Management Innovation Essays in the Spirit of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. was, by general consensus, the pre-eminent business historian of the twentieth century. Through a prodigious body of work, Chandler made the study of the evolution of business enterprise integral to the study of the evolution of economy and society. His work combined detailed historical investigations with grand sociological syntheses. As a result, Chandler's study of the modern business enterprise invited social scientists and business academics as well as historians to contribute to our understanding of a central institution of our time. Chandler revealed how managerial activity was central to the functioning of successful industrial corporations, and hence to the performance of the economy as a whole. This book gathers together contributions from management scholars fundamentally influenced by the work of Chandler to discuss management innovation, the ways in which people who exercise strategic control over the allocation of resources put in place organizational structures that can enable an enterprise to prosper and grow. The volume offers a range of perspectives to examine the challenges that corporate management encounters.

William Lazonick is Professor in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development at University of Massachusetts Lowell and Director of the UMass Lowell Center for Industrial Competitiveness. He is also affiliated with the CNRS Groupe de Recherche en Economie Theorique et Appliquee of Universite Montesquieu Bordeaux IV. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Competitive Advantage of the Shop Floor (Harvard University Press, 1990) and Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and some 100 academic articles.


David J. Teece is Thoma W. Tusher Professor in Global Business at the Hass Business School, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Director of the Center for Global Strategy and Governance. He is listed as one of the World's Top 50 Leading Business Intellectuals by Accenture, and also listed by ScienceWatch as a top 10 scholar worldwide in economics and business for the decade 1995-2005, based on citation counts.