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, including co-authoring Collective Bargaining with James W. Kuhn, and wrote an intellectual memoir as well. His range of research and writing was unusually wide, but his most significant contribution to the field of economics was in the study of industrial relations and especially in his analysis of bargaining power. Chamberlain
Early life, education, and writing Chamberlain was born on May 18, 1915, in Charlotte, North Carolina, as the son of Henry Bryan Chamberlain and the former Elizabeth Wolverton. After search, entry found and purchased is for "Neil Cornelius Wolverton Chamberlain (Deceased) / economist, emeritus educator; Born: 1915" 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.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. vii. While at Lakewood High School, which he began as the Great Depression was starting, he took third prize in national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards with a short story called "Hunger". 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. A San Francisco newspaper recounted his 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. By the age of 19, he said he had traveled some and seen 41 states. He offered to give 15-minute talks, titled "The Category of Dreamers" and concerning the state of youth, in the Lakewood area."The Category of Dreamers", flyer, c. 1934.
He attended Adelbert College of Western Reserve University, having been granted a scholarship, and initially majored in history.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 1. 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.
Chamberlain was initially primarily interested in writing as a career possibility. While a freshman he was also working as editor of the People's Penny Weekly, a magazine intended to provide local coverage of Lakewood. During his senior year in college he worked part-time at the Cleveland bureau of the International News Service.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 2. There he covered many significant developments in labor relations during the mid-1930s. These included the Fisher Body sit-down strike against General Motors.
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.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 3. 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. 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.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 147.
Chamberlain then obtained a Ph.D. in economics from Ohio State University in 1942. The topic of his dissertation was "The Nature and Practice of Collective Bargaining". By now his practice of other forms of writing was being replaced by his interest in economic research. During the latter portion of this time he was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Chamberlain married the former Mariam Kenosian in 1942.
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. There he did work related to cryptography. Meanwhile, his wife worked as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services during the war and then earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1950.
Early career Following his service, Chamberlain was given a Social Science Research Council demobilization fellowship and in 1946 found a position as research director at the Yale Labor and Management Center, which had shortly before been founded by E. Wight Bakke.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 4. 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.
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. His insights into industrial relations theory as a whole became a substantial addition to scholarly knowledge.
His definition of bargaining power, which is based upon the notion of the "inducement to agree", became widely used. 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 analysis of bargaining power and its effects went beyond concepts introduced by others earlier and provided a springboard for the examination of behavioral aspects of the bargaining process as well as bargaining power as a dynamic entity. Influencing several generations of scholars, Chamberlain's work on bargaining power would become his most significant contribution to the field.Kuhn, Lewin, and McNulty, "Neil W. Chamberlain", pp. 143–145. 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 YaleTitle and facing title pages of Social Responsibility and Strikes and The Impact of Strikes; Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 18. 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.ストライキの損益計算 : 経営者・労働者・公衆の損害をどう算定するか Sutoraiki no son'eki keisan : Keieisha rōdōsha kōshū no songai o dō santeisuruka, translated by Minoru Kuronuma, published Tōkyō : Daiyamondosha, 1957.
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. It was the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. In its preface he wrote, "Such an effort may appear pretentious when made by one who lays no claim to being a general theoretician ... I feel (almost apologetically) a need to explain the existence of this work."Chamberlain, A General Theory of Economic Process, p. vii. In it he used bargaining as the central element for economic analysis.Kuhn, Lewin, and McNulty, "Neil W. Chamberlain", pp. 149–150.
Middle career Chamberlain moved to Columbia University, where he was a professor of economics in its Graduate School of Business from 1954 to 1959. There he replaced the retiring Paul Frederick Brissenden as head of the school's program in Labor and Industrial Relations.Chamberlain, Intellectual Odyssey, p. 56. 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. Chamberlain thus became director of the Program in Economic Development and Administration at the foundation from 1957 to 1960, where he also focused a research program on business decision making. Chamberlain subsequently returned to Yale as a professor of economics for the period 1959–1967.
In the 1960s, Chamberlain's research began to focus on theory of the firm and industrial organization, as exemplified by his 1962 book The Firm: Micro-Economic Planning and Action.Kuhn, Lewin, and McNulty, "Neil W. Chamberlain", pp. 151–153. In particular he examined corporate planning and public planning. These works adopted some of the approaches of institutional economics and were less quantitative and more philosophical than some of the author's previous efforts. He then branched out even further afield, writing about nuclear disarmament in 1963 and population economics in 1970. 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."Chamberlain, The West in a World Without War, p. vii.
Chamberlain was prominent in the Industrial Relations Research Association, serving on its executive board during 1955–58 and its president in 1967. Chamberlain served on the board of editors of The American Economic Review from 1957 to 1959, the board of directors of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies for 1957–78, the editorial council of Management International during 1960–70, and two stints on the board of trustees of the Columbia Journal of World Business (1969–72, 1975–80).
He and his wife Mariam Chamberlain divorced in 1967. 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.
Meanwhile, he married Harriet Feigenbaum in 1968. She is a sculptor most known for a 1990 installation in New York City, Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust.