Does the Long-Term Competitiveness of Leading Economies Depend on the Effectiveness of Large-Scale, Integrated Managerial Enterprise? How Convincing Are the Arguments Put Forward by Chandler?

Does the long-term competitiveness of leading economies depend on the effectiveness of large-scale, integrated managerial enterprise? How convincing are the arguments put forward by Chandler?

Alfred Chandler is perhaps the most influential business historian of our age and, since the publication of his first book “Strategy and Structure” in 1962, his works have largely revolutionized the discipline (Nelson, 2010). Many scholars gave credit to Chandler’s efforts to build a strategic framework to explain the evolution of business and, particularly large enterprises, in modern industrialized nations. He is considered, indeed, one of the first who attempted to link structural and strategic business development and theorize a model which allows to compare American and European enterprises (Nelson, 2010). The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the theoretical framework built by Chandler to analyze the strategic development of large corporation in leading industrial nations such as USA, UK, Germany, can be universally extended to explain the competitiveness and long term growth enjoyed by major world economies, including Japan and China, on a national scale. The first part will draw an overview of the main issues of Chandlerian analysis while describing his theoretical foundation. In the second part, the analysis will switch to a comparative dimension and Chandler’s model will be applied to each of the countries cited above, in order to highlight its strengths and limitations in applicability. In addition, it will be discussed an empirical model developed by researchers at the University of Seoul (Lee et al., 2010) which shows consistency with Chandler’s thesis, this will open a debate on whether the importance of SMEs for national economic growth can be considered secondary to that of large enterprises.

Chandler’s analysis began by describing the rise of large corporations, as they are known nowadays, around the end of the XIX century. Major...