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Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (Sep. 15, 1918-) is a
professor of business history at Harvard Business
School, who has written extensively about the
scale and the management structures of modern
corporations. Professor Chandler graduated from
Harvard College in 1940. After wartime service in
navy he returned to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in
History. He taught at M.I.T. and Johns Hopkins
University before arriving at Harvard Business
School in 1970.

He received a Pulitzer Prize for The Visible Hand:
The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(1977). He pursued that book's themes in Scale and
Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
(1990) and co-edited an anthology on the same
themes, with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino,
Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997). 

The thesis of each of these works is this: during
the 19th century the development of new systems
based on steam power and electricity created a
Second Industrial Revolution, which resulted in
much more capital intensive industries than had
the industrial revolution of the previous century.
The mobilization of the capital
(economics)|capital necessary to exploit these new
systems required a larger number of workers and
managers, and larger physical plants than ever
before.

In the wake of this increase of industrial scale,
three successful models of capitalism emerged,
which Prof. Chandler associates with the three
leading countries of the period: Great Britain
("personal capitalism"), the United States
("competitive capitalism") and Germany
("cooperative capitalism.") 

Despite the important differences in these three
models, the common thread in the successfully
developed nations is that the large industrial
firm has been the engine of growth in three ways,
according to Prof. Chandler and his associates.
Its role has been first, to provide focal points
for capital and labor on large scales; second, to
become the educator whereby a nation learns the
pertinent technology and develops managerial
skills; third, to serve as the core around which
grow medium and small firms that supply and serve
it.