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Chandler's Paths of Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Paul J. Miranti
Paul J. Miranti
Affiliation:
PAUL MIRANTI is professor in the Department of Accounting, Business Ethics, and Information Systems at Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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Extract

In his last two major works, Inventing the Electronic Century and Shaping the Industrial Century, Alfred Chandler extended his well-known historical model put forth originally in Strategy and Structure, The Visible Hand, and Scale and Scope by drawing on insights from scholarship dealing with organizational learning and evolutionary economics. In the earlier works, he won high praise, as evinced by the awarding of the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for his contribution in advancing the understanding of history, economics, and sociology. His work presented a powerful alternative vision of businesspeople from the version usually communicated by the older Progressive school of history. Although practitioners of the latter brand of history generally acknowledged industrialization's material benefits, many worried that such change represented a Faustian bargain: they feared that concentrated economic power threatened the preservation of cherished democratic institutions and values.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Alfred D. Chandler Jr. , Summer 2008 , pp. 293 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

1 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Inventing The Electronic Century: The Epic Story of Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Chandler, , Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chandler, , Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass, 1966)Google Scholar; Chandler, , The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; and Chandler, , Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar

2 Averitt, Robert T., The Dual Economy: The Dynamics of American Industry Structure (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Nelson, Richard R., “Why Do Firms Differ and How Does It Matter,” Strategic Management Journal 12, Special Edition: Fundamental Research in Strategy and Economics (Winter 1991): 61–74Google Scholar; Mowery, David C. and Nelson, Richard R., eds., Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arora, Ashish, Landau, Ralph, and Rosenberg, Nathan, Chemicals and Long-term Economic Growth: Insights from the Chemical Industry (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; and Steil, Benn, Victor, David G., and Nelson, Richard R., eds., Technological Innovation and Economic Performance (Princeton, 2002).Google Scholar

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5 Schumpeter, Joseph, History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954).Google Scholar See also McCraw, Thomas K., Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).Google Scholar

6 See Lev, Baruch, Intangibles: Management, Measurement, and Reporting (Washington, D.C., 2001)Google Scholar; and Lev, Baruch and Zarowin, Paul, “The Boundaries of Financial Reporting and How to Extend Them,” Journal of Accounting Research 37 (1999 suppl.): 353–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a comprehensive discussion of these matters.

7 Miranti, Paul J., “Corporate Learning and Traffic Management at the Bell System, 1900–1929: Probability Theory and the Evolution of Organizational Capabilities,” Business History Review 76 (Winter 2002): 733–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, by the same author, “Corporate Learning and Quality Control at the Bell System, 1877–1929,” 79 (Spring 2005): 39–72.

8 Yates, JoAnne, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2005).Google Scholar

9 Tedlow, Richard S., New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; and Friedman, Walter A., Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).Google Scholar

10 For another view of the long-term direction of business organization structuring, see Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M.G., and Temin, Peter, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Towards a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 108 (Apr. 2003): 404–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Galambos, Louis with Sewell, Jane Eliot, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–1995 (New York, 1995).Google Scholar