Neil W. Chamberlain
Neil Cornelius Wolverton Chamberlain (May 18, 1915 – September 14, 2006) was an American economist who was the Armand G. Erpf Professor of Modern Corporations of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.
He was the author of nineteen books, editor of six more, published numerous articles in academic journals, and wrote an intellectual memoir as well.
[1] His range of research and writing was unusually wide, but his biggest contribution to the field of economics was in the study of industrial relations and especially in his analysis of bargaining power.
From the time of junior high school on, he was interested in creative writing, working on poems, short stories, and an incomplete novel.
[4] While at Lakewood High School, which he began as the Great Depression was starting,[1] he took third prize in national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards with a short story called "Hunger".
[7] A San Francisco newspaper recounted his 7,000-mile (11,000 km) wandering journey with another 18-year-old friend from Cleveland to there, in which they started with only $3.77, washing dishes for funds while staying in hobo jungles and sometimes encountering long waits for cars to pick them up.
[1] While a freshman he was also working as editor of the People's Penny Weekly, a magazine intended to provide local coverage of Lakewood.
[12] By his account he then tried two other writing and editing jobs before, after a year's lapse, returning to his education to give himself an understanding of the forces at play in these labor disputes.
[14] 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.
[13] He also later recalled functioning as executive secretary of a successful campaign to amend the Cleveland city charter to bring most civil service employees under the merit system.
[3] During the World War II period, he was in the United States Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946, where he began as an ensign and finished as a lieutenant.
[3] Chamberlain's early work at Yale and the center and his books published during this time focused on exploring matters related to bargaining in the context of labor-management conflicts, the social impact of strikes, and the idea of managerial discretion and how unions challenged it.
[22] 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.
[30] 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 the first, he argued that "if what everyone says [they want] (peace and disarmament) is eventually achieved, the consequences are almost certain to be the end of 500 years of Western world supremacy.
[3] She joined the Ford Foundation and became the director of its higher education program; the grants she dispensed during the 1970s would become instrumental in establishing the place of women's studies at colleges in the United States.
[33] Chamberlain returned to Columbia's Graduate School of Business again to stay for good in 1967,[3] heading a new program in Corporate Relations and Public Policy.
[1] Over the course of his career, Chamberlain became more pessimistic in his conclusions, believing that notions about union-management collaboration would have scant impact on the corporation's ability to react to external events.
[41] 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.
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.
"[1] 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.
[48] 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.
