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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 106 generational displacement within engineering. Since we can no longer accept or afford widespread loss of employment as a consequence of technological innovation, we must uncouple generations of knowledge from human generations and ensure that every engineer acquires as many generations of knowledge as he or she needs to have a full and productive career. Institutional Imperatives The complex organizations within which most engineers work are purposeful institutions, and the strategies and mission statements formulated to express their purposes help define the contextual constraints that shape the practice of engineering. From the setting of research agendas through the development of new processes and products to the evaluation of results achieved, the goals of the institutions within which engineers work provide the primary criteria for determining the success or failure of the effort expended. To grasp how institutional goals impinge on the practice of engineering, we must focus on the strategies that govern specific industries and agencies, for the more abstract goals of ''profitability'' and "public service," which are honored by all corporations and public bodies, are too general to be informative. We must, in other words, turn again to case studies. Stuart Leslie has looked closely at the ways in which Charles Kettering shaped his work as an engineer to the specific corporate strategies of the firms he worked for, and his case study illustrates how this adaptation takes place in the private sector. Thomas Carroll has studied the development of rockets in a publicly funded laboratory, a case in which the changing research orientation of the lab imperiled but did not terminate the line of investigation that eventually proved to be the most fruitful. Both cases demonstrate that institutional imperatives play a central role in engineering. Charles Kettering was born in 1876 and received a degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University. He then went to work at the National Cash Register Company, where he quickly learned that the key to success lay in coupling his talents as an engineer to the needs and opportunities of greatest concern to the company he was working for. These needs and opportunities, he discovered, were most evident to the people responsible for marketing the company's products. Thus, rather than focus his attention on new ideas suggested by recent developments in electrical science, he did his best to provide technical solutions to problems identified by the corporation's sales force. As Kettering later recalled, "I didn't hang around much with the other
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 107 inventors or the executive fellows. I lived with the sales gang. They had some real notion of what people wanted." His personal strategy was highly successful. By the time Kettering left the National Cash Register Company in 1909, he had helped transform the cash register, as Leslie puts it, "from a defensive measure against weak-willed cashiers . . . into a powerful tool of management planning." Kettering left the National Cash Register Company so that he could go into business by himself designing and supplying electrical accessories for automobiles. Again he was spectacularly successful, his most famous new product being the first commercially successful electric self-starter. While others before Kettering had developed various self-starting systems, he concentrated on fitting his system to cars already being produced and on making it reliable. By realizing these goals, he made the world of motoring available to new groups of consumers, most notably women, and greatly expanded the market for his new product. In 1916 he merged his Delco Company into General Motors, and a few years later he was put in charge of a research group in GM. His assignment was to study the long-range problems of the industry, especially those that might be of greatest concern to GM's production divisions. It was a task for which he was well prepared both by experience and attitude, and again he succeeded brilliantly. Managing the Research Laboratory was a difficult assignment, for it was an anomalous unit within General Motors. Unlike the production divisions, it was not a profit-making unit. GM president Alfred Sloan was sharply aware of that fact. Shortly after becoming head of GM Sloan cautioned Kettering that "the more tangible [the] result[s] we get from [the research lab], the stronger its position will be." But the research lab could not simply focus on solving existing technical problems of production, for it was also responsible for reaching out beyond the range of existing products in an attempt to anticipate where the market would go, and this entailed the possibility of making wrong guesses. To satisfy this second expectation, Kettering developed a variety of techniques for identifying what kinds of new devices might sell and he then used these educated guesses when setting the research agenda for the lab. He recognized the importance of risk-taking and told his colleagues in the lab that, "you are always too late with the development if you are so slow that people demand it before you, yourself, recognize it. The Research Department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them." Serving the production divisions proved to be a considerably more demanding task that Kettering had at first realized it would be. This
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 108 point was driven home by his failure to convince the production engineers that they should adopt a radically new air-cooled engine developed by the lab. Having been reminded that the products of the lab were of no value to the company unless they were acceptable to the engineers working in the production divisions, Kettering thereafter devoted a great deal of time and attention to what he called the research lab's internal market. He sought to ensure, largely through personal diplomacy, that ideas proposed by the lab were acceptable within the company before they were developed further for the external market of car buyers. Producibility and marketability were the twin criteria by which the lab's efforts were to be evaluated, and under Kettering's guidance it served General Motors well. Thomas Carroll's study of the development of solid-propellant rocket boosters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory illustrates how changing institutional commitments can shape engineering efforts that later turn out to be unexpectedly successful. While engineering teams must respond to the changing concerns of the institutions in which they work, they also develop a certain momentum of their own. The relationship between the larger institution and the practice of engineering is thus a kind of dance in which the institution leads while allowing its partner a certain degree of freedom. Maintaining such a relationship serves both parties well where there are no formulas for success, for in such cases a certain measure of tolerance appears to be practical wisdom. In the case of solid-propellant rockets, it was individual conviction and group momentum that led to successful development, not the sustained commitment of the sponsoring institution. But had that institution not provided some, if limited, resources for those who believed in solid propellants, their conviction and momentum alone could not have resulted in success. Prior to World War II the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) sponsored a small research project using liquid-fueled rockets for high-altitude sounding of the atmosphere. When the war began, the laboratory took on the task of designing rocket motors to provide jet-assisted takeoff for airplanes (JATO), and the sounding rocket project was set aside. After extensive theoretical and developmental work, the engineers assigned to the JATO project perfected a solid propellant that could be cast in heavy containers. These rockets, which had short burning times, were then produced and used in great number during the war. They also served as the paradigm for further development of solid propellants. Reports of German development of the V-2 rocket led to a dramatic
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 109 redirection of the Cal Tech research facility in 1944. GALCIT was transformed into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), its mission being to develop "long- range rocket missiles and ram jets." The rockets called for by this mission had to have long burning times and the JPL researchers therefore again turned their attention to liquid-fueled rockets. The JATO project was not abandoned, however, although work on solid propellants was demoted to a position of secondary importance within the lab. By 1947 the leaders of the JATO program were convinced that the new designs and new materials they had developed now made it possible to construct a long-burning, lightly cased, solid-propellant rocket. However, when they urged that their research be supported under the long-range missile program, their claims were greeted with skepticism and they were dismissed as eccentric. From 1948 until 1950 the advocates of solid propellants used the resources made available to them to develop and test a series of large rockets. Their enthusiasm had gotten ahead of their research, however, and the tests were cancelled following the twelfth consecutive explosion of one of these multithousand-pound rockets. During this period JPL had become even more deeply committed to liquid-fueled rockets, as well as to the development of other aspects of long-range rocketry, such as guidance systems, that it had taken on. Although the cause of the solid-propellant rocket explosions had been discovered just as the series of tests was being cancelled, the cost of developing these rockets further had come to exceed the commitment of the institution that had fathered them. At that point, as Carroll puts it, JPL declared the solid- propellant rocket an orphan. Although banished from the estate, the orphan did not perish. Rather, it migrated, in the person of the leading scientists involved in the project, to the Thiokol Corporation, a patron that recognized its true qualities and launched it into a flourishing career. Thomas Carroll's study of solid propellants at JPL illustrates that setting agendas for engineering research is a gamble. Everyone wants to support "creative engineering," to use Steinmetz's phrase, but the line between creativity and eccentricity is frequently hard to discern. While successful innovation is a common goal for those involved in engineering research, the factors that lead to successful innovation are hard to identify. Martin Reuss has suggested that since institutional goals have such a great influence on the setting of research agendas, "the burden today is on the managers rather than the educators to provide the opportunities for engineers to do . . . innovative work." Yet corporations and agencies must exercise some control, or their research and develop
