Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 92 to reconcile the competing interests of greatest importance to that branch of engineering. If arrayed along a continuum, the various engineering societies would be bounded at one end by scientific societies, which are preeminently devoted to the discovery and interpretation of natural knowledge, and at the other end by industrial trade associations. The tensions that shaped these societies at the time of their founding, tensions such as those between practical experience and theoretical understanding and between individual autonomy and loyalty to one's employer, are still present in engineering and continue to challenge those responsible for engineering education and the affairs of engineering societies. Engineering as Social Practice The practice of engineering, like the engineering profession, also can be analyzed in cultural terms. In an earlier historical period, when there were many fewer engineers and engineering specialties than there are today, it was not unreasonable to think that all engineers shared a single set of professional values and followed careers that conformed to a common pattern. But today this belief in a common culture of practice, while still informing certain aspects of engineering education and professional organization, does not provide an adequate basis for understanding the actual work experiences of contemporary engineers. For well over a century the growth and diversification of engineering has been driven by the development of new technological systems that require both new types of knowledge and new forms of social organization. Edward Constant described one consequence of the general shift in engineering practice these developments have brought about when he observed that today, "virtually all engineering . . . is done in complex organizations, either in industry, in government, in education, or somewhere else. There are very few solitary engineers. Engineers have a reputation for being casually antisocial and yet virtually everything they do requires fairly intense social interaction." To acquire a more detailed understanding of contemporary engineering practice, however, we must move from this level of generality down to the study of the particular subcultures of engineering practice that taken together make up today's culture of engineering. As James Brittain has pointed out, two recent books, both of which were bestsellers, provide extended and revealing accounts of the culture of engineering practice in two different industries. The first of these, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano, was published in 1952. It is, of course, a work of fiction and must be interpreted with care, but it is
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 93 also an insightful description of certain attitudes and patterns of behavior that the author observed while working for General Electric in Schenectady. One need not share Vonnegut's views about the events he describes nor consider him a particularly skillful novelist to appreciate the sharpness of vision he brings to his study of the subculture of engineering at General Electric. Vonnegut is centrally concerned with understanding how corporations go about indoctrinating new engineers. How are these young people persuaded that they should see themselves as part of the corporate team and how do they come to internalize and make their own the company's view of the significance of their work? This is obviously a question of great importance, for all social organizations must develop ways of ensuring that those who function within them will demonstrate considerable concern for and allegiance to the goals the organization is attempting to realize. We should therefore not object to Vonnegut's concentration on this facet of engineering practice, but should rather be prepared to examine the issue he raises and the conflicts engineers experience as important aspects of the culture of engineering practice. This, of course, is not the place to undertake an extended discussion of Vonnegut's treatment of these questions. It is worth pointing out, however, that the dramatic action of the book culminates in the annual corporate camp meeting at which the company engineers renew their adherence to the values which they, as company employees, live by. And as Brittain reminds us, General Electric did in fact have a camp on Association Island where its engineers and managers went to learn, play, and revitalize their commitment to the corporation. The second book Brittain summarized, Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, is an outstanding example of contemporary reporting. Kidder immersed himself in the daily life of a group of engineers who were given the task of creating an entirely new computer, his purpose being to describe dispassionately yet vividly the character of computer engineering as it is actually practiced today. He tells us that competing teams, the Hardy Boys and the Micro Kids, were formed and that those who wished to sign on to a team had to undergo a rite of initiation. The project leaders told the teams they were going to build what they could get away with. As with the formation of teams, problems were analyzed in binary termsâanswers were right or wrong, decisions were good or bad. Dedication had to be complete, project members being told at one point that they were expected to ruin their health for the company. Kidder tells his story with great skill and provides a compelling account of heroic obsession within the computer industry. One can, of
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 94 course, argue that the book is unrepresentative, but it has been widely praised as accurate by those familiar with this kind of work. At the very least it shares with Vonnegut's novel the virtue of directing attention to aspects of engineering practice that are seldom analyzed. While those who wish to understand the nature of engineering should welcome the appearance of books such as Vonnegut's and Kidder's, putting them in the hands of engineering students may, from one point of view, prove counterproductive. Engineering education, like other forms of professional education, must inspire as well as inform, and it is reasonable to ask whether engineering students ought to have their attention directed to the aspects of engineering practice highlighted by Vonnegut and Kidder. Indeed, there is some evidence that engineering students have a strong sense of self-preservation on this score. David Hounshell reports that he has used Kidder's book in a course for engineering students and that 75 percent of the students consider it the book they like least. The book they most like, David McCullough's excellent history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, can also be read as a story of heroic obsession, but in this case there is a central figure who overcomes the many difficulties he encounters and leaves as a monument to his triumph a massive structure whose beauty and economy is still being celebrated. The extent to which engineering educators are responsible for tempering the unrealistic expectations of their students is, of course, a pedagogic question of considerable importance. Not all engineers work for corporations, and Martin Reuss has provided an informative account of the ways in which the subculture of engineering in a federal agency helped shape the practice of one of its foremost figures. Reuss has studied the career of Andrew Humphreys, an army officer who rose to become chief of the Corps of Engineers and was also one of America's most prominent hydraulic engineers during the nineteenth century. Humphreys is remembered for his influential study of the hydraulics of the Mississippi River. He brought to that project the engineering training he had received at West Point and his belief that science and engineering should be supported by, and should in turn serve, the state. It is interesting to note that both his approach to hydraulic engineering and his views on the relations between science, engineering, and the state were derived from Continental rather than British sources. The Corps of Engineers was committed to serving the public good, although whether it in fact always did so would be seriously questioned in the twentieth century. Humphreys respected this noncommercial mandate and vigorously resisted those who sought to
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 95 reduce the corps to an agency that merely contracted with engineers in private practice for such services as it needed. He is therefore a suitable representative of the subculture of public engineering for the era in which he lived. Humphreys certainly recognized that politics influences engineering decisions, but he insisted that his own recommendations were informed by engineering considerations, not political interests. As chief of engineers, he used data and ideas first published in his famous Mississippi delta report to defend his positions on controversial engineering issues. As a result, his disputes with various professional engineers took on the character of a referendum on the report itself, and since Humphreys had tied the corps so closely to the conclusions of the report, judgments concerning his work as an engineer also were taken as judgments of the entire corps. The best known of these disputes was between Humphreys and James B. Eads, whose most famous work is the great bridge that still bears his name and spans the Mississippi at Saint Louis. Eads was convinced that building jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi would provide the channel depth needed for navigation; Humphreys argued vigorously against the jetties project. The outcome of the dispute was determined by the interplay of egos, alliances, and politics as much as it was by dispassionate analysis of competing engineering theories. Congressmen, most without any engineering education or expertise, debated highly technical questions and called upon government and, increasingly, nongovernment experts to testify before their committees. Newspaper coverage of this dispute was so extensive that Reuss considers it the first technical engineering debate that became a national issue. Humphreys brought to this engagement his status as chief of engineers and his reputation as co-author of an important report dealing with river engineering. He was proud of his work as a hydraulic engineer and proud of his West Point education. Eads, with little more than a grammar school education, brought to the contest not only his own considerable talent, but also the brash entrepreneurial drive of an independent professional determined to win public business for private contractors. Humphreys was outraged as Congress intervened in ways that politicized the entire debate. As it turned out, Eads was right on the technical issue, but this obviously does not provide grounds for concluding that in general private engineers are smarter than public engineers. This case is important for our purposes because of the light it throws on the character of federal engineering in the nineteenth cen
