|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. Page 11 1
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
Page 11 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 11
Page 11
1
Introduction
It is tempting to view any occupational grouping, whether
engineers, lawyers, or teachers—or, for that matter, plumbers
or police—as a distinct entity, separate from the society in
which it develops and functions. Yet such distinctions, inevitable
as they may be, are always artificial. The hard dichotomy thus
established is in many ways inadequate for describing the complex,
dynamic interactions through which society molds professions and
professions shape society. Moreover, the habit of dichotomizing can
do damage to the popular conception of a profession and its role
within the larger society. This may be especially true in the case
of an occupation such as engineering, which is subject to rapid
change, much diversity in its makeup, and a considerable degree of
mystery (from the standpoint of the general public) regarding the
nature of its activities. Under such conditions, it is all too easy
for an ''us and them'' point of view to take root.
With these thoughts in mind, the panel that was formed to
examine the broad questions of engineering's functioning within the
societal context decided to entitle its report "Engineering in
Society." This title is meant to set a prevailing tone appropriate
to the symbiosis that exists between the profession and the
surrounding culture. It is hoped that, by this means, the
discussion will be better able to stress the degree to which the
health of the engineering profession and the health of the American
economy and society are intertwined.
OCR for page 12
Page 12
Engineers and Engineering in the
Cultural Context
Traditional Views of Engineering
The popular conceptions of engineering in America have their
roots in the founding of the country, in its astonishingly rapid
progression from an isolated colonial upstart at the edge of the
civilized world to a leading economic power. Those conceptions are
interwoven with the tradition of American inventiveness—of
"Yankee ingenuity"—and with our popular reverence for such
figures as Ben Franklin, Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, Alexander
Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and other practical-minded inventors whose
achievements helped to shape the nation. The "can-do" attitude
remains an essential part of the American self-image, whether it is
applied to landing on the moon or to finding new medical treatments
and cures.
Over time, the commonplace view of the engineer has acquired a
certain range of definition. On the one hand, he (although the
situation is now changing rapidly, the traditional image of the
engineer has been distinctly male) is the facilitator of
"progress," of economic strength—a builder of bridges, dams,
and cities; an expander of transportation, communication, and
energy systems. It is largely from this notion that the concept of
the "heroic engineer" is derived: the rugged tamer of the
wilderness, in his mackinaw and laced boots. On the other hand, the
engineer is also the purveyor of technology—of the
labor-saving device that shapes home life and the workplace as well
as the machine that powers industry. In this incarnation, the
engineer feeds America's fascination with the clever gadget, the
technically impressive. Here, he is the "wizard," closely allied
with the scientist in the popular view.
These laudatory conceptions are by no means universal. In other
countries—Great Britain, for example—the engineer is
traditionally held in considerably lower esteem, as something more
akin to a mechanic or other tradesman (Secretary of State for
Industry, 1980). And in the United States, the image of the
engineer has proven not to be an immutable one. Changing
demographics of engineers may be one reason. Early engineers came
from the dominant WASP social sector; but in this century, at least
until recently, entering engineers have come to a large extent from
immigrant groups struggling to acculturate and achieve status
(Noble, 1977). However, a more fundamental reason for the changing
view of engineers is that mistrust of technology and
dissatisfaction with its fruits—even fear of its
consequences—has become a significant new element in American
society, one that is kept ever
OCR for page 13
Page 13
near the forefront of national attention by a vocal minority of
Americans.
Thus, in modern times a troubling duality has developed. On the
one hand, the engineer is admired for his ingenuity, competence,
and practicality. But on the other, he has come to be viewed in
many respects as an amoral creature, a corporate "yes-man" of
conservative views and little social conscience or
consciousness—the calm builder of devastating weapons, the
untroubled maker of every kind of environmental contaminant. The
panel believes that much of this new duality in the contemporary
view of engineers derives from a general confusion of their
perceived traditional role with their actual contemporary role in
society and the workplace.
The Reality: Diversity in a Complex
World
The "heroic" image of the engineer belongs to an era in which
the frontiers were physical ones, and daily life often hard; the
image itself is specifically that of the civil engineer, in an era
in which civil engineering works, whether public or private,
predominated. Similarly, the "wizard" concept relates to the early
mechanical engineer and (especially) electrical engineer. In both
roles, the individual actor was often paramount—or is at least
seen today as having been so.
Yet, as we shall see in later sections, these roles are
effectively obsolete. The era of the lone surveyor or inventor has
long since passed. Engineering has become a collective endeavor,
with the engineer most often occupying a place in the
organizational hierarchy as a team member. Thus, the traditional
view of the engineer's role is complicated by divergent conceptions
of military versus civilian engineering, the corporate engineer
versus the private consultant, the engineering-school professor
versus the industry research engineer, and so on. The picture is
further confused by the great variety of disciplines that today
comprise the engineering profession. To civil, mechanical, and
electrical engineering have been added chemical engineering,
industrial engineering, bioengineering, electronics, environmental,
systems, petroleum, transportation, aerospace, and nuclear
engineering, along with a host of other disciplines and
subdisciplines and a variety of analytical and technical fields
that are considered a part of engineering.
If the engineer has disappointed, if his halo has dimmed or
disappeared, it is because he now lives and works in the same
complex and highly stratified world that everyone else in the
developed countries inhabits. Most engineers (about 73 percent)
today work for corpora-
OCR for page 14
Page 14
tions. Corporate structures, and the practice of modern
scientific business management, have relegated many of these
engineers to the role of worker—much like the production
workers whose role in the workplace they initially envisioned,
established, organized, and managed. This is not to say that the
engineer does not still perform those functions; in many ways that
is the essence of the engineer's role with respect to people,
machines, and systems. But the context has changed enormously.
There is much more pluralism in the activities of engineers and
engineering; the engineer is no longer the individualistic "heroic"
figure of American legend. His role (and thus his image) changes as
the "product" demanded of him by society changes over time. Whether
what is expected of the engineer is invention and development, or
efficient production of goods, or improvement of the social milieu,
the profession as well as the individual engineer must respond and
serve those needs.
Significance of Societal
Perceptions
We may well ask whether it is actually important how society
views engineers and the practice of engineering. How are engineers
and their profession affected by these perceptions, and,
conversely, how is society itself affected by its view of engineers
and engineering? If there is little effect in either case, then the
issue becomes an academic one, of little relevance to a study of
the status and future of engineering education and employment, of
which this report is a part.
The answer is that these are important issues. Perhaps the
simplest way to formulate their importance is to point out that the
basic functioning of our society depends on our modern technology;
technology in all its forms is by now the indispensable mechanism
by which developed nations carry on their economic and social
lives. Engineers are, more than any other group, the nurturers and
purveyors of this mechanism, this essential product. How society
views that product is, in a basic sense, irrelevant; it must and
will continue to be delivered. But the perceptions surrounding the
product (is it good or evil, necessary or dispensable?) and—by
extension—its purveyors, the engineers, can significantly
affect the product development process. For example, it can
influence the degree and type of support that government gives to
engineering education. It affects the numbers and types of students
entering engineering studies, and their choice of courses and
careers. It alters the direction of research and development by
both government and industry, and can result in the curbing of
individual lines of technology development through regulation and
boycott.
OCR for page 15
Page 15
These effects not only have an impact on engineers, they also
have strong repercussions throughout our society. The frequent
clashing of opposing forces over technological matters is a
draining, expensive, and divisive phenomenon. Our trust or mistrust
of our governing and corporate institutions often seems to revolve
around these matters. To a certain extent, our society's view of
itself continues to be partly tied to its view—whether good or
ill—of technology and of our special national talent for
pursuing it. Therefore, it is important to try to understand how
these perceptions evolve and what effect they have. Accordingly,
the "image of the engineer" is an underlying theme of this
report.
Calculating the Vector of Change:
Where Do We Go From Here?
This report will first look back at earlier periods in the
engineering story. In so doing it will track the development of
various components of the engineering community—not only the
disciplines, but the educational institutions and professional
societies as well—in terms of the societal interests to which
they responded. The object will be to determine how functional the
engineering community has been relative to those competing
interests and demands: how well the "system" has worked.
The next section of the report will examine the present era, the
period since the 1950s, in which many of the previous social,
economic, and technological trends and pressures have become
intensified. The object here will be to examine the impact of those
great changes in scope and scale on the various components of the
engineering community, to gain some idea of how well the system is
working at the present time.
Based on those assessments of past and present, the next section
will construct a generalized, informal model of the dynamic
relationship between the engineering profession and the larger
society of which it is a part. Finally, the results of this
analysis will be applied to an examination of present and potential
weak points in the system, focusing especially on a summary of
several scenarios that were developed by the panel to project how
the engineering system would respond to new stresses.
The report will thus have asked the following questions about
the engineering profession and community: Where have we been? Where
are we now? Where do we go from here? It seems to the panel that
this is a useful—indeed, obvious—way to formulate an
inquiry into the way in which engineers and their institutions have
functioned and may be
OCR for page 16
Page 16
expected to function, relative to their social role. It makes it
possible to ask whether the engineering institutions are flexible
enough, the profession adaptable enough, to function adequately in
the modern world.
Much has been made in recent years of the "crisis" in
engineering. The term refers variously to shortages of engineering
school faculty and laboratory equipment, excessive student
populations, inadequate numbers of graduates/practitioners in
certain disciplines, the high rate of obsolescence of technical
knowledge and technical professionals, and our declining
international competitive posture in certain areas. In any of these
cases there is room for argument about whether a "crisis" does in
fact exist.
It is partly a question of semantics: What is a crisis? Is it a
situation in which irremediable harm will result unless immediate
action is taken? If so, what kinds of action? To avoid
oversimplifying the issues (and falling into dogmatic traps), this
report will address such questions directly whenever they
arise—not in terms of "crisis," but in terms of the
circumstances and the specific requirements for action. In this
connection it may be instructive to read the opening pages of the
well-known 1968 report Goals of Engineering Education
(American Society for Engineering Education), which predicts the
technology of "The World of 1984." It is interesting to observe how
many of those expectations have not come to pass. One may be led to
the conclusion that broad technological change will seldom be as
rapid as our imaginations suggest, and, further, that our society
and its professional systems may be better able to adapt to change
than we might expect. The important thing is, not to maintain a
crisis-response posture, but to be aware of the mechanisms and
limits of change so that informed choices can be made in a timely
fashion.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
various components