Alfred D. Chandler Jr., 88; Harvard business historian won a Pulitzer Prize
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian who showed how transformations in management structure helped drive capitalism and affected economies worldwide, died of cardiac arrest May 9 at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88.
Chandler retired in 1989 from Harvard Business School after a long career in academia. He wrote or edited more than 25 books, including “The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business,” which received the 1978 Pulitzer in history and Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize.
Long regarded as the dean of management theory, he was responsible for exhaustive studies of major U.S. corporations such as the chemical giant DuPont, Standard Oil and General Motors. He also assisted legendary GM board Chairman Alfred P. Sloan with his memoir, “My Years With General Motors.”
The study of innovation and how wealth is generated was at the core of much of his work, and Chandler remained relevant to generations of business consultants and students. He asked repeatedly, in researching the success or failure of companies from the Industrial Revolution to the present: What made for change? Why did it come when it did and in the way it did?
For answers, he usually turned to an analysis of management structure. From his earliest studies, he chronicled how in the late 1800s the railroad and telegraph made rapid industrial growth possible and how the gray-suited executive class gradually replaced the entrepreneurial tycoon as the chief corporate power.
To shun the standard focus on 19th century “robber barons” in favor of a more nuanced look at corporate supervisors was considered a major shift in historical review.
In this transition to a greater professionalism, he wrote about the birth of “a new economic institution, the managerial business enterprise, and a new subspecies of economic man, the salaried manager.”
He advocated the importance of this salaried manager as an independent force in business, a person whose expertise was portable and not forever tied to the company he oversaw.
“The Visible Hand,” which championed his notion of the expert salaried manager, challenged 18th century economist Adam Smith’s emphasis on the “invisible hand” of free-market forces in capitalism.
Chandler’s key works also included “Strategy and Structure,” a study of organizational hierarchy, and “Scale and Scope,” a comparative history of hundreds of large corporations in the United States, Britain and Germany.
In recent years, Chandler wrote about the electronics and pharmaceutical industries. He also spoke about changes he observed in big business during his career.
“The most important difference -- and this has been happening since the 1880s -- is the continuing transformation of big business by high-technology firms,” he told Fortune magazine last year.
“When a new science appears, they commercialize it globally. In the 1880s the new technologies were electricity and steam. The Germans commercialized them first. Pretty soon you could telegraph China and ship your products to the Chinese dye industry. Today it’s biotech.”
Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was born Sept. 15, 1918, in Guyencourt, Del. He was unrelated to the Delaware Du Ponts who started a chemical company that bears their name.
He spent several early years in Buenos Aires, where his father was a representative of a Philadelphia-based locomotive company. At 7, Chandler became enamored with history after his father bought him Wilbur Fisk Gordy’s primer, “Elementary History of the United States.” He read the book nearly 20 times.
He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and went on to Harvard University, where he excelled on the sailing team with another member of the Class of 1940, John F. Kennedy. Chandler was a Navy veteran of World War II.
He returned to Harvard for a doctorate in business history.
After teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1963 and rose to history department chairman.
Harvard hired Chandler in 1971.
Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Fay Martin Chandler of Cambridge; four children; two sisters; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
