Alfred Chandler

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. was the leading historian of the modern corporation. In The Visible Hand he argued that professional managers, not just market forces, had come to coordinate production and distribution in big firms, an answer to Adam Smith's invisible hand. His earlier work Strategy and Structure, drawing on companies such as DuPont and General Motors, showed how firms adopted the multidivisional form to manage growth. He won a Pulitzer Prize for history and shaped how business schools and economists understand managerial capitalism. His work centred the manager and the organisation in the story of economic growth.