Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on June 3, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(3):411-414; doi:10.1093/es/khn051
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Chandler: A Retrospect
MIRA WILKINS is Professor of Economics at Florida International University, Miami, Florida. Her first book, that set her on the path of studying the history of multinational enterprise, was Mira Wilkins and Frank Ernst Hill, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continent (1964). Next came The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise (1970) and The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise (1974), chronicling the history of American business abroad. Then came The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (1989) and The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914–1945 (2004). All four of these broad studies were published by Harvard University Press. She has published other books and many articles on the history of multinational enterprise. Currently, she is working on the third volume of her history of foreign investment in the United States, which will carry that story to the present. She is a former president of the Business History Conference, and received, after Alfred Chandler, the second life time achievement award (in 2004) from that organization. Her most recent book, William Hausman, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins, Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007, was published in the Spring of 2008
Contact information: Department of Economics, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199 USA; E-mail: wilkinsm@fiu.edu.
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I met Al Chandler in late 1962 (or early 1963), when he visited the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, as a guest of Associate Dean Clarence Walton. Chandler gave a seminar, based on his new book Strategy and Structure. I was then at Columbia Business School, completing my (and Frank Ernest Hill’s) archive-based history of Ford Motor Company's international operations, which was my first book. As my next project, I was seeking to write an overall history of US business abroad. I wanted to figure out whether patterns I had found in my research on Ford abroad were typical (or atypical) of US corporations, in general, as the latter expanded worldwide.
Recently, I looked at the preface (dated June 1963) of our American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents, published in 1964; there was no acknowledgment of the