , “Government Versus Business: An American Phenomenon” [1979]Google Scholar, in McCraw, , ed., Essential Alfred Chandler, 425–431.Google Scholar

²⁴ Nelles, , review of Visible Hand, 272.Google Scholar

²⁵ Chandler, , Visible Hand, 6.Google Scholar

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²⁷ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 13.Google Scholar In the second, corrected edition, Chandler modified his claim slightly by substituting the indefinite for the definite article. Managerial enterprise, he now contended, was “a” central institution in managerial capitalism, rather than “the” central institution, as he had formerly contended. “The phrase taught me a good lesson” — Chandler observed, in explaining his decision, which he made prior to learning of Hughes's critique: “Don't use ‘the’ when you can use ‘a.’” Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., to Richard R. John, 31 Oct. 1996, in author's possession.

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²⁹ Ibid., 596.

³⁰ McCraw, , “Intellectual Odyssey,” 4–5.Google Scholar

³¹ Chandler, , with Ambrose, Stephen E., ed., The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years, vols. 1–5 (Baltimore, Md., 1970).Google Scholar

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³⁴ Chandler did not, however, claim that organizational innovations invariably originated in the United States. For example, in Scale and Scope he credited managers at Siemens, a German firm, with having introduced the multidivisional form prior to their counterparts at DuPont and General Motors. Chandler, , Scale and Scope, 469–471Google Scholar, 544.

³⁵ Chandler, , Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, with Salsbury, Stephen, Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Sloan, Alfred P., My Years with General Motors (Garden City, N.J., 1964).Google Scholar On Chandler's involvement with Sloans memoir, see McCraw, , ed., Essential Alfred Chandler, 156–157.Google Scholar

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⁴⁵ By considering British economic development from the standpoint of the United States, Chandler provided a new perspective on the well known reluctance of British universities to train engineers and other technical professionals. This reluctance, Chandler posited, was institutional rather than cultural. That is, it sprang from the failure of British business leaders to call forth the engineering talent necessary for the proper administration of the modern business enterprise, rather than from the supposed anti-technological bent of British elites. Had such a demand existed, Chandler predicted, even upper-class youths would have flocked to technical fields. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The Growth of the Transnational Industrial Firm in the United States and the United Kingdom: A Comparative Analysis,” Economic History Review 33 (Aug. 1980): 409–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On this theme, see also also Mowery, David C., “Firm Structure, Government Policy, and the Organization of Industrial Research: Great Britain and the United States, 1900–1950,” Business History Review 58 (Winter 1984): 504–531.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁴⁷ Porter, Glenn, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1920 (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992), 128.Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ Between 1978 and 1994, The Visible Hand was cited in the Journal of Economic History 42 times. This exceeded the 28 cites for Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross (1974), a much discussed econometric study of slavery that had been written by two of the leaders of the new economic history. During the same period, Cochran's, Thomas C.Frontiers of Change (1981)Google Scholar, a major study of early industrialism, was cited 3 times, while Galambos's landmark 1970 Business History Review essay on the organizational synthesis was not cited at all. These totals are derived from the CD-ROM version of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

⁵⁰ Wright, Gavin, “Regulation in America: The Human Touch,” Reviews in American History 14 (June 1986): 166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁵⁷ Chandler, , “Comparative Business History,” 11.Google Scholar For a related discussion—which chronicles, and provides a notably sympathetic account of, historians' longstanding preoccupation with models drawn from natural science—see Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn, and Jacob, Margaret, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

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⁶⁸ Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988).Google Scholar For a pointed critique of Montgomery's neglect of the organizational implications of technological advance, see Lazonick, William, “The Breaking of the American Working Class,” Reviews in American History 17 (June 1989): 272–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷¹ These totals are derived from the CD-ROM version of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

⁷² Any generalizations about the influence of Chandler's ideas on U.S. history textbooks must be tentative, since no one has made a thorough study of this topic. But there is good reason to suspect that Chandler's ideas are getting a hearing. Out of a sample of 10 leading college survey textbooks, all but 2 treated the rise of big business in a more-or-less Chandlerian spirit. For a possible model from a related field of how one might generalize about the treatment of business in history textbooks, see Heilbron, J. L. and Kevles's, Daniel J. “Science and Technology in U.S. History Textbooks—What's There and What Ought to Be There,” Reviews in American History 16 (June 1988): 173–185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹³³ Berkowitz and McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State, chaps. 1–3.

¹³⁴ Boff, Du and Herman, , “Alfred Chandler' s New Business History,” 93.Google Scholar

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¹³⁸ Hughes, , “Managerial Capitalism Beyond the Firm,” 698–703.Google Scholar For an informative comparison of Hughes and Chandler, see Hounshell, David A., “Hughesian History of Technolog and Chandlerian Business History: Parallels, Departures, and Critics,” History and Technology 12(1995): 205–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For Hughes's assessment of Chandler's contribution to the historv of technology, see Hughes, Thomas P., “The Order of the Technological World,” in History of Technology, ed. Rupert Hall, A. and Smith, Norman (1980), 7–10.Google Scholar

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¹⁴⁴ Piore, Michael J. and Sabel, Charles F., The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984).Google Scholar See also Sabel, Charles and Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past & Present 108 (Aug. 1985): 133–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The latter essay, though often cited by historians of the United States, deals primarily with Europe. It does, however, include their assertion that Piore and Sabel intended the Second Industrial Divide as a “critique of the Chandler model,” 140.

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¹⁵⁰ Blackford, Mansel G., A History of Small Business in American Life (New York, 1991).Google Scholar See also idem, “Small Business in America: A Historiographie Survey,” Business History Review 65 (Spring 1991): 1–26. See also Walker, Juliet E. K., “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War,” Business History Review 60 (Autumn 1986): 343–382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁵² Brown, John K., The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831–1915 (Baltimore, Md., 1995), 252 n5.Google Scholar

¹⁵³ Ibid., 274 n6–8.

¹⁵⁴ Chandler, , Scale and Scope, 211.Google Scholar

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¹⁵⁸ Ibid., 64.

¹⁵⁹ Alford, B. W. E., “Chandlerism, the New Orthodoxy, of U.S. and European Corporate Development?” Journal of European Economic History 23 (Winter 1994): 643.Google Scholar

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¹⁶¹ Wilkins, Mira, “Business History as a Discipline,” Business and Economic History 17 (1988): 1.Google Scholar

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¹⁶³ Chandler, , “Comparative Business History,” 3.Google Scholar “One of the most challenging tasks of business history,” Chandler has recently written, is the “placing [of] businessmen and their activities in a broad cultural setting.” Chandler, “Editor' s Introduction,” in Dalzell, Robert F. Jr.'s, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), vii.Google Scholar