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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 89 Laboratory of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, again raised the question Steinmetz had addressed. An engineer himself, Terman concluded that the war had demonstrated the inadequacy of the training engineers received, since most of the major advances in electronics had been made by physicists. Unlike the engineers, the physicists had mastered the basic fundamentals of science while acquiring their advanced degrees, and they were quickly converted into extremely good engineers. The engineers he worked with, while they had functioned extremely well in some capacities, had shown little creativity. Reflecting on the engineering method, the relationship between science and engineering and the role of creativity in engineering help clarify certain aspects of the overall enterprise called engineering. But consideration of these issues also reveals that no one of them, nor even all of them taken together, provides a basis for a comprehensive understanding of the nature of engineering. Being an engineer involves the use of certain methods and the utilization of certain kinds of knowledge, but it also involves forms of professional association and social practice that cannot be seen as simply derived from its knowledge base. It is to the examination of these other aspects of engineering that we must now turn. Engineering as a Profession Engineers have long aspired to the dignity associated with being professional and there can be no doubt that today engineering is one of the largest and most prominent of the professions. What is in doubt is exactly how one should characterize the profession of engineering. One approach is to measure it against the standards of independence, collegiality, and ethical concern that have long been the guiding principles of the older professions of the ministry, the law, and medicine. Another approach is to describe carefully the actual concerns and practices of professional engineers and take these as defining. In fact, both the normative and descriptive approaches are needed, for the powerful urge to professionalize engineering has been motivated both by a desire to elevate the status of the engineer within the larger society and by a commitment to serve the functional needs of engineers as their numbers and specializations have multiplied. These two motivations have created a vitalizing tension within the profession of engineering, a tension that was evident when the first engineering societies were founded and is still present in the profession today. James Brittain has suggested that one way to step back from the
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 90 subject of professionalism and bring it into focus is to look at the culture of engineering, using the term culture in the way that anthropologists do. A culture, in this sense, is a system of beliefs embedded in and expressed by a language and related forms of symbolic interaction. These beliefs and their expression provide the context of meaning for those who participate in the culture. This is, of course, a very abstract concept, and cultures only become meaningful to those who are studying them when they are specified by being attached to certain groups of people living at certain times and in particular circumstances. There are, however, two main reasons for thinking about the profession of engineering in cultural terms. The first is that it provides a way of addressing both the prescriptive aspect of professionalization, in which becoming a professional is presented as a way of achieving a higher level of social and personal worth, and the functional aspect, in which being a professional is seen as advantageous in terms of getting on with the work of engineering. The other great advantage of focusing on the culture of engineering is that it enables us to identify what endures, even while changing, in the social organization of engineering. While the culture of engineering is a moving target, as Melvin Kranzberg has put it, the processes by which young engineers are acculturated and socialized into the profession are still of great importance. It is those processes, and the goals they are intended to serve, that we need to understand. One way to spell out the content of a culture is to look at its dominant images. Larry Lankton has suggested that until quite recently the engineer was perceived as a Lone Ranger of the technical world. When help was needed he rode in and fired off a few silver bullets, saving the day for the virtuous and serving the public good. The image is arresting if fanciful, and in some ways it captures the character of men like John Jervis, arguably the foremost American civil engineer in the nineteenth century. In addition to being an accomplished engineer, Jervis laid great stress on his personal integrity and independence. Since the construction of civil works inevitably involves politics, Jervis cultivated an image that would enable him to speak with authority in public debates. He realized that technical expertise, while necessary, was not enough and he therefore stressed his autonomy as a professional and his personal independence. When consulting on the construction of the Croton Aqueduct, for example, Jervis specified that a certain type of mortar be used. The commissioners insisted that a different mortar be used and Jervis, convinced that their decision was technically unsound, told them that while he acknowledged their authority to overrule him, if
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 91 they did so he would withdraw from the project. Jervis's reputation was such that he prevailed. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), founded in 1852 and the first American engineering society, was dedicated to defending and advancing the image of the professional engineer represented by Jervis. But the civil engineers' emphasis on personal autonomy was only possible in fields in which engineers were in fact independent. So long as engineers operated primarily as consultants bound to their employers only by job-specific contracts, they could see themselves as professionals in practice in the same sense as practicing lawyers and physicians. But in fields such as mining, in which many engineers were employed by particular companies for extended periods and served in managerial as well as technical capacities, the image of the professional as an independent agent was much less sustainable. Indeed, one need only glance at the early history of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, the second of the four "founder" societies in engineering to be established, to see that for some engineers, unstinting loyalty to the company of a sort one would expect of someone in a managerial position was entirely compatible with the development of a sense of professionalism. (See Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers, Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve Press, 1971.) The other two "founder" societies established in the nineteenth century, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), attempted to strike a balance between the influence of business and the independence of technical expertise. Since mechanical engineering developed out of a machine-shop culture that had been evolving throughout the century, its leadership came largely from those with extensive experience in the metal-working industries. A tension soon arose between those who wished to ensure that the shop culture of mechanical engineering would continue to dominate the profession and those who looked to a more formally organized and transmitted school culture as the proper foundation for mechanical engineering. The AIEE, which served engineers in one of the new industries spawned by scientific discovery, set high technical standards for membership, but it also acknowledged the dominant position of the new electrical companies and accepted a high degree of business leadership within the society. This brief review of the various conceptions of professionalism that informed the four founder engineering societies clearly reveals that the culture of engineering is highly diverse. Indeed, each of the major societies appears to embody a distinct subculture, each of which attempts
