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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on June 18, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(3):422-425; doi:10.1093/es/khn053
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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.

In Memoriam: Alfred Chandler and the Soul of Business History

Christopher D. Mckenna

CHRISTOPHER D. MCKENNA (PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, 2000) is a reader in business history and strategy at the Saïd Business School, a fellow of Brasenose College, and the director of the MBA, all within the University of Oxford. Recent publications include "Writing the Ghost-Writer Back In: Alfred Sloan, Alfred Chandler, John McDonald and the Intellectual Origins of Corporate Strategy," in Management and Organizational History (May 2006), and The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (2006) which won both the Hagley Prize of the Business History Conference and the Newcomen-Harvard Book Award of the Business History Review. McKenna is currently at work on his next book, Partners in Crime, an international history of white-collar crime and a set of essays on the intellectual links between business history and organizational theory tentatively titled, Management is History

Contact information: chris.mckenna@sbs.ox.ac.uk.

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

I never really knew Al Chandler. While my teachers, Lou Galambos, David Hounshell, and Hugh Aitken, were to varying degrees close friends with Chandler, I spoke at length with him only twice. I met Chandler for the first time in 1990 when I was trying to decide where to do my doctorate and I met with him a second time when I held the Chandler Travel Fellowship at the Harvard Business School in 1995 as I was writing my doctoral dissertation. Chandler's scholarship consistently shaped my approach to the study of business history, yet my relationship was always to Chandler's academic research rather than to him as a mentor or as a colleague.

Although I never knew Chandler in a personal sense, I also never knew business history without his overwhelming intellectual presence. Since 1984, when I first studied economic history under Hugh Aitken as an undergraduate at Amherst . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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