Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on June 13, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(3):419-421; doi:10.1093/es/khn050
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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.
Alfred Chandler and the Importance of Organization
GEOFFREY JONES is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. He previously taught at the universities of Cambridge and Reading, and the London School of Economics, in Great Britain. His books on the history of global business include Multinationals and Global Capitalism (2005). He is currently co-editor of Business History Review
Contact information: gjones@hbs.edu.
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Alfred D. Chandler entered my professional life incrementally rather than dramatically. As a student of economic history at Cambridge University in Britain in the early 1970s, I barely encountered his name. British universities had their own long traditions in business and economic history, including a strong interest in entrepreneurship and in government policies toward industry. Most British scholars were not especially enthusiastic about ideas from across the Atlantic, whether the methodological approach of the new economic history of Robert Fogel, or Chandler's organizational synthesis. Cambridge was an especially closed academic world, with a strong assumption that little that happened outside its delightful campus could be really important. It was not until 1979, when