Communication Partnerships

Alfred Marshall

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Roger S. Ahlbrandt, Jr.

The Center for Industry Studies promotes scholarly research that is informed by the practical experience of industry in order to advance economics and other academic disciplines and enhance the impact of scholarship on industry and on the community. Our research helps to provide unique educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and serves as a vehicle for helping students gain access to professional opportunities. Through research and education we seek to enhance the well-being of our community and to further its economic development.

Follow the links on the left to find out more about what we do, as well as the experience and research that have helped to shape our goals.

Back to top 

Communication between academic research activities and business firms can lead to partnerships that encourage educational opportunities and economic advancement. For students, the results can involve exposure to competitive problems at the cutting edge of economic change. For firms, the results can be the solidification of competitive advantage in a dynamic environment. For communities, the results can lead to a basis for knowledge that will support economic development. After more than a decade of steel industry research and collaboration, faculty members who lead research in the Center for Industry Studies have established the Center's credibility and demonstrated its potential. The Center builds on this experience to encourage research on a broad range of industries...from the well-established to the newly emerging, from manufacturing to services and non-profit organizations. Through scholarship we seek benefits in education, competitiveness, and regional economic development.

Back to top

The basis of modern economics as an academic discipline—much of the substance of the textbooks that inform first-year students—was shaped by intellectual leaders, like Alfred Marshall, who believed that the scientific foundation of economics and its social impact are enhanced by grounding analysis in the practical experience of industry:

"Nearly half a century has passed since I set myself the task to obtain some insight into industrial problems by obtaining leave to visit one or more representative works in each chief industry. I tried to get such a knowledge of mechanical technique...as would enable me to understand the resources and the mode of operation of all elementary plant in general use: I sought also to study the relations between technique and the conditions of employment for men and for women."

Alfred Marshall
Cambridge, England
1919

In 1903, Marshall established the Economics Tripos as an independent course of study at Cambridge University, England. His career began in the mid-19th century and spanned a period of more than fifty years. The importance of his theoretical contributions is evidenced by the fact that a very substantial amount of the course content for introductory economics today relies on Marshall's work.

In the preface to one of his last publications, Industry and Trade (1919), Marshall explains that he had a career-long practice of visiting manufacturing plants so that he might be better informed by the experience. This practice was motivated by the belief that his scholarly contributions would be more meaningful because of the knowledge gained in those plant visits.

Arthur Pigou, Marshall's student and successor as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, confirmed this idea. Reflecting in his Memorials of Alfred Marshall, Pigou explains "What he [Marshall] aimed at in all of this was to get, as it were, the direct feel of the economic world, something more intimate than can be obtained from merely reading descriptions, something that should enable one, with sure instinct, to set things in their true scale of importance, and not to put in the forefront something that is really secondary merely because it presents a curious problem for analysis."

Back to top

This powerful principle for scholarly research was reconfirmed in 1990 when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the first Sloan Industry Center, with the goal of facilitating direct contact between faculty members and firms in industry.  Eventually, this Sloan program grew to include twenty-six centers spanning a broad set of traditional and emerging industries.

One of the first Sloan Industry Centers was organized jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University and focused on research concerning the steel industry. In part because of achievements of the Sloan Steel Industry Center, an anonymous donor made a major gift to the University of Pittsburgh to help endow the Center for Industry Studies, which was established in 2001.

The Center for Industry Studies is now the administrative home of the Industry Studies Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting scholarly research that reflects deep knowledge of industry and benefits from direct observation at the plant or firm/activity level.

Back to top

The Center for Industry Studies also owes its existence to the intellectual legacy of Roger S. Ahlbrandt, Jr. (1941-1999). As a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, Ahlbrandt was Co-Principal Investigator (with the late Professor Richard Cyert of Carnegie Mellon University) at the founding of the Sloan Steel Industry Center.

Over the course of their careers, Ahlbrandt and Frank Giarratani, founding Director of the Center for Industry Studies, shaped a set of core values related to their academic research. Their vision, jointly developed and mutually held, was that academic research can further scholarly disciplines while it helps to create educational opportunities for students and promote economic development. The concept of the Center for Industry Studies was borne in the collaboration that Ahlbrandt and Giarratani enjoyed over a period of twenty years. The faculty members and students who comprise the Center for Industry Studies owe a debt of gratitude to Ahlbrandt, and a share of any beneficial impact that our work may have on our community should be recognized as part of Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr.'s legacy.