Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr., 1918–2007: An Introduction

Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. was born in 1918. On May 9, 2007, Professor Chandler died at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the course of a remarkably productive career, Chandler's ideas about corporate growth and the central role of managers rather than markets in fostering that growth helped shape the scholarship of generations of sociologists, political scientists, and business historians. In 1952, Harvard University awarded the PhD to Chandler. In 1956, he published Henry Varnum Poor, and in 1962, he published Strategy and Structure, one among several of his widely recognized and regularly cited books. In 2005, at age 87, Chandler published, Shaping the Industrial Century, his final book. In between those volumes, Chandler's major books included The Visible Hand (1977), which in 1978 earned the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes, and Scale and Scope, published in 1990. Business executives around the world read Chandler, unlike most books by historians.

Following Chandler's death, former Enterprise & Society editor Kenneth J. Lipartito asked five leading scholars to prepare essays focused on their engagement with Chandler's work. Louis Galambos, Geoffrey G. Jones, Christopher D. McKenna, Philip Scranton, and Mira Wilkins promptly accepted Lipartito's invitation. Lipartito also contributes an essay. These six business historians have helped shape the writing of business history, the scholarship presented in Enterprise & Society and other leading journals, and the development of the Business History Conference (BHC). During 1977–1978, Chandler served as the BHC's president.

Throughout his publications, Chandler sought to explain the growth of large corporations such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and General Motors. By the time of the Civil War, Chandler determined, Pennsylvania Railroad executives had "creat[ed] a managerial hierarchy whose duties were carefully defined in organizational manuals and charts." During the 1870s, Chandler continued, the Pennsylvania's team of middle managers "included an executive in charge of the traffic department and a general manager who supervised the work of two or three general superintendents." As well, "heads of machinery. . ., maintenance of way, telegraph, freight, passenger. . . " and still others worked in this group. According to Chandler, then, managers at the Pennsylvania Railroad and later at General Motors had guided those large, multidivisional firms and the American economy as a whole toward economic growth. For Chandler, reports his former student Richard R. John, no banker or other outsider "played a role in business administration that was in any way comparable to visionary managers such as General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan." After Chandler, serious scholars studying the organization and operation of large business firms had to acknowledge his thesis regarding the administrative coordination provided by counterparts to top executives like GM's Sloan and middle managers such as the Pennsylvania Railroad's "heads of machinery."¹

Chandler developed this thesis at a unique moment in American business and economic history. The growing American economy informed his thinking about business history and about corporations and managers in particular. During World War II, business leaders such as Sloan organized production of countless tanks, trucks, airplanes, and radios. As a US naval officer reviewing the results of bombing raids, Chandler held a front row seat to the economic and military power that large corporations, mass production, and vast transportation networks had wrought.²

After the war, many of those same business leaders at firms such as General Motors, General Electric, and Boeing continued to foster development of the automobile, aircraft, and consumer electronics industries. Taken together, products manufactured by these firms permitted ordinary Americans, including those former soldiers, to drive an automobile to a new, comfortable suburban mall. Once they arrived, shoppers, women more than men really, could search large, air-conditioned stores such as Philadelphia's Strawbridge & Clothier for linens, coffee-makers, televisions, and bridal gowns. Appliance makers such as Westinghouse produced stoves capable of baking eight pies at one time. Starting in the late 1950s, members of wealthier households and top business leaders traveled on jet airplanes to meetings and distant vacation spots. During the late 1960s, Berkeley graduate student and future business historian Mansel G. Blackford recalls reading Strategy and Structure to learn "what is...