Chandler - Publications - Faculty & Research

23 Jun 2003
Research & Ideas

Historically Speaking: A Roundtable at HBS

Business History at HBS traces its roots back to 1927 when it was part of a course in business policy. But the golden age for this area of study at the School began with the arrival of Professor Alfred Chandler in 1970. Universally... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Aisner

11 Sep 2012
First Look

First Look: September 11

meals and lodging planned, and their daily productivity measured and monitored. These findings disrupt prevailing narratives in business history, challenging the primacy that Alfred Chandler awarded the railroad as the testing ground for... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

08 Jun 2009
Research & Ideas

The Return of the Salesman

seeing its real importance. It didn't help that economists also thought that selling was unimportant in influencing markets and that door-to-door selling declined in the United States in the final decades of the 20th century. But scholars often build on what other... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

14 Nov 2019
Book

Lifting the Lid on Turkey's Hidden Business History

diversified business group, comprising over one hundred individual companies, employing over 90,000 people, and the only Turkish business to enter the Fortune 500 venture. I and my co-author Asli Colpan, who now teaches at the University of Kyoto and was previously an... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

22 Jul 2002
Research & Ideas

How Business Strategy Tamed the “Invisible Hand”

in production and economies of scope in distribution. In some industries, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was gradually tamed by what the historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has termed the "visible hand" of professional... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat

12 May 2003
Research & Ideas

How Hot is the “Hot Spot” Business?

with the unsexy title, A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. Co-edited by HBS professor emeritus Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada, the story starts out... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne & Martha Lagace; Technology; Communications; Telecommunications

05 Dec 2017
Research & Ideas

What We've Learned from 101 Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

Paulo Lemann Professor; Erica Salvaj, Alfred D. Chandler Fellow in Business History; and doctoral student Cheng Gao. Sean Silverthorne: Now that you’ve reached the 100th interview milestone, reflect a bit on how the project has worked... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

08 Apr 2009
Research & Ideas

Clayton Christensen on Disrupting Health Care

if so, where are we on the transition timeline? A: System problems require a systemic solution. You need what the great [HBS professor] Al Chandler called "the visible hand of managerial capitalism." When this kind of change happened in... View Details

Keywords: by Deborah Blagg; Health

21 Dec 2010
First Look

First Look: December 21

Alfred D. Chandler nor do they resemble small- and medium-sized Mittelstand firms, which Gary Herrigel highlighted as a successful alternative. That is why so far there has been little research about them beyond individual case studies.... View Details

Publications