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Scale and Scope: A Review Colloquium - Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. By Alfred D. ChandlerJr., with Takashi Hikino · Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. xix + 860 pp. Charts, figures, tables, appendixes, notes, and index. $35.00.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Alfred D. Chandler Jr
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Extract

In Scale and Scope, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., sets out a complex and sustained interpretation of “the dynamics of industrial capitalism.” His work, the culmination of decades of study, spanning three major economies (the United States, Great Britain, and Germany) from the 1880s to the 1940s, will undoubtedly be a central point of reference for all business historians for a very long time to come. More than that, it also makes contributions to, and has wide implications for, a great variety of fields of scholarship, research, and debate. It is hard to imagine any single book review that could do justice to the scale and the scope of Chandler's work.

Type
Review Colloquium
Information
Business History Review , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , Winter 1990 , pp. 690 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1990

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References

1 Scherer, F. M., et al. , The Economics of Multi-Plant Operation: An International Comparisons Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar.

2 Sands, Saul S., “Changes in Scale of Production in United States Manufacturing Industry, 1904-1947,” Review of Economics and Statistics 43 (Nov. 1961): 365–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Power: Technical Creativity and Economic Progress (New York, 1990), 1–2Google Scholar. For a graphical illustration, see my “Economies of Scale and Industrial Concentration” in Industrial Concentration: The New Learning, ed. Goldschmid, Harvey J., et al. (Boston, 1974), 21Google Scholar.

4 Scherer, et al., The Economics of Multi-Plant Operation, 49-56 and 295-321.

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6 U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Statistical Report: Annual Line of Business Report, 1977 (Washington, D.C., April 1985)Google Scholar.

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1 Burch, Philip, The Managerial Revolution Reassessed (Lexington, Mass., 1972)Google Scholar.

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1 However, Hannes Siegrist has produced more detailed and more complete lists on the hundred largest enterprises in German manufacturing and mining in 1887, 1907, and 1927 (on the basis of nominal capital, including the large personal enterprises). Cf. the tables in Horn, Norbert and Kocka, Jürgen, eds., Law and the Formation of the Big Enterprises in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Göttingen, 1979), 98–112Google Scholar, and Siegrist, Hannes, “Deutsche Grossunternehmen vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Weimarer Republik,” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 60–102, esp. 93-102Google Scholar.

2 As Chandler knows, this reconfirms the notion of “organized capitalism” developed in a more sweeping way in a controversial debate that started in the early 1970s. Cf. Winkler, H. A., ed., Organisierter Kapitalismus (Göttingen, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 This was done, for example, in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Herman Daems, “Administrative Coordination, Allocation and Monitoring: Concepts and Comparisons,” in Horn and Kocka, eds., Law and the Formation of the Big Enterprises, 28-54.

4 The Gerschenkronian idea is not incompatible with Chandler's analysis. Cf. J. Kocka and H. Siegrist, “Die hundert grossten deutschen Industrieunternehmen im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert: Expansion, Diversifikation und Integration im internationalen Vergleich,” in Ibid., 91-95.

5 Ibid., 84. Also see appendix C.4 in Scale and Scope, 722-32.

1 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The United States: Seedbed of Managerial Capitalism,” in Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise, ed. Chandler, and Daems, Herman (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 14Google Scholar.

1 Amsden, Alice H., Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (New York, 1989), 8, 9Google Scholar.