How do we measure Alfred Chandler's achievement? What forces shaped his vision? What is his place in the pantheon of historians and social scientists? Might he rank with sociologists such as Talcott Parsons or even Max Weber? Economists such as Kenneth Arrow or even Joseph Schumpeter? With political scientists such as Louis Hartz, Robert Dahl, and Seymour Martin Lipset? It's too early to make these kinds of judgments, but some answers are certainly possible about his place among historians.

For almost half a century, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has enjoyed an enviable reputation as the most influential business historian in the world. Chandlerian business history is a mainstay of the “new” institutionalism that John Higham discerned over four decades ago in a justly admired survey of American historical writing; in addition, it has long been a cornerstone of the “organizational synthesis” that Louis Galambos championed in three widely discussed essays. Even in history departments that have shifted their primary focus from politics and economics to society and culture, Chandler remains required reading.

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.

What was Alfred D.Chandler's significance in the study of business history throughout the world? How did his views evolve? Why was his approach so influential? How did his thinking contribute to comparative business history and to the history of international business? This essay is designed to answer these questions.

Richard Rumelt, Dan Schendel, and David Teece are clear: “The foundation of strategic management as a field may very well be traced to the 1962 publication of Chandler's Strategy and Structure.” For these three doyens of strategy, Alfred Chandler was a fundamental influence on the shape of the strategic-management discipline that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, unlike the two other pioneers they identify, Kenneth Andrews and Igor Ansoff, Chandler stood firmly outside the discipline, working as a business historian, not as a strategist. Remarkably, it is Chandler's work that resonates most strongly in the discipline today and, I shall argue, still offers the most powerful inspiration for scholarly work in the future.

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.

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.

The work and ideas of Alfred D.Chandler Jr. have enriched the field of Japanese business history and our understanding of that nation's industrial development. Chandler's studies about the rise of the large, professionally managed, multidivisional firm in the United States highlight factors critical not only to the United States' capitalist system but also to Japan's. Indeed, large firms played a dominant role in Japan's economic takeoff in the late 1800s. As these companies grew, they were transformed into professionally managed corporations. Managers, operating in a clear hierarchical chain of command, built up huge companies, such as Nihon Denki (NEC), Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi, Nippon Steel, Matsushita, and Toyota. In Japanese as in U.S. firms, the visible hand of management was critical to controlling the flow of work, from the input of raw materials to the production of finished goods.

Once upon a time, in the 1950s, Alfred Chandler was a student of history, doing what most young, untenured assistant professors of history do. He was applying for a grant. His aim was to conduct research on the 1927 reorganization of the Standard Oil Corporation of New Jersey for a chapter in a forthcoming book that was to become Strategy and Structure.

A consideration of Rakesh Khurana's From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, 2007).

Khurana's book is an examination of the development of the university-based business school in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. He asserts that while the original goal of these schools was to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors or lawyers, university business schools no longer strive for this ideal. Instead, Khurana believes that business schools have become purveyors of a product –the MBA–sold to student-consumers. People should therefore not be surprised at corporate misconduct when managers are considered responsible only to shareholders. Khurana calls for a renewal of the professional ideal in the business school, in which future business leaders are trained to take their place as moral leaders in society. We asked each of the following authors to comment on the book and see if business education underwent a similar transition in other countries.