APSF: Research Grants

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit institution, was established in 1934 to support severa programs areas that includes the following:
(click here for a list of all the programs and interests of the Foundation)

Business Organizations

This program (formerly "Role of the Corporation") supports academic research and scholarship aimed at painting a realistic picture of how corporations and other business organizations function, with special emphasis on how the people in them actually behave, how they are motivated, and how they are rewarded. The Foundation has sought to increase understanding of these organizations because of the enormous effect they have on the standard of living and quality of life for most people in the United States and around the world.

Human Resources, Jobs and Income

The goal of this program is to build understanding of management practices in the changing American workplace, and of the effect of these changes on people, jobs and income by studying specific industries. Major changes affecting the workplace in the past decade include increases in outsourcing, offshoring and temporary work; increases in wage inequality; far greater global competition; work restructuring and downsizing. Sloan Industry Center researchers and many others not at centers have been supported over the years to study the effects of these new conditions. Researchers in human resources, industrial relations, organizational behavior, sociology, anthropology, and labor economics have gone into factories and offices in the U.S. and elsewhere to observe and understand the nature of work today.

Globalization

The goal of this program is to provide a fact-based picture of globalization by studying specific industries. Grants have been made over the years to study company location decisions and the effects of these decisions on the company's competitive position in a number of industries: computer flat display, auto, computer disk drive, semiconductor manufacturing, personal computer, and computer software. An ambitious collaborative project, begun in 2003, is studying different industries within the electronics value chain (e.g., semiconductors, flat panel displays, PC’s, etc.) and examining how companies are moving people, jobs and knowledge across the globe to investigate and pursue market opportunities, and to organize design and production; and how these new global ‘knowledge networks’ are affecting firms, workers and national economies

Workplace, Workforce and Working Families

The goal of this program is to enhance scholarly, business, and public understanding of the interaction of family and workplace and of how the workplace can be restructured to provide more choice in work hours to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse workforce, particularly working parents and older workers.

Federal Statistics

The broad goal of this program is to improve the conceptual underpinnings of Federal statistics, especially economic statistics. We seek sustainable mechanisms by which expertise might be applied to improving the validity of Federal statistical measures, in view of rapid changes in the U.S. economy and society that have brought existing measurement approaches into doubt. Measuring productivity and prices, for example, was far easier when the U.S. economy was dominated by manufacturing than by services, especially hard-to-measure services such as information technology and E-commerce.

Deadline: Grant requests can be made at any time for support of activities related to Foundation program areas and interests.

For further information, visit: http://www.sloan.org/grant/index.shtml