Neil W. Chamberlain

Neil Cornelius Wolverton Chamberlain (May 18, 1915 – September 14, 2006) was an American economist who served as the Armand G. Erpf Professor of Modern Corporations of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. Previously, he was a professor in the Department of Economics at Yale University. His scholarly work focused on industrial relations and labor economics, the economies of corporations and corporate planning, national planning, and social values and corporate social responsibility. He authored nineteen books, edited six more, published numerous articles in academic journals, and wrote an intellectual memoir as well. When he was two years old the family moved to Ohio and he grew up in Lakewood, Ohio. From the time of junior high school on, he was interested in creative writing, working on poems, short stories, and an incomplete novel. While at Lakewood High School, which he began as the Great Depression was starting, Another short story, "A Millionaire's Debut", was published in the Cleveland News.

During vacations when he was 17 and 18, Chamberlain traveled around the country by hitchhiking and freighthopping. By the age of 19, he said he had traveled some and seen 41 states.

He attended Adelbert College of Western Reserve University, having been granted a scholarship, and initially majored in history. He was elected Phi Beta Kappa as a senior. He was also a poet there, winning first prize as a junior and second prize as a senior in the Rupert Hughes Prizes in Poetry. In 1937, he graduated with an A.B. degree magna cum laude. There he covered many significant developments in labor relations during the mid-1930s. At the Graduate School at Western Reserve University, he earned an M.A. degree in economics in 1939. At the same time he wrote a play about the Chrysler Auto Strike of 1939, From Now to Hallelujah, which he later said was accepted for production at a local theater group but never put on due to a scheduling conflict.

Chamberlain then obtained a Ph.D. in economics from Ohio State University in 1942. By 1947 he was also an assistant professor of economics at Yale. His first major book, The Union Challenge to Management Control , was published in 1948. In 1949 he became assistant director of the Labor and Management Center. That same year, he became an associate professor. Examining the history of many labor-management actions and conflicts as case studies, he analyzed their tactics with his framework of how each sought to influence relative bargaining power. His 1951 textbook Collective Bargaining presented some of these ideas and was twice later republished in revised editions.

His work on strikes, which was published in two books, Social Responsibility and Strikes (1953) and The Impact of Strikes: Their Social and Economic Costs (1954), was done in collaboration with Jane Metzger Schilling, an assistant in research at the center and a doctoral student in the Department of Economics at Yale who was working on research into invention and innovation and into the scope of bargaining units. Their work devised a quantitative framework for analyzing the effect of strikes on the various parties involved as well as on the general public, making use of reliable figures when available and forming imprecise judgments when not, then sought to evaluate seventeen recent strikes in the coal, rail, and steel industries in these terms. They also made public policy recommendations regarding when government intervention should be undertaken, saying that such action must take into effect the loss of income for producers as well as the loss of goods and services for consumers. The second of these books became one of Chamberlain's works to be translated into other languages, in this case Japanese.

While Chamberlain self-identified as an industrial relations specialist, he nonetheless next wrote A General Theory of Economic Process, an attempt to define the overall economic environment in ways that provided entrée for the insights of his labor analyses. In it he used bargaining as the central element for economic analysis.

Middle career Chamberlain moved to Columbia University, where he was a professor of economics in its Graduate School of Business from 1954 to 1959. This was part of a wave of hirings as the business school sought to improve its intellectual standing by strengthening its research program and instituting a Ph.D. program separate from that of the Department of Economics.

During this time, Chamberlain was recruited by Thomas H. Carroll of the Ford Foundation, who was starting an effort for the improvement of business school education. In particular he examined corporate planning and public planning.

Chamberlain was prominent in the Industrial Relations Research Association, serving on its executive board during 1955–58 and its president in 1967.

Meanwhile, he married Harriet Feigenbaum in 1968.

Chamberlain returned to Columbia's Graduate School of Business again to stay for good in 1967, He was named the Armand G. Erpf Professor of Modern Corporations in 1969.

Later career During the latter part of his career, Chamberlain took on the analysis of the role of corporation management in society. In a series of books from 1973 on he became known as an economist who found insights in the relationship of business power to social power. He also became involved in community-related projects such as a 1972 plan to help decentralize city services in nearby Washington Heights, Manhattan.

Tackling the issue of corporate responsibility, his 1973 book The Limits of Corporate Responsibility Chamberlain said that businesses could do "remarkably little" about urban problems, environmental degradation, product safety, or worker dissatisfaction, because the values of the business culture are incompatible with such goals and economic forces will constrain businesses to only actions which result in growth and profit.

Chamberlain retired in 1980, He also grew dissatisfied with the development of economic analysis, believing it too formal and beholden to quantitative methods and lacking a value-based look at how corporate management behaved. He came to have philosophical doubts about the entire study of economics, believing that purposeful action, unforeseen trends, and random occurrences combine to give economic theories that are based upon the observation of what has taken place in the past little predictive ability or policy-making usefulness in terms of what will take place in the future. although nothing was published, and he painted as well. He published a memoir of sorts, Intellectual Odyssey: An Economist's Ideological Journey, in 1996. It traced the development of his interests and summarized the work and conclusions of many of his books. The last chapter of the memoir includes lengthy excerpts from one of the novels, whose protagonist is a disillusioned economics professor considering whether to retire and struggling with philosophical questions.

Chamberlain died at age 91 on September 14, 2006.

Legacy Writing in the Journal of Economic Issues in 1996, Charles J. Whalen said that "Chamberlain's career in economics has been extraordinary."

In a 1983 retrospective of Chamberlain's career written shortly after his retirement and published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, three business professors at Columbia University – James W. Kuhn, David Lewin, and Paul J. McNulty – analyzed where his work had had the greatest scholarly influence and where it had been less so. Their conclusion was that despite a fair amount of the latter, "Chamberlain stands ... as an intellectual giant and a major intellectual force, whose legacy will endure." and in the 2004 fifth edition of the popular International City/County Management Association "Green Book" Management Policies in Local Government Finance.

In terms of the labor history discipline, Chamberlain came to be seen as part of the mainstream, along with scholars such as Sumner Slichter and Richard Lester, who focused on institutions and laws, as opposed to "new labor history" and its adherents, such as David Brody and Nelson Lichtenstein, who focused more on demographics and social history. Like two other scholarly pioneers in industrial relations and labor research, Robert F. Hoxie and John R. Commons, Chamberlain was dissatisfied with neoclassical economics-based theory and sought to provide new and different explanations for the economic process. This foray into general theory, like those of the other two, generally found few followers in the field. He was one of the first members of that association to be so honored.

Published works Collective Bargaining Procedures (American Council on Public Affairs, 1944) The Union Challenge to Management Control (Harper & Brothers, 1948) Cases on Labor Relations (The Foundation Press, 1949) [co-editor with Harry Shulman] Management in Motion: The Corporate Decision-Making Process as Applied to the Transfer of Employees (Labor and Management Center, Yale University, 1950) [report] Collective Bargaining (McGraw-Hill, 1951; second edition, 1965 [with James W. Kuhn]; third edition, 1986 [with James W. Kuhn]) Social Responsibility and Strikes (Harper & Brothers, 1953) [assisted by Jane Metzger Schilling] The Impact of Strikes: Their Economic and Social Costs (Harper & Brothers, 1954) [co-author with Jane Metzger Schilling] (republished by Greenwood Press, 1973) A General Theory of Economic Process (Harper & Brothers, 1955) A Decade of Industrial Relations Research 1946-1956 (Harper & Brothers, 1958) [co-editor with Frank C. Pierson and Theresa Wolfson] Labor (McGraw-Hill, 1958) Sourcebook on Labor (McGraw-Hill, 1958 [editor]; 1964 [editor, revised and abridged with assistance of Richard Perlman]) The Firm: Micro-Economic Planning and Action (McGraw-Hill, 1962) The West in a World Without War (McGraw-Hill, 1963) Private and Public Planning (McGraw-Hill, 1965) The Labor Sector (McGraw-Hill, 1965; second edition, 1971 [with Donald E. Cullen]; third edition, 1980 [with Donald E. Cullen and David Lewin]) Enterprise and Environment: The Firm in Time and Place (McGraw-Hill, 1968) Frontiers of Collective Bargaining (Harper and Row, 1968) [co-editor with John T. Dunlop] Contemporary Economic Issues (R. D. Irwin, 1969; revised edition, 1973) [editor] Beyond Malthus: Population and Power (Basic Books, 1970) Business and the Cities (Basic Books, 1970) [editor] The Place of Business in America's Future: A Study in Social Values (Basic Books, 1973) The Limits of Corporate Responsibility (Basic Books, 1973) Remaking American Values: Challenge to a Business Society (Basic Books, 1977) Forces of Change in Western Europe (McGraw-Hill, 1980) Social Strategy and Corporate Structure (Macmillan, 1982) (republished by Free Press, 2007) Intellectual Odyssey: An Economist's Ideological Journey (Pentland Press, 1996)