Book Review

Comparative/World

In the 1960s and 1970s, Alfred D. Chandler changed the way in which we think about business history. As Thomas McCraw has explained in a series of articles on the meaning of the Chandler thesis, one of the many brilliant moves that Chandler made in his career was to decontextualize business history. By focusing on an internal history of the managerial revolution, Chandler restored its complexity and rescued this important story from the oversimplifications of the "bad guys-good guys" dichotomy inherited from Progressive historiography. In depoliticizing the discussion of business in U.S. history, Chandler downplayed financial capitalism and promoted management as the engine of economic growth. He gave the process of large organization its due.	1
Several of Chandler's books are widely read. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of Industrial Enterprise (1962), The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), and Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990) are the best-known results of this lifelong effort fully to tell the story of the large, hierarchical, multidivisional business corporation. Chandler has done more than any other historian to push for an "organizational synthesis" of American history. But in giving business its due, he left unresolved the problem of reconnecting business history as he understands it to other forces of American history.	2
During the last fifteen years, however, Chandler has begun to reconnect his story, not to other parts of U.S. history but to the business stories that unfolded in other nations. In Scale and Scope, he juxtaposed American competitive managerial capitalism to Great Britain's personal capitalism and to Germany's cooperative managerial capitalism. But that was only three countries. The volume under review takes on the world. Coedited with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, it is the proceedings of the Eleventh International Economic History Congress at Milan in 1994, where specialists in business history were asked to provide narratives comparable to the one Chandler produced for the U.S. and to test the relevance of Scale and Scope for their geographic areas of expertise.	3
The organizers/editors divided the world among prime drivers (such as the U.S. as the example of engine of economic growth in capital-intensive and knowledge-intensive industries, Great Britain as a case study of competitiveness, and Germany as an example of tension between cooperation at home and competition abroad), and small European nations (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands) as cases of cooperative capitalism. After the prime drivers came European followers such as the slowly developing France and the tormented Italy and Spain. The third part is devoted to the late industrializers of East Asia and Latin America: specifically to the innovative organizational capabilities of Japan, the entrepreneurial moves of South Korea, and the growth of Argentina. Finally come the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe (USSR and Czechoslovakia).	4
Each chapter is written by a leading authority. The chapter by Patrick Fridenson on France is a small masterpiece on the social history of French management, with some excellent pages on French higher education; that by Hidemasa Morikawa on Japan's own version of the organizational synthesis is also excellent. All provide a good starting point for the comparative investigation of big business. Explicit in Chandler's Scale and Scope was the judgment that the American model should be the reference point. Geoffrey Jones on England and Ulrich Wengenroth on Germany take issue with such a thesis and argue against it with force and reason.	. . .