Exploring the Evolution of American Commerce Through Key Literary Works

In the days of Calvin Coolidge, it was said the “business of America is business.” By contrast to other cultures like the Japanese, whose “business is the Japanese”, America’s combination as a youthful country and having a vast untapped frontier, especially in its early years, made the one common denominator of a polyglot nation a drive to tap vast natural resources and build wealth based on a large internal market. To operate at this unprecedented speed at scale unleashed by new technologies such as the railroad and telegraph, author Alfred D. Chandler contends, a new managerial revolution had to take place, creating the hierarchical behemoth corporations that America has become known for and have proliferated in today’s modern global economy.

Myth of the 20th Century – Episode 214 – The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

— References —

• The Managerial Revolution, Burnham (1941)
• Strategy and Structure, Chandler (1962)
• The Visible Hand, Chandler (1977)
• Scale and Scope, Chandler (1994)