Alfred D. Chandler junior

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Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. (born September 15, 1918 in Guyencourt , Delaware , † May 9, 2007 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an American economic historian and economist . He is considered a co-founder of modern corporate history .

Life

Chandler grew up in Buenos Aires , where his father represented an American railroad company. The Chandlers belonged to the New England elite and had family connections with the Du Ponts, owners of the chemical company of the same name. When Chandler was eleven, the family moved to Wilmington , United States . He studied history at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1940. During the Second World War he worked in the US Navy , where he interpreted aerial photographs. After a brief stay at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , where he worked on the history of the southern states, he returned to Harvard for a dissertation. The source material for his research on Henry Varnum Poor, Chandler's great-grandfather and a leading railroad business analyst in the second half of the 19th century, had been kept with his family. In 1952 he received his doctorate from Harvard with Frederick Merk . Another of his teachers was the then leading American sociologist Talcott Parsons .

From 1950 to 1963 he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT . During this time he did intensive research into new approaches to the company's history. While his dissertation was published in 1956 according to the paradigm of older research as an entrepreneurial biography, in 1962 he presented a new type of work with "Strategy and Structure". The focus was no longer on company leaders, but on the emergence of large corporations and the development of their organizational structure. As an example, he placed the leading corporations in the auto ( General Motors ), chemical ( DuPont ) and oil industries Exxon , as well as the wholesaler Sears, at the center. Since it also aimed to explain what made these companies so successful, the publication is still a standard work of management theory today.

He later taught at Johns Hopkins University and finally from 1970 as a professor of corporate history at Harvard Business School . In 1977 he published his main historical work “The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American Business ". It is an investigation of the change in company types from family businesses to large corporations in the USA in the period from about 1800–1950. In its main thesis it goes against the view of the leading economists of the Chicago School at the time that the western economic system should be understood as a free market economy controlled by Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand". In Chandler's view, the rise of the large corporations in the late 19th century rather led to the use of resources and the distribution of goods in companies being planned and managed by a hierarchy of managers. They would have learned to anticipate the market forces and thus "overcome" them. In 1989 he retired. He was visiting professor at Oxford University .

Alfred Chandler was the editor of Harvard Studies in Business History, President of the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference. He was also a member of the American Philosophical Society (1984) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1971). In 1986 he became a corresponding member of the British Academy .

His textbooks are still among the most cited standard works in the subject. In international comparative studies, Chandler formulated general laws governing the development of large companies and thus provided business administration with important impulses. He realigned the company's history practically single-handedly in the 1970s. The approach he developed formed the ruling paradigm until the 1990s. Since then it has received criticism and further development.

For his publication “The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business” he won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize . In 2006 Fortune Magazine named him “America's pre-eminent business historian”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 13, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Chandler, Alfred D. Jr.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chandler, Alfred Dupont
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economic historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Guyencourt , Delaware
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 2007
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts