Engineering in Society (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 110-114
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From page 110... ...
Certainly his responsibilities at that stage in his career were primarily those of a manager. Aaron Gellman notes that a similar problem arose in two university programs in transportation engineering.
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From page 111... ...
In America in the twentieth century the institutional values of greatest importance to engineers have been those of corporate capitalism, and considerations of cost and profit are as central to contemporary engineering as is knowledge of the properties of the physical world. This historical coupling of the central cultural values of engineering and management has been immensely successful, and there is little reason to think that the ability of this extraordinary cultural compound to motivate and inform the design and production of new technologies is nearing exhaustion.
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From page 112... ...
And as Neil Wasserman's study of recent changes in American Telephone and Telegraph also indicates, corporations that in the past have been organized on functional principles derived from their engineering practice may suddenly find themselves compelled to reorganize to give primacy to market considerations. In general then, those engineers who plan to move into management, and they constitute a majority, must be prepared to accept the primacy of managerial values, which are the values of the marketplace, even when this does some violence to the values they acquired while training to become engineers.
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From page 113... ...
By 1925 Sloan's "trade-up" marketing strategy had penetrated each of GM's product lines and the annual model change was introduced. As an engineer, Sloan realized how technically demanding and resource wasteful such a strategy was, but it made great sense as a way to sell cars and Ford was obliged to conform.
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From page 114... ...
But this should not be surprising, for such beliefs are essential components of the systems of ideas that unify and sustain the cultures of engineering and management. The ways in which market considerations come to dominate technical-considerations when engineers work in competitive industries is also illustrated by Neil Wasserman's study of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
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