Political Economist

May 12, 2007
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., a Business Historian, Dies at 88
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Alfred D. Chandler Jr., an economic historian who revolutionized the writing
of business history, shunning the old debate about whether tycoons are good
or bad, and instead arguing persuasively in almost two dozen books that it
was the emergence of professional management that propelled modern
capitalism, died on May 9 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88.

Jim Aisner, a spokesman for Harvard Business School, where Dr. Chandler had
taught, announced the death.

Fortune Magazine last year called Dr. Chandler “America’s pre-eminent
business historian,” saying that for a long-term perspective on the Fortune
500, the magazine’s ranking of the biggest corporations, “there’s really
only one person to ask.”

Before Dr. Chandler, the bulk of business histories were morality plays that
portrayed executives as heroic or damnable. He helped redirect the field
toward dispassionate analysis of the anatomy of business. He emphasized the
transformative power of technology as railroads and the telegraph spawned
big business. These corporations needed what Mr. Chandler called “a new
subspecies of economic man — the salaried manager.”

The salaried manager represented a new concept: a manager could possess
management expertise independent of the content of what he was managing.
Unlike the traditional entrepreneur, he need have no stake in the company he
managed.

Dr. Chandler developed this theme most famously in “The Visible Hand: The
Managerial Revolution in American Business” (1977), which won the Pulitzer
Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize. His thesis was that managers,
functioning as a “visible hand,” had replaced the “invisible hand” of Adam
Smith’s free market in allocating resources.

This new emphasis on organizational structure so transformed the field of
business history that some call the period before Dr. Chandler’s
publications “B.C.,” meaning before Chandler. Glenn Porter wrote in 1992 in
“The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920”: “Virtually every work now written on
the history of modern, large-scale enterprise must begin by placing itself
within the Chandlerian analytical framework.”

Dr. Chandler’s work was distinguished by an intellectual rigor he gleaned
from the sociologist Talcott Parsons, one of his professors at Harvard. Dr.
Chandler rigorously compared earlier and later time frames to see what
changed, and, more important, what caused the change. He likened the process
to a controlled scientific experiment.

His conclusions jolted conventional wisdom. For example, he said that
America’s industrial revolution did not start in New England mills, but with
the beginning of large-scale mining of anthracite coal fields in
Pennsylvania in the 1830s and 1840s. This new power source replaced water,
wood and charcoal, facilitating the making of iron and metal products.

Alfred du Pont Chandler Jr. was born in Guyencourt, Del., on Sept. 15, 1918.
Although he was not a blood relation of the du Ponts who founded the
chemical company, his great-grandmother was raised by the du Ponts after her
parents died of yellow fever.

Alfred spent his first five years in Buenos Aires, where his father
represented an American locomotive company. When he was 11, the family moved
back to the United States and settled near Wilmington.

Family lore has it that the boy announced his intention to become a
historian by the time he was 7. He was inspired by Wilbur Fisk Gordy’s book
“An Elementary History of the United States,” a primer for sixth-graders his
father gave him. He read it 19 times.

At Phillips Exeter Academy, he won a prize for excellence in history. In
1940, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where generations of his
family had studied, beginning in the 18th century. During World War II, he
served in the Navy, interpreting intelligence photos.

He enrolled as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill to study Southern regional history. But he became captivated by
sociology, and returned to Harvard to study with Mr. Parsons.

He stumbled on his dissertation topic in old papers on the history of
American railroads written by his great-grandfather, a founder of the
financial-data company that became Standard & Poor’s. The dissertation
became a book, “Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst and Reformer”
(1956).

From 1950 to 1963, Dr. Chandler taught at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he helped edit the letters of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote
“Strategy and Structure,” which used General Motors, DuPont, Exxon and
Sears, Roebuck to develop his ideas on how companies employ organization
structure to further strategy.

Dr. Chandler taught at Johns Hopkins, where he edited the papers of
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then joined the faculty of Harvard Business
School from which he retired in 1989. He was editor of the Harvard Studies
in Business History.

He was a visiting professor at Oxford and elsewhere, and president of the
Economic History Association and the Business History Conference. He was a
member of the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Chandler is survived by his wife, the former Fay Martin; his daughters,
Alpine (Dougie) Chandler Bird, of Annapolis, Md., and Mary (Mimi) Chandler
Watt, of Dina Powys, Wales; his son, Howard, of Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa.;
his sisters Nina Murray, of Bedford, Mass., and Nantucket, and Sophie
Consagra, of Manhattan; five grandchildren and two step-grandchildren; and
one great-grandchild.

Dr. Chandler fancied a glass of sherry with lunch before retiring to write
on yellow-lined paper in small, cramped letters. Though he did not use a
computer, he gave characteristic thought to its impact on economic change.

“All I know is that the commercializing of the Internet is transforming the
world,” he said in an interview with Newsweek last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/business/12chandler.html?pagewanted=print