Synopses & Reviews
1990 Leo Melamed Prize, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Association of American Publishers
Review
The book is important. It traces the evolution of the economic environment in which we breathe, and which we need to interpret without the blinders of doctrine or dogma... It is an exhaustive, nation-by-nation, industry-by-industry, company-by-company survey Chandler is what social science is all about. Jonathan Hughes - New York Times Book Review
Review
In the history of business, B.C. stands for Before Chandler. Over the past several decades, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. of Harvard Business School has brought unprecedented rigor and sophistication to the study of the corporation. In so doing, he has profoundly shaped our understanding of that institution's role in modern capitalism...[Chandler's] latest work, Scale and Scope...is his most ambitious yet. Chandler compares and contrasts the growth of the 200 largest companies in each of three industrial powerhouses--the U.S., Britain, and Germany--from the 1880s through the 1940s, searching for the common characteristics of successful corporations...The book speaks to all the major debates swirling around Corporate America--including those over shareholder value, mergers and acquisitions, and global competitiveness. Sidney Pollard - Times Higher Education Supplement
Review
Serious students of the worldwide industrialization that occurred in the century between the 1870s and the 1970s are indebted to Mr. Chandler...for a lifetime of determined effort to find order and predictable processes in industrial history...Chandler started out years ago to make sense out of the transformation of capitalist enterprise caused by the growth of giant industrial companies...He has succeeded with a power and authority that will not soon be matched. New York Times Book Review
Review
A major monument to our increasingly successful quest to understand and interpret the modern industrial world. Bernard A. Weisberger - Washington Post Book World
Review
Chandler has written an admirable book, analytically tight, and full of fascinating detail. The more he explains, the more, perhaps, there is left to explain. But all future work on the process of successful industrial development must necessarily have reference to his outstanding research and writing. Christopher Farrell - Business Week
Synopsis
Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler's first major work since his Pulitzer prize-winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the U.S., Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century's most important developments. This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [631]-732) and index.
About the Author
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., was Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School.
Harvard Business School
Table of Contents
PART I Introduction: Scale and Scope 1. The Modem Industrial Enterprise
2. Scale, Scope, and Organizational Capabilities
The New Institution
Historical Attributes
Economies of Scale and Scope in Production
Economies of Scale and Scope in Distribution
Building the Integrative Hierarchy
First-Mover Advantages and Oligopolistic Competition
Continuing Growth of the Modern Enterprise
Horizontal and Vertical Combination
Geographical Expansion and Product Diversification
The Modern Enterprise in Labor-Intensive Industries
PART II
The United States: Competitive Managerial Capitalism