Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

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Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. (born 15 September 1918). Born in Guyencourt, Delaware, Chandler is a professor of business history at Harvard Business School, who has written extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. Professor Chandler graduated from Harvard College in 1940. After wartime service in navy he returned to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in History. He taught at M.I.T. and Johns Hopkins University before arriving at Harvard Business School in 1970.

Chandler began looking at large-scale enterprise in the early 1960s. His Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962) examined the organization of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Motors, and Sears, Roebuck and Co. He found that managerial organization developed in response to the corporation's business strategy.

This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large-scale corporations was expanded into a "managerial revolution" in The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977) for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. He pursued that book's themes in Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, (1990) and co-edited an anthology on the same themes, with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997).

The thesis of each of these works is this: during the 19th century the development of new systems based on steam power and electricity created a Second Industrial Revolution, which resulted in much more capital intensive industries than had the industrial revolution of the previous century. The mobilization of the capital necessary to exploit these new systems required a larger number of workers and managers, and larger physical plants than ever before. More particularly, the thesis of The Visible Hand is that, counter to popular dogma regarding how capitalism functions, administrative structure and managerial coordination replaced Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (market forces) as the core developmental and structuring impetus of modern business.

In the wake of this increase of industrial scale, three successful models of capitalism emerged, which Prof. Chandler associates with the three leading countries of the period: Great Britain ("personal capitalism"), the United States ("competitive capitalism") and Germany ("cooperative capitalism.")

Despite the important differences in these three models, the common thread in the successfully developed nations is that the large industrial firm has been the engine of growth in three ways, according to Prof. Chandler and his associates. Its role has been first, to provide focal points for capital and labor on large scales; second, to become the educator whereby a nation learns the pertinent technology and develops managerial skills; third, to serve as the core around which grow medium and small firms that supply and serve it.

Along with economist Oliver Williamson and historians Louis Galambos, Robert H. Wiebe, and Thomas C. Cochran, he is a leading historian of the organizational synthesis.