Special Issue of Industrial and Corporate Change

Special issue of Industrial and Corporate Change

"Management Innovation: Essays in the Spirit of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr."

Co-editors, William Lazonick (University of Massachusetts Lowell) and David Teece (University of California Berkeley)

Bill Lazonick and Al Chandler, Kyoto, Japan, January 1985, on the occasion of the 12th Fuji Conference on Business History

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., who passed away on May 9, 2007 at the age of 88, was, by general consensus, the pre-eminent business historian of the 20th century.  Through a prodigious body of work that included the volumes, Strategy and Structure (1962),The Visible Hand (1977),and Scale and Scope (1990), Professor Chandler made the study of the evolution of business enterprise integral to the study of the evolution of economy and society. His work combined detailed historical investigations with grand sociological syntheses. As a result, Chandler’s study of the modern business enterprise invited social scientists and business academics as well as historians to contribute to our understanding of a central institution of our time.

In memory of a great scholar and in honor of his important work, Industrial and Corporate Change will publish a special issue of essays that reflect and further develop the Chandlerian approach.  We have chosen “management innovation” as the unifying theme of this special issue to emphasize the contribution of Chandler’s work to the analysis of the ways in which people who exercise strategic control over the allocation of resources put in place organizational structures that can enable an enterprise to prosper and grow.  Our goal is to publish a set of high quality papers that demonstrates the ongoing fertility of Chandler’s ideas (without necessarily being slavishly “Chandlerian”) as well as the interdisciplinary and evolutionary learning that his approach helped set in motion.