Alfred D. Chandler Books

2013 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This classic text, chosen for the 1964 Thomas Newcomen Award in Business History by the editors of "Business History Review," is based on intensive studies of General Motors, Dupont, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Sears, Roebuck. Chandler shows how the seventy largest corporations in America have dealth with a single economic problem: the effective administration of an expanding business. The author summarizes the history of the expansion of the nation's largest industries during the previous hundred years and then examines in depth the modern decentralized corporate structure as it was developed independently by four companies--General Motors, Dupont, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Sears, Roebuck.

The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution. The managerial revolution, presented here with force and conviction, is the story of how the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of market forces. Chandler shows that the fundamental shift toward managers running large enterprises exerted a far greater influence in determining size and concentration in American industry than other factors so often cited as critical: the quality of entrepreneurship, the availability of capital, or public policy.