The Dynamics of Big Business

Part III

Strategy and Structure

More than fifty years after the publication of Strategy and Structure by Alfred Chandler (1962), the debate on the hypothetical convergence of the behavior of the large corporations in the richest industrial powers of the world continues to this day, and has been further extended with the addition of new empirical data and information.

The academic debate during the last few decades has seen two opposite views: that of the “universalists” versus the “contextualists” scholars (Whittington and Mayer 2000, chap. 2).

Universalists have identified the strategies and structures adopted by the large corporations in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century as the most ...