Alfred Chandler and knowledge management within the firm

David C. Mowery

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2010, vol. 19, issue 2, 483-507

Abstract: This essay examines the role of knowledge management, defined as the management of processes affecting the creation, communication, distribution, and exploitation of knowledge concerning corporate strategy, markets, product and process technologies, and management practices within the corporation, in Alfred D. Chandler's work on the modern corporation. Along with efforts to avoid transaction-cost problems, the management of firm-specific information and knowledge was central to the 19th-century transformation of US corporate structure that Chandler examined in The Visible Hand . Knowledge management also played a key role in the creation of intrafirm organizations for managing the creation of knowledge, management of innovation, and acquisition of technologies from external sources. Industrial R&D and the product diversification that emerged from the in-house R&D facilities of many of these firms contributed to the development of the so-called "M-form" corporation (examined by Chandler in Strategy and Structure ), in which corporate management and strategy formulation were organizationally differentiated and separated from functional management. Finally, Chandler's last work on the success and failure of United States, Japanese, and Western European firms in the modern electronics, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals industries emphasized the role of the "integrated learning base" within these firms and the varying degrees of success with which established firms were able to sustain these "learning bases" and/or apply them to new markets and technologies. Copyright 2010 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/icc/dtq010 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:indcch:v:19:y:2010:i:2:p:483-507

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Industrial and Corporate Change is currently edited by Josef Chytry

More articles in Industrial and Corporate Change from Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().