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Alfred D. Chandler Jr.

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Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University who wrote extensively about modern corporations' scale and management structures. His works redefined the business and the economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. 

He has been called "the doyen of American business historians." Chandler was the great-grandson of Henry Varnum Poor. "Du Pont" was apparently a family name given to his grandfather because the Du Pont family raised his great-grandmother, and there are other connections as well. Chandler graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1936 and Harvard College in 1940. 

After World War II, he returned to Harvard, finished his M.A. in 1946, and earned his doctorate in 1952 under the direction of Frederick Merk. He taught at M.I.T. and Johns Hopkins University before arriving at Harvard Business School in 1970. Chandler used the papers of his ancestor Henry Varnum Poor, a leading railway industry analyst, the American Railroad Journal publisher, and a founder of Standard & Poor's, as a basis for his Ph.D. thesis.

Chandler began looking at large-scale enterprises in the early 1960s. His book Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962) examined the organization of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Motors, and Sears, Roebuck, and Co. He found that managerial organization developed in response to the corporation's business strategy. 

The book was voted the eleventh most influential management book of the 20th century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management. This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large-scale corporations was expanded into a "managerial revolution" in The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. He further pursued that book's themes in Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990) and co-edited an anthology on the same themes with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997).

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The Visible Hand

Paul Graham
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