Engineering as a Social Enterprise (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Introduction
Introduction
Pages 1-4
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When the committee charged with planning the symposium met to implement the assigned theme of engineering and society, we quickly found that we shared a common view. Though we expressed it in different words, we agreed that engineering, far from interacting with society from outside as often assumed, is in reality an integral part of the social fabric.
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Engineers have to deal with systems technical systems all the time and are familiar with how they need to be subdivided for analysis. In the sociotechnical model, the entire society is visualized, as we engineers do in our technical work, as a vast integrated system, with the varied social and technical areas of human activity as major interacting subsystems.
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The third and fourth essays offer views from the standpoint of two major organizational subsystems of society, business and government. Marina Whitman treats business in terms of the growing tensions and challenges for engineering and engineers in the auto industry as a result of demands for economic growth and jobs and for safer and more environmentally benign automobiles.
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Given the interna' demands of our profession, not all engineers can or should function as what one sociologist has called "heterogeneous engineers." To perform engineering's task as a social enterprise, however, the profession as a whole will need to act more consciously in that mode than it has in the past. Somewhere in his writings, the late, eminent social critic Lewis Mumford said, "The main lesson that history teaches is—prepare for the unexpected." As the Academy proceeds into its second quarter century, we hope this volume of essays will in some small way help our colleagues well as the lay public to make that paradoxical preparation.
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