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INTRODUCTION 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 consciousnessâthe 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 paramountâor 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
