Chandler, Alfred DuPont, Jr.

▪ 2008

      American business historian

born Sept. 15, 1918, Guyencourt, Del.

died May 9, 2007, Cambridge, Mass.

won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1978 for his groundbreaking study The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), in which he stressed the importance of professional managers in the rise of modern-day corporations. Chandler was also known for his books Strategy and Structure (1962), which explored the organization of large corporate enterprises, and Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990), a comparative study of successful corporations in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. Chandler enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career, which included professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; 1960–63), Johns Hopkins University (1963–71), and Harvard University (1971–89). His interests included political as well as business history. While at MIT he helped edit the papers of U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, and at Johns Hopkins he edited the papers of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower. The last of Chandler's nearly two dozen books, Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries, was published in 2005.

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