PREEMINENT BUSINESS HISTORIAN DONATES COLLECTED PAPERS TO HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
Scholars Honor Life and Work of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., at HBS Event
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| Professor Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., (right) acknowledges his many admirers at Baker Library Celebration Photo: Stuart Cahill |
BOSTON - Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Isidor Straus Professor of Business History Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the world’s foremost authority on the historical evolution and organizational development of the large modern corporation, has donated his collected works to the School’s Baker Library. The collection, which will be housed within the library’s Historical Collections, reflects the life’s work and intellectual development of Chandler from 1941 to 2004, including his time as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard University, and his years as a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard Business School.
The donation includes virtually all of Chandler’s lecture and seminar notes and nearly the entire body of his professional correspondence. It provides an invaluable overview of his and others’ research on and interpretation of the evolution of the giant modern corporation; his editorial work on the papers of Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower; his role as trustee and president of the Economic History Association and as executive board member of the Organization of American Historians; and his involvement with many other professional and scholarly organizations.
The collection also comprises manuscript versions of his work, along with research material gathered during his comparative studies of corporate structure and its development in the United States and other industrial economies, including a wealth of notes and photocopies from records in institutional and company archives.
Members of both the Harvard Business School and Harvard University faculties attended the event, which was hosted by HBS Professor and Director of Research Geoff Jones at Baker Library, which recently reopened after two years of renovation and reconstruction. “Chandler’s work is inspirational because of its unique combination of historical rigor and thinking big,” said Jones. “His papers were the key formative influence on my own development and the reason why I – like a lot of my generation – went into business history. As a person, Chandler is incredibly enthusiastic, humble, and interested in the work of young, yet unknown scholars, and that made a huge impact on me as well.”
Other speakers included Harvard University historians Bernard Bailyn and David Landes, as well as Professor Richard John of the University of Illinois at Chicago. HBS Professor Malcom Salter presented Chandler with a gift on behalf of the School.
“Today we celebrate Al Chandler’s gift of his papers and personal archive to Baker Library – a gift, in effect, of guidance and knowledge and a promise of important work by scholars and students of the future,” said Landes, who was a doctoral student at Harvard with both Chandler and Bailyn.
Chandler came to Harvard Business School in 1970. He was Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor for a year and Straus Professor of Business History from 1971 to 1989. He retired from the active faculty in 1989, but continues to conduct research and write. His most recent books are Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (2005), a volume he co-edited, and Inventing the Electronic Century; The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (2001).
Among Chandler’s many other influential works are: Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990); The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962). He also contributed numerous chapters and articles to books and professional journals; worked closely with Alfred Sloan, the founder of General Motors, on his autobiography; and served as editor of Harvard Studies in Business History.
Throughout his career, Chandler was actively engaged with numerous professional organizations and conferences, often in leadership roles. Among them were the Economic History Association, the Society for the History of Technology, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Business History Conference, the Business History Foundation, and the Council on Research in Economic History. He was chairman of the Advisory History Committee of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and also served on advisory boards and committees for the histories of a number of corporations, including Alcoa, the British Petroleum Company, Citibank, and DuPont’s Research and Development Division.
Chandler has received honorary degrees from the University of Leuven (1976), the University of Antwerp (1979), Babson College (1982), Ohio State University (1987), and Canada’s York University (1988).