The Future of Alfred Chandler

One could make a career of throwing darts at the work of Alfred Chandler. I don't mean just criticizing him. You could take the pages of Chandler's books, paste them up on a wall, and start throwing. Almost everywhere a point struck would be a little gem of business history to draw your interest.

I didn't need a dartboard, but in 1980 when I first read The Visible Hand I came across a reference to futures trading that fascinated me. It was something I knew little about, yet there it was, its history deftly laid out in a few pages. Classic Chandler: futures trading emerged out of a combination of new technology—the telegraph—and market growth in Chicago. It progressed smoothly and logically, lowering transactions costs, redistributing risk to those able to bear it, promoting the growing scale and scope of distribution.

For whatever reason, I seized on futures trading as something to research for my first graduate school paper in 1981. This led me, with Lou Galambos's help, into the oak paneled offices of the New York Cotton Exchange, located high up in the World Trade Center. There an executive with a love of the history and romance of his trade brought a pile of dusty old boxes containing the exchange's minutes. By the time I wrote up my research and presented my paper, I had taken a step toward becoming a business historian.

I also found that futures trading did not proceed quite so smoothly as The Visible Hand suggested. There was political conflict, there were farmers who regarded the practice as detrimental to their interests, there were critics and cranks who thought it immoral. At the time I had little framework to appraise these aspects of the story, largely using the tools of economic theory filtered through Chandler. But looking back now I see a pattern.

Chandler's inductive method yielded rich historical details that he adroitly worked into a strong narrative of business progress. His framework gave significance to something—the history of business—that otherwise might seem beneath the notice of serious historians. That was valuable; no one wants to be considered an antiquarian. But could there be other reasons for studying business, perhaps in even more minute detail, without simply fleshing out the master's framework?

I was proud that Chandler served as chair on the panel where I gave my first professional paper—back in New York in 1985 at the Business History Conference, this time on AT&T and the telephone industry. He said in his introduction that I had "come up through the ranks" meaning that I had received my undergraduate degree at the University of Delaware and worked on my senior thesis with Glenn Porter. But in fact, I never felt myself a true Chandlerian. AT&T appears on only five pages of The Visible Hand (fewer than American Sugar Refining) despite it having long been the largest corporation in the United States. Telephones received far fewer pages than did telegraphs. Once again I had chosen a business history topic that apparently had little significance in Chandlerian terms.

The reason, I only gradually came to see, was that many important things from the world of business may have little to do with business itself—the making of money, the managing of enterprise, the growth of the firm. As business tools, telephones were useful and interesting, but they were also household artifacts, symbols of modernity, facilitators of new modes of human communication. On matters such as these business historians were silent, as they were silent or far less vocal about political battles over the financial system and agrarian values in an industrial era. Even consumers only appeared in their books as reasons firms had marketing departments, not as agents of history.

Business historians have often spoken of "adding" culture or politics or even gender to Chandler, but this now seems a mistake. The Chandlerian framework is what it is, but it is not everything, and adding culture and politics does not make it complete. Instead, we might think of looking...