Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. ( born September 15, 1918 in Guyencourt, Delaware; † 9 May 2007 in the Cambridge ( Massachusetts)) was an American economic historian and economist. He is regarded as the doyen of modern corporate history.

Life

Chandler grew up in Buenos Aires, where his father was of an American railway company. The Chandlers were among the elite of New England and had familiar relations with Du Pont, owner of the chemical company of the same name. As Chandler was eleven years old, the family moved to Wilmington, USA. He studied history at Harvard University and in 1940 graduated with honors. During World War II he worked at the NavyUS 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 railway business analyst in the second half of the 19th century, had been kept in his family. In 1952 he received his doctorate at Harvard University 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 period he carried out intensive research on new approaches to the history of the company. During his doctoral dissertation in 1956 yet published according to the paradigm of the earlier research as an entrepreneur biography, he laid in 1962 with "Strategy and Structure" a new work before. Focus were not more corporate leaders, but the emergence of big business and the development of their organizational structure. Exemplary presented he heard for the leading companies in the car (General Motors), chemicals (DuPont ), and the oil industry, Exxon, and the wholesalers Sears to the center. since it had also claim to explain what these companies did so successfully, the publication to this day a standard work management theory. he later taught at Johns Hopkins University, and finally from 1970 as a professor of business history at Harvard Business School. 1977 he published his historical magnum opus " the Visible hand. The Managerial Revolution in American Business. " It is an examination of changes in the types of company from a family business to large corporations in the United States in the period from about 1800 to 1950. During his main thesis it is opposed to the view of the then leading economists of the Chicago School, that the Western economic system is to be regarded as a free market economy, Adam Smith's " Invisble hand " going to be controlling. Chandler's view, the rise of large corporations have rather done in the late 19th century to the fact that the resource utilization and the distribution of goods in the company of a will be planned and managed hierarchy of managers. , you have learned to anticipate the market forces, and they " overcome " it. he retired in 1989. he was a visiting professor at Oxford University.

Alfred Chandler was editor of the " Harvard Studies in Business History ", President of the "Economic History Association " and the " Business History Conference ". In addition, a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His textbooks are still today among the most-cited standard works of the subject. Chandler has formulated general laws of the development of large enterprises in international comparative studies and thus of business administration gave a major impetus. He has realigned in the 1970s, almost single-handedly the company's history. Developed by him access to formed in the 1990s, the prevailing paradigm. Since then, it undergoes review and further development.

For its publication, " The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business " won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize. Fortune Magazine described him in 2006 as "America's pre-eminent business historian ".