The normativities of engineers: Engineering education and history of technology

Technology and Culture

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 737-752

  Brown, John K ^a   Downey, Gary Lee ^b   Diogo, Maria Paula ^c  

^a University of Virginia   (United States)

^b VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA   (Portugal)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73649085468     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0370     Document Type: Note

References (100)

1. Terry S. Reynolds, "On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé," Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 523-30.
2. Terry S. Reynolds, "On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé," Technology and Culture 42 (2001) Ibid., 523.
3. Terry S. Reynolds, "On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé," Technology and Culture 42 (2001) Ibid., 525.
4. Quoted from Gary Downey's "SHOT 2007 notes" file, typed during the meeting.
5. Ronald R. Kline, "From Progressivism to Engineering Studies: Edwin T. Layton's The Revolt of the Engineers," Technology and Culture 49 (October 2008): 1019-20.
6. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977), 323 and 324.
7. Peter Meiksins, "The 'Revolt of the Engineers' Reconsidered," Technology and Culture 29 (April 1988): 238.
8. R. A. Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750-1914 (London, 1989);
9. Kees Gispen, New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815-1914 (Cambridge, 1989);
10. Ronald Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992);
11. A. Michal McMahon, The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America (New York, 1984);
12. Terry S. Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress: A History of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 1908-1983 (New York, 1983);
13. and Bruce Sinclair and J. P. Hull, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880-1980 (Toronto, 1980). There are a significant number of European national studies on this topic written in local languages.
14. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America 1870-1945 (Amsterdam, 1999), 168.
15. John K. Brown, "Design Plans, Working Drawing, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775-1945," Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 196.
16. Eda Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-Century France and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 304.
17. Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992), 10.
18. While one can find normativities in Walter Vincenti's historical case studies, his explicit interests were philosophical and focused on epistemology. See Peter Meiksins and Chris Smith, Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective (London, 1996),
19. and Walter G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore, 1990).
20. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 60.
21. Bruce E. Seely, "The Other Re-Engineering of Engineering Education, 1900-1965," Journal of Engineering Education 88 (July 1999): 291.
22. Amy Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), conclusion, p. 5.
23. Peter Lundgreen, "Engineering Education in Europe and the U.S.A., 1750-1930: The Rise to Dominance of School Culture and the Engineering Profession,"Annals of Science 47 (1990): 33.
24. Some key entry points include Bruno Belhoste, La Formation d'une technocratie: L'École Polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris, 2003);
25. André Grelon, ed., Les Ingénieurs de la crise: Titre et profession entre les deux guerres (Paris, 1986);
26. and Antoine Picon, L'invention de l'ingenieur moderne: L'École des ponts et chaussées, 1747-1851 (Paris, 1992).
27. See Ana Cardoso deMatos, Maria Paula Diogo, Irena Gouzévich, and André Grelon, eds., Les Enjeux identitaires des ingénieurs: Entre la formation et l'action (Lisbon, 2009),
28. and André Grelon, Anousheh Karvar, and Irina Gouzévich, La Formation des ingénieurs en perspective: Modèles de références et réseaux de médiation, XVIIIème-XXème siècles (Rennes, 2004).
29. Another useful entry point is Melvin Kranzberg, ed., Technological Education-Technological Style (San Francisco, 1986).
30. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 757.
31. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 758 and 756.
32. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 777.
33. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 772.
34. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 777 and 773.
35. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 755 and 763.
36. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 777 and 778.
37. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 779.
38. Matthew Wisnioski, "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 781.
39. Ross Bassett, "Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States," Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 798.
40. Ross Bassett, "Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States," Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 798. Ibid.
41. For discussion of the dangers of positing transferable "models" in engineering education, see Gary Lee Downey, "Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress," History and Technology 22, no. 3 (2007): 293.
42. Bassett, 786.
43. Ibid., 791.
44. Ibid., 794.
45. Ibid., 809.
46. Ibid..
47. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005).
48. Bassett (n. 28 above), 809.
49. See also Thomas L. Friedman, "It's a Flat World, after All," New York Times Magazine, 3 April 2005, available online at http://www.nytimes. com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html (accessed 27 April 2008).
50. Bassett, 786 and 808.
51. Andrés Valderrama et al., "Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972," Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 811.
52. Andrés Valderrama et al., "Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 837.
53. Andrés Valderrama et al., "Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 829.
54. Andrés Valderrama et al., "Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid.
55. Andrés Valderrama et al., "Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 837.
56. Andrés Valderrama et al., "Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972," Technology and Culture 50 (2009) Ibid., 835 and 836.
57. For an overview, see Juan C. Lucena et al.,"Competencies Beyond Countries: The Re-Organization of Engineering Education in the United States, Europe, and Latin America," Journal of Engineering Education 97, no. 4 (2008): 433-47.
58. Melvin Kranzberg, "At the Start," Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1-10.
59. For more on SHOT's early ties to ASEE, see Bruce E. Seely, "SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education," Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739-72.
60. John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 3.
61. John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (1985) Ibid., 4.
62. Rosalind Williams, another SHOT president with deep expertise at the intersection of engineering and technological history, has raised similar concerns in an insightful account of the challenges that grew to confront orthodoxies in engineering and in the history of technology over the past four decades. Her essay "All That Is Solid Melts into Air" also details the widening gap that has come to separate those fields (Technology and Culture 41 [October 2000]: 641-68).
63. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: "The Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), chaps. 15-16.
64. As Wisnioski (n. 19 above, p. 780n92) says: "STS, history of science, and technology programs still pursue liberal learning for engineers, but often at cross-purposes with their own academization. For a survey, see Stephen H. Cutcliffe, 'The STS Curriculum: What Have We Learned in Twenty Years?' Science, Technology, & Human Values 15, no. 3 (1990): 360-72."
65. Rosalind H. Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
66. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988);
67. Gary Lee Downey, "Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology? From'Problem Solving' to 'Problem Definition and Solution' in Engineering Education," Chemical Engineering Research and Design 83, no. A8 (2005): 584;
68. André Grelon, "French Engineers: Between Unity and Heterogeneity," History of Technology 27 (2006): 107.
69. See Kline, "From Progressivism to Engineering Studies" (n. 5 above) and Noble (n. 6 above).
70. Corporations often looked to engineering groups like the Society for Automotive Engineers to resolve technical matters and set industry-wide standards. Major corporations like General Motors or General Electric also subsidized the engineering professional societies by paying the membership dues of their employees and compensating them for time spent on society business-such as attending the annual meeting. These two practices are rare today.
71. Quoted from Downey, "SHOT 2007 notes" (n. 4 above).
72. Gary Lee Downey, "What Is Engineering Studies For? Dominant Practices and Scalable Scholarship," Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 58.
73. See http://www.inesweb.org (accessed 12 August 2009).
74. See http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/engineeringstudies (accessed 12 August 2009).
75. Konstantinos Chatzis, "Coping with the Second Industrial Revolution: Fragmentation of the French Engineering Education System, 1870s to the Present," Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 79-99;
76. Downey, "What Is Engineering Studies For?"; Vivian Lagesen and Knut Sørensen, "Walking the Line? The Enactment of the Social/Technical Binary in Software Engineering," Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 129-49;
77. Juan Lucena, "Imagining Nation, Envisioning Progress: Emperor, Agricultural Elites, and Imperial Ministers in Search of Engineers in 19th Century Brazil," Engineering Studies 1, no. 3 (2009, forthcoming);
78. Lisa McLoughlin, "Success, Recruitment, and Retention of Academically Elite Women Students without STEMBackgrounds in U.S. Undergraduate Engineering Education," Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 151-68;
79. and Carroll Seron and Susan S. Silbey, "The Dialectic between Expert Knowledge and Professional Discretion: Accreditation, Social Control, and the Limits of Instrumental Logic," Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 101-27.
80. Atsushi Akera, Maria Paula Diogo, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Ronald Kline, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, and Matthew Wisnioski.
81. Thomas P. Hughes, "A Usable History for Engineers: The First Morison Prize Lecture," in Working Papers, Program in Science, Technology, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 3. Thanks to Matt Wisnioski for calling this lecture to our attention.
82. Thomas P. Hughes, "A Usable History for Engineers: The First Morison Prize Lecture," in Working Papers, Program in Science, Technology, and Society (2000), Ibid., 2 and 3.
83. Gary Downey, "SHOT 2007 notes" (n. 4 above), 2.
84. Longtime SHOT stalwart Eugene Ferguson showed one model for this kind of writing in "How Engineers Lose Touch," American Heritage of Invention and Technology 8 (winter 1993): 16-24
85. an article widely assigned in engineering design coursework. Two fine sources that explore the ethics of design failure are: Eda Kranakis, "Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse," Technology and Culture 45 (July 2004): 487-518,
86. and William D.Middleton, The Bridge at Quebec (Bloomington, 2001).
87. For some of the ethical challenges of modern bioengineering, see Michael Bess, "Icarus 2.0: A Historian's Perspective on Human Biological Enhancement," Technology and Culture 49 (January 2008): 114-26.
88. Some of these fine studies can work well in the engineering classroom, but others would need reworking to condense historical detail while bringing hard analytic questions to the fore. John Staudenmaier has done this work in his textbook for the University of Detroit Mercy, The Politics and Ethics of Engineering (1998), funded by the Greenfield Coalition for New Manufacturing Education, National Science Foundation, E.E.C. 9630951.
89. McMahon (n. 8 above);
90. Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress (n. 8 above); Sinclair and Hull (n. 8 above).
91. Among U.S.-based organizations, IEEE has themost active role in sponsoring historical awareness and publications through its History Center. But ASCE, ASME, AIAA, and most other engineering societies also see value in history-related activities that mix celebration, public relations, historical awareness, and professional consciousness.
92. These remarks are based on Jack Brown's service (2000-present) on the History and Heritage Committee of ASME, where he has served alongside another SHOT member, Robert Friedel. The distinguished and prolific engineer/historian Henry Petroski chairs the ASCE's History and Heritage Committee. Among their many activities, these committees often have a celebratory mission that is alien to academic history, but they also seek legitimacy as sponsors of historical awareness.
93. Dan H. Pletta, The Engineering Profession: Its Heritage and Its Emerging Public Purpose (Lanham, Md., 1984), 127.
94. For a history and overview of ABET, see http://www.abet.org (accessed 4 June 2009).
95. The criteria can be found at http://www.ed.psu.edu/educ/ec2000/criterion- 3 (accessed 4 June 2009).
96. The eleven outcomes are: (A) Ability to apply knowledge of math, science, and engineering; (B) Ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data; (C) Ability to design a system, component, or process tomeet desired needs; (D) Ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams; (E) Ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems; (F) An understanding of professional and ethical responsibility; (G) Ability to communicate effectively; (H) The broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context ("economic and environmental" added in 2004); (I) Recognition of the need for, and an ability to, engage in life-long learning; (J) Knowledge of contemporary issues; (K) Ability to use the skills, techniques, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice. The seven areas in which liberal studies are essential are outcomes D through J.
97. A given engineering school undergoes a full assessment and (re)accrediting process once every six years. The professional societies-such as IEEE and ASME-train the accreditors, as ABET itself is a small organization with limited resources. Then the accreditors in turn conduct their campus visit as a team, although each degree program is reviewed separately (albeit concurrently) and accredited individually.
98. ABET has an interest in gauging the effectiveness of its EC 2000 approach, andit commissioned a study that showed overall improvements in student learning. See http://www.ed.psu.edu/educ/ec2000 (accessed 4 June 2009).
99. Liberal studies educators, however, who met at a 2002 conference on EC 2000 at the University of Virginia (funded by the National Science Foundation) had a more nuanced view of the problems and opportunities for liberal studies in the new accrediting system. See http://www.sts.virginia.edu/EC2000/ FinalDocuments/White-Paper-2003.pdf (accessed 4 June 2009).
100. One specific proposal: SHOT, in company with other societies including the Liberal Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education, could offer a summer institute to train accreditors to recognize best practices in the uses of history in engineering education.