The dominant paradigm in business history has for many years been the synthesis developed by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Like most paradigms that define a field of scholarship, Chandler's has attracted swarms of devotees and critics, and for some years, it was customary to perform a ritual bow toward his work in the first or second paragraph of any article appearing in the Business History Review. This was true whether the substance of the article appeared to support or contradict Chandlers concept of the development of modern private enterprise.

For Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in Scale and Scope, “the British story provides a counterpoint, an antitheses, to the American experience.” Chandler shows that fewer of the largest firms appeared in Britain. British companies preferred to retain family or family-like control and management; he terms this “personal capitalism.” Firms were reluctant to recruit professional managers, and if they did so, they did not like them to have received much formal education. There were no business schools in the pre-1945 U.K. These personal capitalists on the whole preferred personal income to making the 3-pronged investments in manufacturing, marketing and management in the capitalintensive industries of the Second Industrial Revolution. The more complex the technical and managerial skills required in an industry, the worse these personal capitalists performed and the greater the missed opportunities. For Chandler, Britain stands as a warning of the unpleasant consequences of not adopting managerial capitalism.

Although it has not been recognized very clearly, Alfred Chandler offers a dual definition of modern business. One definition focuses on the formation of “managerial hierarchies;” this refers to the rise of professional managers, a development that eventually leads to the separation of management and ownership. The advent of the managerial firm, or managerial capitalism, symbolizes modern business. Chandlers other definition focuses on management structure and emphasizes the U-form (Unitary-form) or M-form (Multi-divisionalform), both of which are organizational types closely associated with the development of modern, large-scale firms. The modern firm usually has the characteristics of a managerial organization and employs either the U-form or M-form (typically the latter) structure.

It is perfectly correct to place the work of Alfred Chandler at the center of a discussion of globalization as seen by business historians. No other author in our field of studies has offered us so much both in terms of research results as well as tools for the analysis and definition of the global characteristics of the modern large enterprise. It is enough in this respect to consider his last book, Scale and Scope, where the author examined the history of six hundred firms (the top two hundred in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany) for the period from the 1880s to the 1940s.