Alfred Chandler Jr., left an indelible mark on the history of management, organization, and innovation, and this book is an attempt to honor his work and achievements following his death in 2007. Chandler was a highly productive and thoughtful researcher who influenced a generation of business historians. As an edited volume, the book contains chapters by scholars with interests as far ranging as business and economic history, technological innovation, strategy, organizational behavior, and marketing. Bringing together the writings of such an eclectic group of researchers in one volume is a fitting testament because it reflects Chandler's enormous impact across a variety of disciplinary fields. Lazonick and Teece should be commended for their efforts to synthesize Chandler's powerful, influential, and wide-ranging scholarship.

The book is split into four parts. The first part summarizes Chandler's main contributions in four chapters, each chapter being authored by Lazonick or Teece. Readers unfamiliar with Chandler's explanation for the rise of the modern business enterprise during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its significance beyond history will learn a great deal from these well-written summations. Lazonick and Teece hit all the major points from Chandler's writings about how firms achieve efficiency through managerial coordination, organizational capabilities, structure, and control. The authors write authoritatively and they expertly integrate history, context, and theory.

Despite these favorable impressions, there are some glaring omissions in the first part of the book. In the interests of balance, I would have preferred the editors to include at least one additional chapter by a Chandlerian naysayer summarizing the main critiques of his work, which are otherwise only given limited coverage. Chandler's omission of the role of government and regulation and of entrepreneurship, for example, mean that his collective research falls some way short of providing a metanarrative for business development. Some authors have also revisited Chandler's sources (e.g., those relating to General Motor's multidivisional corporate structure) highlighting a disjoint between the evidence that he assembled and his analytical claims. As is stands, the book comes across as overly flattering to Chandler, something that will surely antagonize many readers who are familiar with this literature.

The remaining three parts of the book deal with topics in strategy, organization, and finance. The strategy chapters pay homage to Chandler's assertion that the integration between professional management and organization defines how large firms develop and make strategic decisions about strategy and structure. All the chapters in this part of the book are informative and use a mixture of theoretical, anecdotal, and case study evidence to make their points. Each author highlights how Chandler's writings still has relevance to present-day ideas with respect to issues revolving around business professionalization, the management of supply chains, and “make or buy” decisions.

Three chapters deal with organization. Gary Pisano delivers an excellent account of innovation in science-based firms providing comparisons and contrasts with modern-day biotech and the businesses characteristic of Chandler's nineteenth and early twentieth century setting. David Mowery provides a compelling account of R&D and knowledge management inside the boundaries of the firm and Peter Cappelli offers a thorough analysis of the managerial labor market, its evolution over time, and the mechanisms through which managers became organized within firms. Although the chapters are disparate in content and in the time period of their coverage, they are tied together by common themes. Each of the authors speaks to ideas at the intersection of industry development, management and performance, and corporate organizational design.

Two chapters examine finance, a crucial area that Chandler is often criticized for neglecting. While many have argued that Chandler considered finance to be a passive rather than an active determinant of business development and economic growth, Mary O'Sullivan's contribution successfully attempts to set the record straight. Her chapter points to the relationship between finance and railroads that Chandler frequently discussed in his early writings and the role he attributed to speculators and investors. A final chapter in this part of the book extrapolates from Chandler's ideas on coordination to the functioning of internal capital markets in firms.

Overall, the editors of this volume achieved their objective to celebrate Chandler's work. But they did so at a cost, which is to adopt a perspective that overemphasizes the achievements and downplays the omissions. I would have preferred a more ambitious attempt to assimilate insights from the pro- and anti-Chandler schools of thought, and have these view deconstructed by two influential scholars like Lazonick and Teece. Finally, as a practical matter, given that most of the chapters in this book have already been published in a 2010 special issue of Industrial and Corporate Change (the editors do note this), it is hard to justify the high purchase price. Taken together, this is a very useful, albeit one-sided and overly expensive addition to the literature.