Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, The Visible Hand after Twenty Years

Two decades have passed since the publication of The Visible Hand , Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, magisterial account of the rise of the modern business enterprise in the United States. Although Chandlers pathbreaking work has been widely hailed as a landmark in business history, only rarely has anyone considered systematically its influence on the large body of historical scholarship on related topics. This essay is intended to help fill this gap. It is divided into two sections. The first section reviews Chandlers argument, touches on the relationship of Chandlers oeuvre to his personal background, and locates The Visible Hand in the context of American historical writing. The second considers how three groups of historians have responded to Chandlers ideas. These groups consist of champions who creatively elaborated on Chandler's intellectual agenda; critics who probed anomalies between Chandler's argument and their own research; and skeptics who rejected Chandlers analysis outright.

[1]  E. Perkins.  The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Colonial America: The Foundations of Modern Business History , 1989, Business History Review.

[2]  T. Freyer,et al.  Regulating Big Business , 1992 .

[3]  Harold C. Livesay,et al.  Entrepreneurial Dominance in Businesses Large and Small, Past and Present , 1989, Business History Review.

[4]  M. Kammen,et al.  The Past before us : contemporary historical writing in the United States , 1981 .

[5]  Pamela Walker Laird,et al.  New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America , 1991 .

[6]  C. McCurdy.  The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and The Modernization of American Corporation Law, 1869–1903 , 1979, Business History Review.

[7]  Simon Baatz,et al.  Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made , 1987 .

[8]  Thomas C. Cochran,et al.  The Business Revolution , 1974 .

[9]  W. Bernard Carlson.  Innovation as a Social Process , 1992 .

[10]  Susan Strasser,et al.  Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market , 1992 .

[11]  C. Sabel,et al.  The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity , 1984 .

[12]  David A. Hounshell,et al.  From the American System to Mass Production 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States by David A. Hounshell (review) , 2023 .

[13]  Philip Scranton,et al.  Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885 by Philip B. Scranton (review) , 2023 .

[14]  Glenn Porter,et al.  The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1910 , 1994 .

[15]  Walter Licht,et al.  Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century , 1995 .

[16]  J. F. Wall,et al.  The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880-1940: A Quantitative Study in Social Change , 1975 .

[17]  Lisa Bud-Frierman.  Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business , 1994 .

[18]  T. McCraw,et al.  Regulation in America , 1975, Business History Review.

[19]  T. McCraw.  Business & Government: The Origins of the Adversary Relationship , 1984 .

[20]  Arnold Thackray,et al.  Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric , 1986 .

[21]  D. Sicilia,et al.  The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure , 1986 .

[22]  A. Chandler.  Enterprise and history: Comparative business history , 1984 .

[23]  E. Perkins.  American public finance and financial services, 1700-1815 , 1995 .

[24]  Joseph A. Pratt.  The Petroleum Industry in Transition: Antitrust and the Decline of Monopoly Control in Oil , 1980, The Journal of Economic History.

[25]  L. Winner.  The Whale and the Reactor , 2020 .

[26]  The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years@@@The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower , 1971 .

[27]  Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change In America, 1900-1933. , 1991 .

[28]  Eric Foner.  Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 , 1988 .

[29]  N. Painter.  Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 , 1987 .

[30]  Thomas M. Doerflinger,et al.  A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia , 1988 .

[31]  Thomas J. Misa.  A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 , 1996 .

[32]  W. Diebold,et al.  The Second Industrial Divide , 1985 .

[33]  Neil Fligstein,et al.  FROM THE TRANSFORMATION OF CORPORATE CONTROL , 2021, The New Economic Sociology.

[34]  James R. Beniger.  The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society , 1986 .

[35]  D. Landes.  The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present , 1969 .

[36]  John K. Smith.  The Scientific Tradition in American Industrial Research , 1990 .

[37]  P. Uselding.  Business History and the History of Technology , 1980, Business History Review.

[38]  Gerald Berk,et al.  Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia by Colleen A. Dunlavy (review) , 1994, Technology and Culture.

[39]  Richard H.K. Vietor,et al.  Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America. , 1994 .

[40]  Richard R. John.  Private Mail Delivery in the United States during the Nineteenth Century: A Sketch , 1986 .

[41]  David A. Hounshell,et al.  Hughesian history of technology and Chandlerian business history: Parallels, departures, and critics , 1995 .

[42]  David Montgomery,et al.  The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 , 1987 .

[43]  H. Livesay.  American Made: Men Who Shaped the American Economy , 1979 .

[44]  K. Lipartito.  When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890–1920 , 1994 .

[45]  Thomas K. McCraw,et al.  Prophets of Regulation. , 1984 .

[46]  Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America. , 1998 .

[47]  A. Chandler,et al.  The essential Alfred Chandler: Essays toward a historical theory of big business , 1988 .

[48]  W. Becker,et al.  The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893-1921. , 1981 .

[49]  David A. Hounshell,et al.  Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D , 1989 .

[50]  E. Herman,et al.  Alfred Chandler's New Business History: A Review , 1980 .

[51]  Alfred D. Chandler.  Response to the Contributors to the Review Colloquium on Scale and Scope , 1990, Business History Review.

[52]  Charles F. Sabel,et al.  HISTORICAL ALTERNATIVES TO MASS PRODUCTION: POLITICS, MARKETS AND TECHNOLOGY IN NINETEEN-THCENTURY INDUSTRIALIZATION , 1985 .

[53]  William R. Leach.  Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture , 1993 .

[54]  Lynn Hunt,et al.  Telling the Truth about History , 1995 .

[55]  D. North,et al.  Encyclopedia of American economic history : studies of the principal movements and ideas , 1981 .

[56]  John Braeman.  The New Left and American Foreign Policy during the Age of Normalcy: A Re-examination , 1983, Business History Review.

[57]  D. Nelson.  The Company Union Movement, 1900–1937: A Reexamination , 1982, Business History Review.

[58]  Alfred D. Chandler.  The Growth of the Transnational Industrial Firm in the United States and the United Kingdom: A Comparative Analysis , 1980 .

[59]  D. Greenberg.  Reassessing the Power Patterns of the Industrial Revolution: An Anglo- American Comparison , 1982 .

[60]  Martin J. Sklar.  The corporate reconstruction of American capitalism, 1890-1916 : the market, the law, and politics , 1988 .

[61]  George H. Douglas,et al.  Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 by Gerald Berk (review) , 1995, Technology and Culture.

[62]  Menahem Blondheim,et al.  News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 , 1994 .

[63]  N. Lamoreaux,et al.  Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy by William Lazonick (review) , 1992, Technology and Culture.

[64]  James Livingston.  Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 , 1994 .

[65]  Alfred P. Sloan,et al.  My years with General Motors , 1964 .

[66]  Gerald Zahavi.  Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950 , 1988 .

[67]  George Rogers Taylor,et al.  The transportation revolution, 1815-1860 , 1952 .

[68]  Thomas Childs Cochran.  Frontiers of change : early industrialism in America , 1982 .

[69]  T. Freyer.  Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and America, 1880-1990 , 1992 .

[70]  JoAnne Yates,et al.  Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management , 1990 .

[71]  Alfred D. Chandler,et al.  Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism , 1992 .

[72]  Bernard Bailyn.  The Challenge of Modern Historiography , 1982 .

[73]  Steve Fraser.  Combined and Uneven Development in the Men's Clothing Industry , 1983, Business History Review.

[74]  J. Patterson.  Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 , 1996 .

[75]  M. Blackford,et al.  Business enterprise in American history , 1986 .

[76]  S. Kutler,et al.  The promise of American history : progress and prospects , 1982 .

[77]  J. Walker.  Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War , 1986, Business History Review.

[78]  Arthur M. Johnson,et al.  Family firm to modern multinational : Norton Company, a New England enterprise , 1986 .

[79]  Paul Israel,et al.  From, Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830–1920 by Paul Israel (review) , 1995, Technology and Culture.

[80]  Alfred Dupont Chandler,et al.  战略与结构 : 美国工商企业成长的若干篇章=strategy and structure : chapters in the history of the American industrial enterprise , 1962 .

[81]  L. Galambos.  The Emerging Organizational Synthesis In Modern American History , 1970, Business History Review.

[82]  D. Mowery.  Firm Structure, Government Policy, and the Organization of Industrial Research: Great Britain and the United States, 1900–1950 , 1984, Business History Review.

[83]  Richard R. John.  Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835 , 1997, Studies in American Political Development.

[84]  Victoria C. Hattam.  Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States , 1994 .

[85]  James N. Baron,et al.  Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers. , 1991 .

[86]  Thomas C. Cochran,et al.  Challenges to American Values: Society, Business, and Religion , 1985 .

[87]  Peter Novick,et al.  That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession , 1988 .

[88]  W. Bernard Carlson,et al.  Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900 , 1991 .

[89]  Susan Strasser,et al.  Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 , 1991 .

[90]  Robert W. Garnet.  The telephone enterprise : the evolution of the Bell System's horizontal structure, 1876-1909 , 1985 .

[91]  Richard R. John,et al.  Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse , 1995 .

[92]  Merritt Roe Smith,et al.  Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change by Merritt Roe Smith (review) , 2023 .

[93]  O. Williamson.  The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting , 1985 .

[94]  Kenneth Lipartito,et al.  Culture and the Practice of Business History , 1995 .

[95]  Philip M. Marcus,et al.  The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business , 1979 .

[96]  H. Rockoff,et al.  Accumulation And Power An Economic History Of The United States , 1989 .

[97]  R. Sylla,et al.  Banks and State Public Finance in the New Republic: The United States, 1790–1860 , 1987, The Journal of Economic History.

[98]  Judith A. Bootcheck,et al.  Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. , 1986 .

[99]  John K. Brown,et al.  The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore & Ohio, the Nation's First Railroad, 1828-1853 , 1993 .

[100]  Alfred D. Chandler.  The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism , 1984, Business History Review.

[101]  L. Galambos.  Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis , 1983, Business History Review.

[102]  Alfred D. Chandler,et al.  Henry Varnum Poor, Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer. , 1957 .

[103]  Ernie Englander.  The inside contract system of production and organization: A neglected aspect of the history of the firm , 1987 .

[104]  Robert G. Albion,et al.  The "Communication Revolution" , 1932 .

[105]  Jeremy Atack,et al.  An Emerging Independent American Economy, 1815-1875 , 1980 .

[106]  Thomas A. Kochan,et al.  Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945. , 1987 .

[107]  Alfred D. Chandler,et al.  Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation , 1971 .

[108]  Richard B. Kielbowicz,et al.  The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860-1900 , 1988 .