Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Remembered
CHANDLER: His great books “light up a landscape that had been only dimly perceived, if at all.”
Photo by Richard Chase
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., the renowned Harvard Business School historian who established business history as an indepen-dent and important area of study, died last May in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 88.
Chandler was perhaps best known for his book The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1978. In it, Chandler argued that management, a visible hand, had in some ways replaced Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of market forces. Indeed, Chandler concluded, by the mid-2oth century, the multiunit, multifunctional enterprise administered by salaried managers had become the “most powerful institution in the American economy.”
In his 1962 book Strategy and Structure, which helped spawn the field of corporate strategy, Chandler examined four U.S. industrial giants from the 1900s to the 1940s, focusing on the executives who devised the decentralized, multidivisional structure of the large corporation. In Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, he compared the evolution of managerial capitalism in America, England, and Germany by examining the 200 largest corporations in those countries.
In 2001, Chandler wrote Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries, which focused on the fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the rise of Sony and Matsushita. That volume was followed in 2005 by Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries. “Such science-based industries have had as much impact on this country in the 20th century as railroads did in the last one,” Chandler observed.
Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was born in Guyencourt, Delaware, on September 15, 1918. A 1940 graduate of Harvard College, Chandler returned to Harvard after service as a Navy officer in World War II, earning his Ph.D. in history in 1952 while studying under the great Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. Chandler was also influenced by his participation in the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Baker Library.
Chandler taught at MIT from 1950 to 1963, where in addition to writing Strategy and Structure, he helped edit four volumes of Theodore Roosevelt’s letters. Also during the 1950s, Chandler assisted Alfred P. Sloan Jr. with his famous autobiography, My Years with General Motors. In 1963, Chandler became chairman of the history department at Johns Hopkins University, where he edited the papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had just completed his second term as president.
An active HBS faculty member from 1970 to 1989, Chandler not only conducted some of his most important research at the School, but he also nurtured a group of younger world-class business historians. With them, he created an enormously popular elective in business history. One of those historians, HBS professor emeritus Thomas McCraw, in his 1988 collection of Chandler essays, The Essential Alfred Chandler, described a man who was universally regarded as both an academic giant and a true gentleman. “Chandler’s most striking trait, in all his personal relations, remains a pronounced lack of pretension,” McCraw observed, a modesty maintained even as Chandler was producing great books that “light up a landscape that had been only dimly perceived, if at all.”
A memorial service will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church on October 19. Contributions may be made in Chandler’s memory to any of the following: The Alfred D. Chandler Fund, c/o Kerry Cietanno, Teele Hall, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA 02163; The Memorial Church, Harvard University, One Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA 02138; The Massachusetts Audubon Society, 208 South Great Rd., Lincoln, MA 01773.
For a Chandler tribute, visit http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5695.html.
