《THE NEW YORK TIMES》 Alfred D. Chandler Jr., a Business Historian, Dies at 88 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: May 12, 2007 Correction Appended Alfred D. Chandler Jr., an economic historian who revolutionized the writing of business history, shunning the old debate about whether tycoons are good or bad, and instead arguing persuasively in almost two dozen books that it was the emergence of professional management that propelled modern capitalism, died on May 9 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88. Jim Aisner, a spokesman for Harvard Business School, where Dr. Chandler had taught, announced the death. Fortune Magazine last year called Dr. Chandler “America’s pre-eminent business historian,” saying that for a long-term perspective on the Fortune 500, the magazine’s ranking of the biggest corporations, “there’s really only one person to ask.” Before Dr. Chandler, the bulk of business histories were morality plays that portrayed executives as heroic or damnable. He helped redirect the field toward dispassionate analysis of the anatomy of business. He emphasized the transformative power of technology as railroads and the telegraph spawned big business. These corporations needed what Mr. Chandler called “a new subspecies of economic man — the salaried manager.” The salaried manager represented a new concept: a manager could possess management expertise independent of the content of what he was managing. Unlike the traditional entrepreneur, he need have no stake in the company he managed. Dr. Chandler developed this theme most famously in “The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business” (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize. His thesis was that managers, functioning as a “visible hand,” had replaced the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s free market in allocating resources. This new emphasis on organizational structure so transformed the field of business history that some call the period before Dr. Chandler’s publications “B.C.,” meaning before Chandler. Glenn Porter wrote in 1992 in “The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920”: “Virtually every work now written on the history of modern, large-scale enterprise must begin by placing itself within the Chandlerian analytical framework.” Dr. Chandler’s work was distinguished by an intellectual rigor he gleaned from the sociologist Talcott Parsons, one of his professors at Harvard. Dr. Chandler rigorously compared earlier and later time frames to see what changed, and, more important, what caused the change. He likened the process to a controlled scientific experiment. His conclusions jolted conventional wisdom. For example, he said that America ’s industrial revolution did not start in New England mills, but with the beginning of large-scale mining of anthracite coal fields in Pennsylvania in the 1830s and 1840s. This new power source replaced water, wood and charcoal, facilitating the making of iron and metal products. Alfred du Pont Chandler Jr. was born in Guyencourt, Del., on Sept. 15, 1918. Although he was not a blood relation of the du Ponts who founded the chemical company, his great-grandmother was raised by the du Ponts after her parents died of yellow fever. Alfred spent his first five years in Buenos Aires, where his father represented an American locomotive company. When he was 11, the family moved back to the United States and settled near Wilmington. Family lore has it that the boy announced his intention to become a historian by the time he was 7. He was inspired by Wilbur Fisk Gordy’s book “An Elementary History of the United States,” a primer for sixth-graders his father gave him. He read it 19 times. At Phillips Exeter Academy, he won a prize for excellence in history. In 1940, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where generations of his family had studied, beginning in the 18th century. During World War II, he served in the Navy, interpreting intelligence photos. He enrolled as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study Southern regional history. But he became captivated by sociology, and returned to Harvard to study with Mr. Parsons. He stumbled on his dissertation topic in old papers on the history of American railroads written by his great-grandfather, a founder of the financial-data company that became Standard & Poor’s. The dissertation became a book, “Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst and Reformer” (1956). From 1950 to 1963, Dr. Chandler taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he helped edit the letters of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote “Strategy and Structure,” which used General Motors, DuPont, Exxon and Sears, Roebuck to develop his ideas on how companies employ organization structure to further strategy. Dr. Chandler taught at Johns Hopkins, where he edited the papers of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then joined the faculty of Harvard Business School from which he retired in 1989. He was editor of the Harvard Studies in Business History. He was a visiting professor at Oxford and elsewhere, and president of the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Chandler is survived by his wife, the former Fay Martin; his daughters, Alpine (Dougie) Chandler Bird, of Annapolis, Md., and Mary (Mimi) Chandler Watt, of Dinas Powys, Wales; his son, Howard, of Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa.; his sisters Nina Murray, of Bedford, Mass., and Nantucket, and Sophie Consagra, of Manhattan; five grandchildren and two step-grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Dr. Chandler fancied a glass of sherry with lunch before retiring to write on yellow-lined paper in small, cramped letters. Though he did not use a computer, he gave characteristic thought to its impact on economic change. “All I know is that the commercializing of the Internet is transforming the world,” he said in an interview with Newsweek last year. ___________________________________________________________________________ ※ 编辑: RungTai 来自: 123.195.23.235 (03/05 14:27)