Beyond Chandler?

Unlike several of my colleagues whose retrospective essays are included in this special section, I did not have a personal relationship with Alfred DuPont Chandler, though during the 1980s he did invite me to present a discussion of my first book Proprietary Capitalism at his Harvard business history seminar. I also met Dr. Chandler frequently at Business History Conference meetings, where I found him ever-gracious, indifferent to criticism, and supportive of diverse projects whether allied with or tangential to his own. Thus here I offer some reflections on our discipline and its current situation, taking Chandler's publications as a point of departure.

From my perspective, Alfred Chandler's life work was a classic modernist project, along at least two dimensions. Empirically, Chandler documented and analyzed what he understood as the means to "making the modern," be it manager, enterprise, or economy. From The Visible Hand through the final publications on process industries and electronics, this enterprise-based, managerially led dynamics continued to generate industrial revolutions that mastered mature modernity's challenges in innovation, complex organization and global competition. Empirically committed to getting the story right, Chandler seemed theoretically wedded to the notion that there was a right story, not biased by ideological commitments from right-leaning market fetishizers and left-leaning critics of corporate capitalism. Hence the massive scale of his volumes, their wide-ranging research and stunning detail, their big ideas and large structures, and their universalizing purposes—aiming together to provoke not inquiry but assent, to be definitive and corrective, not tentative and exploratory, carving a template for others to emulate, to generate teachable units not searching conversations.

Chandler's work sought to put order into business history, creating a compelling, foundational narrative for others to ornament and embroider, and in doing so his research exemplified the high era of what social theorist Zygmunt Bauman calls "solid modernity": "a part of history, now coming to its close [which] could be dubbed. . . the era of hardware, or heavy modernity—the bulk-obsessed modernity, 'the larger the better' kind of modernity, of 'the size is power, the volume is success' sort."¹ The century after the 1870s was an age in which conquering and holding space was a "supreme goal," in which "wealth and might, which depend on the size and quality of hardware, tend to be sluggish, unwieldy and awkward tomove," grounded in logics of power and control/routinization and "organized around one precept: bigger means more efficient."² Through his accounts of America's largest corporations and their managerial practices, Chandler provided an origin story for solid modernity in which rational and rationalizing enterprises are the natural and essential foundations for progress, for a society of reliable structures, durable careers, and rising expectations. Yet as solid modernity has vaporized, these concepts and their history become ever less helpful in linking past and present in ways that make sense of both.

Bauman (and others³) note that contemporary enterprises inhabit spaces where "business organization is increasingly seen as a never-conclusive, ongoing attempt 'to form an island of superior adaptability' in a world perceived as 'multiple, complex and fast moving and therefore as 'ambiguous,' 'fuzzy,' or 'plastic'."⁴ Such operations profit through short-term commitments, through opportunistic shifts in product, focus or locale, and through avoiding constructing dense and durable structures, physically or organizationally. We now inhabit an age of "liquid modernity," in which the capacity for rapidly moving on, grasping the new, new thing, and suddenly redeploying capital or information resources,makes reading, shaping, and enhancing flows a strategy far superior to building immobile structures and capabilities. For firms and individuals, moreover, as Bauman summarizes, "'Rational Choice' in the era of instantaneity means to pursue gratification while avoiding the consequences, and particularly the responsibilities which such consequences may imply."⁵

Of what value to managers immersed in the challenges and incentives of currency arbitrage or financial derivatives (or to their acolytes in business schools) is the business history Chandler has bequeathed us? Likewise in this context, of what value to them is that business history, including my own equally 'solid modernist' work, fabricated in response...