Chandler's paradigm and managerial capitalism

2008

Debats Annual Review, 2019

Debats. Revista de cultura, poder i societat, 2019

Presentation of the monograph. Managerialismand its influence on the contemporary world: analysis and reflections

Cadmus, 2013

Alfred D. Chandler’s theory of the managerial revolution culminates with the triumph of General Motors over the Ford Motor Company in the American automobile market of the 1920s. In Chandler’s view, the relative decline of Ford vis-à-vis General Motors was a direct consequence of the modernization of management under Alfred Sloan’s leadership in the face of Ford’s outdated managerial methods. Based on previously unexploited material from the Ford Motor Company Archives, and on Chandler’s research papers located at Harvard’s Baker Library, the paper revsits this pivotal episode of American business history. It makes three points. First, it suggests that Chandler’s account resembles an idealtypical Weberian modernization narrative. Second, it argues that Ford did not simply fail to modernize; rather, he advocated an illiberal business model very much at odds with the American corporate mainstream of the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, the paper traces the influence of Chandler’s collaboration on Sloan’s memoir, My Years With General Motors (1964), on his thinking about the GM/Ford episode in particular, and the managerial revolution at large. The paper ends by suggesting that politics, not managerial efficiency, played a larger role in the making of industrial strategy and structure than Chandler appreciated.

Enterprise and Society, 2004

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking bookThe Visible Handappeared, the large, vertically integrated, “Chandlerian” corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearly a century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler's own,The Visible Handand subsequent works constitute a triumphalist account of the rise of that organizational form: the large, vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of its inherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized, market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later, however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape. It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-like forms that often resemble some of the “inferior” nineteenth-century structures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.

International Review of Social History, 2010

African Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Research, 2019

This paper draws attention to cultural typology as a factor relevant to the stewardship of offices – in particular those of the business community – and within that focus the notion of dignity is upheld as against that of cynicism. The arguments are developed in the context of entrepreneur John Mackey’s “conscious capitalism”, the best canopy label under which to include more specific endeavors such as ‘social entrepreneurship’ or ‘creative capitalism’ because it implies a known and considered responsibility to certain normative, chiefly ethical, ends.

The objective of the present study consists in deepening our understanding of the firm as a social system, which is characterised by conflicting interests, strategic conflict behaviour and latent power and information asymmetries between the agents and groups involved in the productive process of the firm. The firm therefore appears as a duality, i.e. a technical and at the same time a social system. Instead of a normative consideration of the production plan, the focus is on the behavioural motives of the people who work in the firm, the conflicts in their respective interests and objectives and how these conflicts of interest affect day-to-day practice. The conflict of interests that the classical authors of political economy called 'labour and capital' is at the centre of this analysis. 1 This will be analysed exclusively under the aspect of the individual employment relation. The social interactions between the organised workforce, the unions and the firm's management will not be dealt with, because they are beyond the self-defined scope of this analysis. Today, the analysis of the individual employment relation as an expression of the contradiction that exists between workers and owners of capital is often not understood. Some readers will ask, "Does the conflict of interest between 'labour and capital' still exist?" Are not employment relations in modern firms characterised more by partnership and team work than by social conflicts which in turn lead to political conflicts? Now, it is certainly true that the "workplace today is a vastly changed place from the shops and offices of seventy-five or a hundred years ago", as the American economist and social scientist Richard Edwards 1979, 9 ff. writes by pointing out that where "once foreman ruled with unconstrained power, there now stands the impersonality (…) of the organization. Where once workers had few rights and no protections, there now exists a whole set of claims from job bidding rights to grievance appeals to the possibility of a career within the firm. Where once the distinction between the workers 1 In order to avoid misunderstandings, let it be said that I am using the terms 'capitalistic' and 'profit' in a value-neutral manner. As Preiser 1982, 74 has succinctly stated, "some people don't like to hear the word (profit), they are embarrassed, just as one shies away from the expression 'capitalism'. In other countries people do not have any qualms in this respect and we also have no reason to avoid the words 'profit ' and 'capitalism'."

Theory, Culture & Society, 2007

Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a ‘physical’ capitalism – of the national and manufacturing age – with a ‘metaphysical capitalism’ of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of (1) extensity, (2) equivalence, (3) equilibrium and (4) the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism’s (1) intensity, (2) inequivalence (or difference), (3) disequilibrium and (4) the noumenal. Most centrally: if use-value or the gift in pre-capitalist society is grounded in concrete inequivalence, and exchange-value in physical capitalism presumes abstract equivalence, then value in contemporary society presumes abstract inequivalence. The article argues that the predominantly physical causation of the earlier epoch is being superseded by a more metaphysical causation. This is discussed in terms of the four Aristotelian causes. Thus there is a shift in efficient cause from abstract homogenous labour ...

Philosophica, 1972