Still visible: Alfred D. Chandler's the visible hand

Technology and Culture

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 584-596

  Usselman, Steven W ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748519899     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0206     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
2. For evidence of this continuing vitality, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, "Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History," American Historical Review 108 (2003): 404-33;
3. "Symposium: Framing Business History," Enterprise and Society 5 (2004): 355-403 (
4. which includes Richard N. Langlois, "Chandler in a Larger Frame: Markets, Transaction Costs, and Organizational Form in History," 355-75;
5. Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin, "Against Whig History," 376-87;
6. and Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Neither Modularity nor Relational Contracting: Inter-Firm Cooperation in the New Economy," 388-403);
7. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., "Response to the Symposium: Framing Business History," Enterprise and Society 6 (2005): 134-37,
8. and "Preface to the Paperback Issue of Inventing the Electronic Century" reprinted in Enterprise and Society 6 (2005): 138-43;
9. and Louis Galambos, "Recasting the Organizational Synthesis: Structure and Process in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries," Business History Review 79 (2005): 1-38.
10. Remarkably, history repeated itself one year later. While I was taking Scheiber's course in legal history, he announced one morning that Morton Horwitz had won the Pulitzer. This time the offhand comment suggested the pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite direction.
11. Soon the cohort at Penn would include others with similar interests, such as Eric Schatzberg and Amy Slaton.
12. Leslie and Seely were also influenced significantly by a previous visiting scholar from MIT, Lynwood Bryant.
13. Cochran's contribution, Business in American Life, appeared in 1972. Cole never completed his study.
14. On Chandler's technological determinism, see Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
15. For my own response, see Steven W. Usselman, "Determining a Middle Landscape: Competing Narratives in the History of Technology," Reviews in American History 23 (1995): 370-77.
16. The concomitant appearance of Noble's provocative book was enormously fruitful for those of us operating at the boundaries of business history and the history of technology. Noble explored many of the same themes as Chandler, but cast them in a strikingly different light. Noble also connected these themes much more directly than did Chandler to the emergent body of work in the history of technology, where scholars such as Hugh Aitken, Eugene Ferguson, Thomas Hughes, Edwin Layton, Bruce Sinclair, Roe Smith, and Anthony Wallace were teaching us to look at engineers with greater nuance and sophistication. Whereas Chandler had highlighted the importance of technology but glossed over the details of its generation and development, Noble instructed us to take a hard look at the process of innovation and the instruments through which corporations had asserted control over the course of technical change.
17. Reading Chandler, one would have virtually no idea that during the previous dozen years an econometric revolution had swept through economic history. One of its earliest shots across the bow - Robert Fogel's provocative Railroads and American Economic Growth, which argued that the railroad was not the indispensable engine of growth so many had presumed - had appeared in 1964. Apparently unperturbed, Chandler launched into his extended explanation of the railroad's centrality, pausing only briefly to address the Fogel thesis in a single footnote. By the time Chandler's book went to press, of course, the econometric approach had emerged in full bloom, and several critics from within its fold had subjected Fogel's argument to close scrutiny and found it wanting. In characteristic fashion, Chandler deftly extracted from the many criticisms precisely those elements that reinforced his own argument. He cited evidence suggesting that Fogel had failed to appreciate how the speed and regularity of railroad transport had reduced the need to maintain large inventories and to sustain pools of otherwise idle labor during periods of slack transport. Chandler dealt similarly with Fogel's 1974 study, Time on the Cross, written in collaboration with Stanley Engerman, regarding the management of slave plantations. Chandler dismissed the idea that plantations constituted an important exception to his generalization that the separation of ownership and management did not occur until after the Civil War.
18. One voice from the STS community that did register strongly with us at Delaware was Langdon Winner, whose Autonomous Technology also appeared in the annis mirabilis of 1977.
19. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
20. For an extraordinarily insightful and wide-ranging examination of these developments, see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford, 1996).
21. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers (London, 1998),
22. and Gary Fields, Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist Development, and the Innovative Enterprises of G. F. Swift and Dell Computer (Stanford, Calif., 2004).
23. "Symposium: Framing Business History" (n. 2 above).
24. Chandler, "Response to the Symposium" (n. 2 above).
25. For a particularly compelling example, see Leonard S. Reich, "Lighting the Path to Profit: GE's Control of the Electric Lamp Industry, 1892-1941," Business History Review 66 (summer 1992): 305-34.
26. Chandler's severest critics have stressed the power large firms exercised, both economically and politically, in negotiating terms of exchange, especially those involving access to labor and capital; cf. Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of the American Industrial Order, 1865-1917 (Baltimore, 1994),
27. and William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, 1997).
28. This line of analysis stretches back to the important work on flexible specialization pioneered by scholars such as Philip Scranton, Jonathan Zeitlin, and Charles Sabel. Their scholarship has gained added poignancy in light of subsequent developments in the recent American economy. On this point, see "Symposium: Framing Business History."
29. Chandler bases his argument on what he sees as the persistent importance of large integrated firms such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft in the industries driving the communications revolution of the computer age. For further elaboration, see his Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (New York, 2001). Perhaps I should acknowledge here that Professor Chandler was instrumental in facilitating my own early research on IBM.
30. Castells (n. 12 above) presents a compelling argument to this effect.