Thomas P. Hughes and Alfred D. Chandler have exerted enormous influence in their respective fields of the history of technology and business history. This essay explores the development of these two scholars and their work, highlights the interaction of Hughes and Chandler and their ideas, and indentifies the ideas and issues on which they agree and disagree. The problem of technological determinism has attended both scholars’ work and has become one of the principal avenues by which their work has been criticized. This essay argues that the rise of social contraction of technology and its cousins stemmed in large measure from political concerns about human agency in historical change in general and the problem of technological determinism in particular.

Both social constructivism and historians’ embrace of the critique of American manufacturing methods launched by Piore and Sabel in their 1984 book, The Second Industrial Divide, have become principal means by which some historians have sought to lessen the dominance of Chandlerian approaches in business history and to move beyond Hughesian systems analysis in the history of technology.