Chandler and global business history

Business History Review

Volumn 82, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 251-266

  Wilkins, Mira ^a  

^a FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 50849114488     PISSN: 00076805     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0007680500062759     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 10 (for the chart).
2. Quoted in Christopher D. McKenna, The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 2006), 300n52;
3. and in Richard R. John, "Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand after Twenty-Years," Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 152. The original statement was in Alfred D. Chandler, "Comparative Business History," in D.C. Coleman and Peter Mathias, eds., Enterprise and History (Cambridge, U.K., 1984), 16. The Anchor edition of Strategy and Structure was published in paperback in 1966: hence the cheap price.
4. Published by the Division of Research, Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration.
5. Published in London in 1976.
6. Editor's introduction, Harold Williamson, ed., Evolution of International Management Structures (Philadelphia, 1975).
7. Published in Louvain in 1974.
8. Keiichiro Nakagawa, ed., Strategy and Structure of Big Business (Tokyo, n.d. [1976]), v.
9. Ibid., 121-47.
10. Chandler, Strategy and Structure, 322.
11. Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970);
12. and Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).
13. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Herman Daems, eds., Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 1.
14. Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 33 (August 1980): 396-410. Even earlier, he had published "The Development of Modern Management Structure in the US and UK," in Leslie Hannah, ed., Management Strategy and Business Development: An Historical and Comparative Study (London, 1976).
15. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., "The Place of the Modern Industrial Enterprise in Three Economies," in Alice Teichova and P. L. Cottrell, eds., International Business and Central Europe, 1918-1939 (Leicester, U.K., 1983), 3.
16. Alice Teichova and P. L. Cottrell, "Industrial Structures in West and East Central Europe during the Inter-war Period," in Teichova and Cottrell, eds., International Business, 32.
17. Subsequently published in Alice Teichova, Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, and Helga Nussbaum, eds., Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, U.K., 1986).
18. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 477.
19. Ibid., 480.
20. Ibid., 483, 480.
21. The first sentence in Strategy and Structure indicated that the book began as an experiment in the "writing of comparative business history." This was not a reference to comparisons across countries as the term "comparative business history" came to be generally used and is used in this article. In Strategy and Structure, the experiment in "comparative" history has to do with evolving forms of U.S. business administration through time. Chandler at times used the phrase "international comparative history" to differentiate the cross-country comparisons from those across time periods.
22. Chandler, "The Place of the Modern Industrial Enterprise," 3.
23. Christopher McKenna, Comments prepared in February 2008 for a forthcoming issue of Enterprise and Society.
24. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Franco Amatori, and Takashi Hikino, eds., Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (Cambridge, U.K., 1997). Of course, by 1994, Czechoslovakia and the former U.S.S.R. were no longer communist, but these were business histories.
25. See Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Peter Hagström, and Örjan Sölvell, eds., The Dynamic Firm: The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization, and Regions (Oxford, 1998). Facets of technology within the firm were explored; strategy and organization included learning how to govern, problem solving, and a "three dimensional model of changing the internal structure of the firm." Regional considerations included the impact of geography and the spatial dimensions of economic activities. Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones, eds., in Business History around the World (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), emphasized national business histories and themes in business. Chandler's contribution was a short concluding chapter, accenting his forthcoming work on the electronics industry.
26. Business History Review 68 (Spring 1994).
27. In Strategy and Structure, Chandler wrote, "In the large corporation, the stockholders, the legal owners, long ago abdicated this function. They had neither the time, information, nor (as long as the enterprise was paying dividends) the interest to make basic policy decisions." Managers, not owners, made the policy decisions. Chandler, Strategy and Structure, 312-13.
28. Alfred D. Chandler, "Competitiveness and Capital Investment: The Restructuring of U.S. Industry, 1960-1990," Business History Review 68 (Spring 1994): 19, 20, 21, 23.