Obituary: Business historian and Harvard Professor Alfred Chandler

In his long career, he chronicled and analyzed big businesses around the globe in a prolific corpus of books and articles. At the time of his death, he was the Straus Professor of Business History Emeritus at HBS.

Chandler, who in the 1950s helped Alfred P. Sloan, the creator of the modern General Motors, write his famous autobiography My Years with General Motors, investigated the dynamic factors that made the American economy and its businesses succeed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The key factors, as Chandler saw them, were the rise of the railroad, concentrated urban markets, mass production techniques, electrification, the internal combustion engine, and research and development.

He concluded that successful industrial corporations intelligently harnessed and exploited these forces and made the transition from entrepreneurial enterprises to multidivisional, vertically integrated companies. In essence, the creation and development of modern managerial capitalism was the driver of American business success. What counts are people their skills, knowledge and experience, he said.

Chandlers landmark books and articles influenced generations of scholars in many countries and numerous disciplines, including history, economics, sociology, and management science. Al Chandler revolutionized the field of business history and nurtured it at this School with the help of outstanding colleagues who worked closely with him and admired him as a mentor and friend, said Jay Light, Dean of Harvard Business School. Through his teaching and research and the comprehensive collection of papers he donated to our librarys historical collections, he has left a lasting mark on scholars and students at HBS and far beyond.

In Strategy and Structure, published in 1962, 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. Through a detailed study of General Motors, DuPont, Exxon, and Sears, Roebuck & Company, he showed that organizational structure is a direct result of strategy. The book helped spawn the field of corporate strategy and made the maxim strategy precedes structure a staple of corporate management during the 1960s and 1970s.

In The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1978, Chandler argued that the visible hand of management had replaced, in Adam Smiths words, the invisible hand of market forces in coordinating and allocating the resources of the economy as a result of the coming of the railroads and the telegraph in the 1800s. Although there was little need for middle managers prior to 1840, Chandler concluded, by the mid-twentieth century, the multiunit, multifunctional enterprise administered by salaried managers had become the most powerful institution in the American economy.

In another important work, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of American Capitalism, published in 1990 and winner of an American Association of Publishers Award and the University of Chicagos Melamed Prize, Chandler took on a more global view. He compared in detail the evolution of managerial capitalism in the United States, England, and Germany by examining the 200 largest corporations in those countries. According to his findings, the first movers in capital-intensive industries kept their competitive advantage only if they made three key strategic investments: first, in large-scale, high-speed production; second, in distribution; and, third, in a management structure that could plan, coordinate, and monitor the companys vast operations.

Chandler continued to do research and write until the very end of his life. In 2001, he wrote Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industry, which focused on the fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the rise of Sony and Matsushita, as Japan conquered the worldwide consumer electronics market.

After earning his masters degree in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1952, Chandler taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1950 to 1963. In 1963, Chandler was asked to join the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, where he chaired the history department. After seven years in Baltimore, however, Chandler felt he needed more time to pursue his own research interests. He was even prepared to leave academia to begin work on The Visible Hand, when the then HBS Dean, Lawrence Fouraker, invited him to join the Business School faculty in 1970.

As a member of the active HBS faculty from 1970 to 1989, Chandler not only conducted some of his most important research, but he also made business history one of the Schools most prominent and popular areas.Chandler received numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world, including Harvard, which honored him in 1995.