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Chandler and the Sociology of Organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Neil Fligstein
Neil Fligstein
Affiliation:
NEIL FLIGSTEIN is professor in the Department ofSociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Extract

I remember the first time I read Alfred Chandler's Strategy and Structure as a graduate student in the mid-1970s. I was taking a class on the sociology of organizations and finding that many of the assigned books and articles did not interest me. Corporations are clearly one of the dominant forces in our society, yet none of what I read seemed to capture what they do and how they do it. Reading the first eighteen pages of Strategy and Structure was like having the scales fall from my eyes. Here was a historical view of the largest corporations that placed them in their context and, most important, showed that real people with real purposes undertook to make these organizations work. Chandler's book opened the black box of the large modern corporation for me. Chandler realized that what was interesting about corporations was not that they made profits, but how they did so. In a single chapter, Chandler articulated much that I had found lacking in organizational theory.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Alfred D. Chandler Jr. , Summer 2008 , pp. 241 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

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

2 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).Google Scholar

3 Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 901–40.Google Scholar

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13 Dobbin, Frank, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (New York, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roy, William, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, N.J., 1997)Google Scholar; Perrow, Charles, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton, N.J., 2002)Google Scholar; Freeland, Robert, The Struggle for Control of the Modern Corporation: Organizational Change at General Motors, 1924–1970 (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; and Fligstein, Neil, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar