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Measuring Chandler's Impact on European Business Studies since the 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Martin Jes Iversen
Martin Jes Iversen
Affiliation:
MARTIN JES IVERSEN is associate professor at theCentre for Business History, Copenhagen Business School.
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Extract

Recently, a number of groups sponsored large international research projects that are concerned with business history. Harm G. Schröter's group investigated the European integration that followed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 in order to discover whether it had led to the appearance of a characteristically “European” corporation. Franco Amatori, Camilla Brautaset, and Youssef Cassis coordinated an analysis with the ambitious title “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century.” The projects shared some common “Chandlerian” features: they were problem-oriented, comparative studies of the long-term development of large enterprises, and their goal was to propose illuminating generalizations. Such Chandler-inspired studies are likely to undergo a renaissance in the next couple of years. Still, as the term “renaissance” implies, Chandler's impact on European business studies has undergone upswings and downturns over the past four decades.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Alfred D. Chandler Jr. , Summer 2008 , pp. 279 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

1 Schröter, Harm G., ed., The European Enterprise: Historical Investigation into a Future Species (Heidelberg, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brautaset, Camilla and Cassis, Youssef, “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century: A Pilot Study,” Business and Economic History On-Line (vol. 1, 2003).Google Scholar

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, Ill., 2007).

3 Based on Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED): 1945-present; Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI): 1956–present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI): 1975–present. From 1957 to 2007, there was a total of 3,869 citations to Chandler's works in the ISI Web of Knowledge database (accessed on 20 Nov. 2007). One citation may corre spond to one or more subject-area categories. Therefore in order to have an overview of the distribution of citations by subject area, I have made a summation of the record count, from 1957 to 2007, of Chandler citations per subject area category. All 92 subject area categories add up to 6,392. The percentage of each subject category is then computed from this total. The Article Citation Count was produced by research assistant Leopoldo Alonso, CBS, and it is based on Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED): 1945–present; Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI): 1956–present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI):1975–present.

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7 Ibid., 75.

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9 Note that the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) only covers the period after 1975; there might thus have been more American and European Chandler citations within these fields before 1975.

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13 For instance in the early 1950s the Danish foreign ministry published a number of industry specific reports on study trips to the U.S. aimed at productivity improvements.

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37 Ibid., 46.

38 There was, for instance, Franco Amatori and Youssef Cassis's ambitious study, “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century,” Harm G. Schröter's project, “The European Corporation,” and Andrea, , Colli, , Iversen, Martin Jes and Wilson's, John “Corporate Responses to European Integration,” Schröter, , ed., The European EnterpriseGoogle Scholar; Brauta-set and Cassis, “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century”; Wilson, John F. et al., “Mapping Corporate Europe: Business Responses to Institutional Change, 1957–2007,” European Journal of International Management 1 (July 2007): 225–38.Google Scholar

39 Chandler, , Scale and Scope, 10.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 3.

41 The concept of inductive nature refers to the understanding known from business research methodologies. See for instance Bryman, Alan and Bell, Emma, Business Research Methodology: The Nature of Qualitative Research (Oxford, 2003).Google Scholar

42 Jones, Geoffrey, “In Memoriam: Alfred D. Chandler, 1918–2007,” Business History Review 81 (Summer 2007): 326–27.Google Scholar

43 Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M. G., and Temin, Peter, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 106 (Apr. 2003): 404–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar