Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on June 18, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(3):415-418; doi:10.1093/es/khn057
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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.
Reflections on Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
LOUIS GALAMBOS is a professor of history and co-director at Johns Hopkins University of the Institute for Applied Economics and the Study of Business Enterprise. His courses at Hopkins focus largely on global developments from the first through the third industrial revolutions, and his research has for some years been concerned with the process of innovation in modern societies. He has written and edited a number of books and articles that describe and analyze private, public, and nonprofit organizations, their leaders, and their interactions. He was honored recently with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Business History Conference
Contact information: galambos@jhu.edu.
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Once, long ago, I was teaching business and economic history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Alas, my academic career was stalled in the early 1960s. A distinguished Yale professor had kept the revised manuscript of my dissertation sitting on his desk for a year without reading it or submitting a report to the press. Meanwhile, I had just learned that editors do not want to publish fifty-page academic articles. I was having a wonderful time teaching the talented students at Rice, but it was not at all clear that I was not soon going to be looking for a different job and maybe a different profession.
Fortunately, I had met Al Chandler while I was spending the academic year 1959–1960 on a postdoc—actually in my case an "almost postdoc" because I finished late—at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Never having taken a course in business history, economic history,