Strategy and structure

The goal of this thesis is to investigate if Alfred D. Chandler’s findings regarding expansion strategy patterns and organizational structure, in the book Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise also are applicable to large Swedish firms. In particular, the thesis investigates if Swedish firms have followed the same expansion strategy pattern and if the time between Chandler’s investigation 1962 and 2011 has changed the way firms structure their organizations given a certain strategy. This is investigated through looking at the historical expansion patterns of four Swedish, large, industrial and diversified firms and how their present organizational structures looks like. There are two main findings. First, the investigated firms expansion strategies doesn’t follow Chandler’s suggested pattern in terms of which strategies that are used or the order in which they are implemented. Second, all the investigated firms were structured by the multidivisional organization suggested by Chandler, but they differed in their definition of divisions.