Chandler's Paths of Learning

Abstract

In his last two major works,Inventing the Electronic CenturyandShaping the Industrial Century, Alfred Chandler extended his well-known historical model put forth originally inStrategy and Structure, The Visible Hand, andScale and Scopeby drawing on insights from scholarship dealing with organizational learning and evolutionary economics. In the earlier works, he won high praise, as evinced by the awarding of the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for his contribution in advancing the understanding of history, economics, and sociology. His work presented a powerful alternative vision of businesspeople from the version usually communicated by the older Progressive school of history. Although practitioners of the latter brand of history generally acknowledged industrialization's material benefits, many worried that such change represented a Faustian bargain: they feared that concentrated economic power threatened the preservation of cherished democratic institutions and values.