National Academies Press: OpenBook

Engineering in Society (1985)

Chapter: CALCULATING THE VECTOR OF CHANGE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

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Suggested Citation:"CALCULATING THE VECTOR OF CHANGE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?." National Research Council. 1985. Engineering in Society. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/586.
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Page 15
Suggested Citation:"CALCULATING THE VECTOR OF CHANGE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?." National Research Council. 1985. Engineering in Society. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/586.
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Page 16

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INTRODUCTION 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

INTRODUCTION 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.

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