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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 120 managers will in their day-to-day activities ever again enjoy the degree of freedom from public scrutiny and control that they did through the period of the Cold War. The first reaction to the new level of contextual complexity is, quite naturally, to insist that engineering students spend much more time studying the social sciences and the humanities, but as we saw above, there is little likelihood that more time will be made available for these subjects. A second and more promising response is to say that an instrumental approach to the social/humanistic component of engineering education now compels us to recast instruction in these subjects so that engineering students will be able better to understand the fundamental concerns and claims that lie behind the new public attitudes and policies. If in the public mind engineering now appears morally ambiguous, then the reasons for that attitude and their implications for engineers can be examined in courses on ethics for engineers. And if the conduct and consequences of industrial activity are now to be closely regulated, then the reasons for doing so and the consequences entailed can be examined in courses on engineering and public policy. Such courses, if treated with the seriousness they deserve, can help engineering students think their way through the challenges that will be thrown in their way by those outside the profession. Rather than being driven to sectarian self-justification, they will be prepared to manage the complexities they encounter ultimately to satisfy the highest goal of both engineering and management by getting the job done. ENGINEERING AND SOCIAL CHANGE Resilience in Times of Crisis Engineers find their jobs in a highly differentiated labor market that is both extremely free and highly responsive to change. One can speak of an engineering manpower system, but to do so is to aggregate and rationalize in the abstract a dispersed series of negotiations and contracts arrived at freely and independently between employers and employees. The constraints within the system are imposed, on the one hand, by the total number of potential employees available and the special skills they bring to the marketplace and, on the other hand, by the needs, both total and in terms of specific skill requirements, of potential employers. When it appears the system is malfunctioning, it may be because of an oversupply in the total number of engineers seeking work or in an oversupply in one or more specialties, or, con
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 121 versely, it may be that the total demand, or the demand for one or more specialties, exceeds the supply. In practice, of course, crises within the system first become evident as shortages or oversupplies within certain fields of engineering. The response to crises involving a shortage in a certain specialty can take two forms. The number of engineers available in the undersupplied specialty can be increased either by increasing the number of beginning engineers trained in the specialty, or engineers trained in other specialties can be hired to do the work required. How the engineering manpower system has in the past responded to shortages, and whether or not individual engineers have successfully migrated between specialties, is thus an empirical question that can be answered, at least in part, by the study of appropriate historical cases. The two cases described below indicate that in fact the engineering manpower system has been surprisingly resilient in times of crises, primarily because large numbers of engineers have in practice been highly flexible in terms of their ability to move successfully between specialties. Edward Constant, who is studying the early history of petroleum engineering, has been impressed by the extent to which engineers have moved into new and undersupplied specialties from adjacent areas of science and engineering. In 1920 there were only two university programs in America for the training for petroleum engineers. A survey of those who prior to 1920 were doing the kind of work that came to be associated with petroleum engineering reveals that only 9 percent were trained in this field. Of the 147 practicing engineers in the survey who had degrees, over one quarter had received degrees in geology, another quarter had degrees in mining engineering, and the remaining half held degrees in chemistry or other fields of engineering. As new academic programs in petroleum engineering were developed, this cross-flow between specialties naturally diminished. A sample of 180 degree-holding petroleum engineers in practice between 1930 and 1960 indicates that roughly 44 percent had degrees in petroleum engineering, while 21 percent had degrees in geology and 35 percent held degrees in other fields of engineering, with mining engineering accounting for only 5 percent. Constant's data suggest an interpretation that he believes is misleading. Perhaps the petroleum engineering case is an example of the emergence of a specialty, and once the field has reached maturity, in the sense of having its own degree programs, the flow of engineers into that specialty from other fields will decline to relative insignificance. But as both Constant and Jeffrey Sturchio point out, the assumption that mature specialties operate as closed systems in the engineering man
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 122 power system is not supported by the evidence of history. If the fluctuations of the system were predictable, these specialty subsystems well might establish an internal equilibrium, for they are strongly inclined in this direction. But in fact the demand for engineers, both in the aggregate and within separate specialties, is affected by so many factors, and the lag time involved in recruiting and training new specialists is so long, that in times of crises a considerable cross- flow between specialties is evident even in mature fields. For instance, in the area of petroleum engineering the 1973 oil embargo, an event that certainly evaded prediction, created a decade-long sharp increase in the demand for petroleum engineers. While this heightened demand led to increased enrollments in degree programs in petroleum engineering, it was satisfied in the short run primarily by an influx of engineers who moved into petroleum engineering from related areas in science and technology. The resilience of the overall engineering manpower system was again demonstrated, and it seems reasonable to attribute that resilience at least in part to the openness of the specialty subsystems of which it is composed. Alex Roland has drawn similar conclusions from his study of NASA's Apollo program. Driven by a fear of military vulnerability and a desire to demonstrate national power, the lunar-landing program involved engineering on a national scale and threatened to create intense stresses in the engineering manpower system. This threat was relieved in part by certain organizational choices made within NASA. Rather than developing the Apollo program on the Army arsenal model, in which almost all the engineering work is done in-house, NASA adopted the Air Force contracting system and consistently spent 90 to 95 percent of its budget on contracts with industrial suppliers of products and services. Having made this choice, NASA then hired a cadre of its own engineers to plan, supervise, and coordinate its contracts and operations. The engineers hired by NASA came from a variety of specialties, again illustrating the predominance of cross-flow in periods of high demand, and many of its engineers and managers were detailed to NASA from the military services. As a result, NASA never suffered from a shortage of qualified engineers. Although Roland has not studied the flow of engineering manpower in the corporations that contracted with NASA, his impression, shared by others familiar with this story, is that there, too, cross-flow between specialties was the key to meeting the sudden increase in demand for aerospace engineers. The sudden expansion of NASA associated with the Apollo program was followed by an equally unanticipated sudden decline. NASA managers, seduced by the technical sweetness of the devices they were
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 123 creating and lulled into believing there was a boundless national commitment to the exploration of space, planned for continued high levels of growth within the agency, but as early as 1963, long before the first lunar landing in 1969, political support for post-Apollo projects had begun to wane. Since 1965 NASA's budget has been steadily declining and it is now less than the military space budget. While this retreat from the space frontier has received a great deal of highly charged publicity, it appears that during the period of decline the engineers in NASA and in the corporations with which it has contracted have either successfully returned to the jobs they held before the Apollo program or have taken the experience they gained while on that project and applied it elsewhere. Thus while both the expansion and contraction of the Apollo program had the potential for creating a crisis in the engineering manpower system, that system in fact exhibited a surprising degree of resilience in responding to the stresses placed upon it. The realization that the engineering manpower system possesses a high degree of resilience has important implications for engineering education. Because we are incapable of predicting with a useful degree of accuracy future shifts in the demand for engineers, and because the response times of universities are so slow in comparison with those of the marketplace for engineering labor, attempts to tie the content of engineering education closely to the needs of industry have been of little use in anticipating or responding to short-term stresses in the engineering manpower system. Indeed, attempts to forge a tight link between engineering curricula and specific employment opportunities have probably done more harm than good from the point of view of individual flexibility and the resilience of the system, for they have emphasized specialization at an early stage of education and have thereby reduced the breadth of understanding that in fact facilitates movement between specialties. The character of the engineering research carried on in universities appears to have a considerable bearing on the flexibility of the engineers trained within them. The most effective link between college-and university-based engineers and the markets served by engineers appears to lie in the realm of research. While it is relatively easy to insure that research and development activities carried on within a corporation are market responsive, such is not the case in universities. When given the choice, university-based engineers, like their counterparts in science, are more apt to pursue technically sweet projects than those that are primarily of economic value, and this preference can powerfully influence the values of those studying in such institutions. But since practically all university research in science and engineering
