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

Web

Research Links: Records of Railroad Companies & Personal Papers - Railroads and the Transformation of Capitalism | Harvard Business School

railroads with which the Nashua and Lowell had dealings. Alfred D. Chandler Papers The collection provides a comprehensive view of historian Alfred D. Chandler’s sixty year academic career. Chandler’s study of railroads as the first... View Details

1996
Book

Management Past and Present: A Casebook on American Business History

By: A. D. Chandler Jr., T. K. McCraw and R. S. Tedlow

Keywords: Business History; United States

Citation

Find at Harvard

11 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt: ’Entrepreneurship and Multinationals’

How important were they compared with governments and other institutional actors in building global capitalism? Were they followers of fashions and trends, or creators of them? Could they dictate to consumers and governments? Or were they dictated to? MNEs have been... View Details

Keywords: Re: Geoffrey G. Jones

01 Mar 2009
News

A New Approach to Health-Care Reform

about real change. Is this change happening, and if so, where are we on the transition timeline? System problems require a systemic solution. You need what the great HBS professor Al Chandler called “the visible hand of managerial... View Details

Keywords: Deborah Blagg; Health, Social Assistance

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

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

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

Turkey’s economic development story has always been something of a black box for scholars to understand, perhaps in part because many of the most successful business enterprises there have been in family hands and largely closed to public scrutiny. The authors of a new... 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

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

01 Sep 2009
News

Professor, Historian, and Storyteller

impersonal forces and events. Indeed, in the field of business history, it was HBS professor Alfred Chandler who shifted the focus of scholars and others away from individual heroic entrepreneurs toward a concentrated examination of the... View Details

Keywords: News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information

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

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