Alfred Chandler and the Importance of Organization

Abstract

Alfred D. Chandler entered my professional life incrementally rather than dramatically.As a student of economic history at CambridgeUniversity in Britain in the early 1970s, I barely encountered his name. British universities had their own long traditions in business and economic history, including a strong interest in entrepreneurship and in government policies toward industry. Most British scholars were not especially enthusiastic about ideas from across the Atlantic, whether the methodological approach of the new economic history of Robert Fogel, or Chandler's organizational synthesis. Cambridge was an especially closed academic world, with a strong assumption that little that happened outside its delightful campus could be really important. It was not until 1979, when I was recruited by the Business History Unit at the London School of Economics (LSE), headed by Chandler's (then) acolyte Leslie Hannah, that I read Strategy and Structure, nearly two decades after it was published.