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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 110 ment groups might concentrate only on "technically sweet" projects while slighting those that seem most likely to serve the needs of the larger institution. What is clear, therefore, is that considerations of institutional mission and strategy are and will remain primary in the planning of engineering research and development. ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT The Engineer and the Marketplace There is an intriguing tension in engineering between the public image of the engineer and the reality of the normal career pattern within engineering. The engineer is in the popular mind a skillful manipulator of physical substances and the organizer of vast technical enterprises. Engineers strive for efficiency in the sense of using energy and materials in the least wasteful way possible and they seek to maximize utilities by satisfying the material needs of humanity while making the most efficient use possible of the resources provided by nature. Conceived in this way, engineering can be readily distinguished from management, for this latter activity involves primarily the organizing, motivating, and supervising of people. The goals of management are entirely those of the institution in which the manager works, while engineers are primarily, although certainly not exclusively, concerned with material efficiency and utility. Engineers deal with things, managers deal with people. But this distinction, while clear, is artificial, for in fact engineering and management blend into one another in ways that make it very difficult to disentangle them. Consider the case of Kettering, described above. Thomas Hughes has asked if Kettering was in fact an engineer when he was serving as director of the GM Research Laboratory. Certainly his responsibilities at that stage in his career were primarily those of a manager. Aaron Gellman notes that a similar problem arose in two university programs in transportation engineering. Social and management issues were introduced to such an extent, he reports, "that people who were turned on by engineering stopped coming," and these programs in transportation engineering were subsequently transformed into programs in transportation management. But at exactly what point did this move from engineering to management occur? While distinguishing between engineering and management remains a difficult analytical problem, it appears that in practice few
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 111 engineers today find the relationship between these two enterprises especially troubling. This is so because engineers have by and large accepted and made their own the fundamental values of the institutions they work for. In America in the twentieth century the institutional values of greatest importance to engineers have been those of corporate capitalism, and considerations of cost and profit are as central to contemporary engineering as is knowledge of the properties of the physical world. This historical coupling of the central cultural values of engineering and management has been immensely successful, and there is little reason to think that the ability of this extraordinary cultural compound to motivate and inform the design and production of new technologies is nearing exhaustion. But the fact that these two sets of values have been yoked together in practice does not provide grounds for believing that they are essentially identical. Indeed, the persistence of the distinction between engineering and management in both public opinion and everyday language, as well as the tensions that occasionally arise between these two activities, indicate that while engineers in practice may successfully compromise the differences between the value systems of these two enterprises, their differences still need to be made explicit. Earlier in this century it was widely believed that the leading management problems created by the rise of industrial society could be successfully reduced to engineering problems in the sense that they could be adequately analyzed and solved in terms of material and energy efficiencies. While today this approach to social engineering has few public adherents, the arguments advanced in its behalf serve as a useful reminder that the conception of the relationship between engineering and management has varied through time. The early champions of scientific management and of the political movement called technocracy were practicing engineers who believed that the wastefulness of competitive capitalism and the inefficiencies of interest-group politics could be eliminated by treating all problems of management, both public and private, as engineering problems. If this were done, the struggle between labor and management over control of the workplace could be resolved through a scientific determination of the organization of work. Similarly, the shortages and unequal distribution of essential goods and services, problems that are a commonplace in the political economy of corporate capitalism, would be eliminated through rationally organized production and distribution. The primacy of the market would be replaced by the primacy of reason as represented by science and applied by engineers. No one today needs to be reminded
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 112 that this version of social engineering did not prevail. But it did express a clear notion of the difference between engineering and management, one that was accepted by many engineers. While the technocrats in particular were emphasizing the differences between the ways that engineers and capitalists solve problems, most engineers were happily following career tracks that carried them from technical work to managerial responsibility. Indeed, it has long been a commonplace among engineers that the road to success leads to management. Over 50 years ago William Wickenden, a giant in the history of engineering education, reported that a survey of engineers who graduated between 1884 and 1924 revealed that roughly two thirds had become managers within 15 years of leaving college. Wickenden applauded this finding, for he realized it is almost always necessary for an engineer to leave the engineering of materials and enter the engineering of people in order to become very successful financially and socially. The movement of engineers into management has continued unabated, and many observers believe that if American industry is to hold its own in international trade, the number of engineers in top management must be dramatically increased. Today the importance of good engineering in the design and production of consumer products is being reemphasized, while at the same time the importance of linking the work of engineers to the marketplace is also being stressed. Striking the right balance between engineering considerations and marketing possibilities is central to the art of management, and as David Hounshell's study of the competition between Ford and GM in the 1920s demonstrates, that balance can shift very suddenly. And as Neil Wasserman's study of recent changes in American Telephone and Telegraph also indicates, corporations that in the past have been organized on functional principles derived from their engineering practice may suddenly find themselves compelled to reorganize to give primacy to market considerations. In general then, those engineers who plan to move into management, and they constitute a majority, must be prepared to accept the primacy of managerial values, which are the values of the marketplace, even when this does some violence to the values they acquired while training to become engineers. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T and five years later he revolutionized automobile production by introducing the moving assembly line for major subassemblies and final chassis assembly. Until the mid-1920s Ford's classic carâblack, spare, cheap, and reliableâand the technology with which it was produced represented engineering efficiency and utility to most Americans. While the Model T
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 113 did in fact undergo some improvement and modification over the years, it was never radically altered, and therein lay its vulnerability in the marketplace. In 1922 Ford manufactured over two million Model Ts, held a market share of 55 percent, and reaped huge profits; four years later its market share was down to 30 percent and drastic action was called for. The alternative to Ford's "best engineering solution" conception of the automobile was developed by GM under the presidency of Alfred Sloan. Rather than offering the public a single automobile containing a compromise of all those features one looks for in a car, Sloan developed a family of cars, or as he put it, a car for every purse and purpose, and in doing so he consciously sought to capitalize on the public's willingness to pay for comfort and conspicuous consumption. By 1925 Sloan's "trade-up" marketing strategy had penetrated each of GM's product lines and the annual model change was introduced. As an engineer, Sloan realized how technically demanding and resource wasteful such a strategy was, but it made great sense as a way to sell cars and Ford was obliged to conform. In 1927 Ford announced it would end production of the Model T and introduce a new car, the Model A. The changeover, as Hounshell points out, was a disastrous episode in the history of the Ford Motor Company. The costs and difficulties entailed were grossly underestimated and the time required to complete the changeover greatly exceeded original projections. The Chevrolet Division of GM continued to press the market strategy Ford was attempting to copy, and by the time the Model A was becoming profitable, it was already being seriously challenged by a newer and better GM product. Success in automobile marketing had come to depend on continuous innovation in product design and GM had developed the management organization required to implement this strategy. While both companies employed highly competent engineers, Ford was hobbled by an arbitrary and unsystematic management organization that reflected the prejudices and conduct of its founder and owner. The model change fiasco made the inadequacies of Ford's management painfully evident. Perhaps Sloan should be seen as an "ideal type" of the engineer who became a successful manager. There can be no doubt that he devoted skills he acquired as an engineer to serving General Motors, but whether the decisions he made while president were strongly influenced by his background in engineering remains problematic. Consider the question of installing safety glass, for instance. To do so would certainly have been advantageous from the point of view of safety engineering, as Sloan realized. But as Hounshell points out, Sloan consid
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 114 ered questions of profitability paramount. Indeed, he put the point as a matter of stark inevitability, not personal choice, saying "I regret that we have to be so selfish that we must consider our profit position before we do, perhaps, the safety of those who use our products, but it cannot be otherwise." Here is an acceptance of the "naturalness" of the market that is as absolute as the naturalness of the physical world engineers must deal with in their technical work. It thus appears that to succeed as managers, engineers must be prepared to accept the naturalness of the laws that govern the social world in the same way that as students they were taught to accept the natural laws of the physical world. But this should not be surprising, for such beliefs are essential components of the systems of ideas that unify and sustain the cultures of engineering and management. The ways in which market considerations come to dominate technical considerations when engineers work in competitive industries is also illustrated by Neil Wasserman's study of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Wasserman uses the phrase functional atomism to describe the managerial system employed by AT&T from the late 1880s until the end of the 1970s. In this system the organization of managerial units paralleled the organization of the engineering functions performed by the various components of the system. When fully developed, the system assigned research to Bell Labs, equipment manufacture to Western Electric, long distance service to a separate division, local service to regional operating companies, and so forth. This organization of management responsibilities was particularly effective at a time when the telephone company was operating as a regulated monopoly having as its primary goal the development of a universal system of voice communication. Shielded from market competition, it was able to control and phase in new technology to ensure functional compatibility throughout the system. Today the situation in which the telephone companies operate is dramatically different. AT&T has been broken up, competing technologies are being introduced by aggressive entrepreneurs, new kinds of services are being marketed, and universal telephone service, having been largely achieved, is no longer a suitable corporate goal. In response to these changes, Wasserman reports, AT&T decided even before faced with divestiture to move from a managerial system based on functional atomism to one based on market organization. As in the automobile case, the end of what was essentially a monopoly forced those with managerial responsibility to respond to the new range of choices available to consumers and rely less on products that represented engineering solutions to technical problems.
