The Revolt of the Engineers

The Revolt of the Engineers

Author: Edwin T. Layton

Publisher:

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780801832871

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Awarded the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. "A thoroughgoing study of the engineering profession, emphasizing, and rightly so, its accommodation to business institutions. It is a book that is suggestive, challenging, and instructive."--Technology and Culture. "First-rate."--American Historical Review.


Engineers for Change

Engineers for Change

Author: Matthew Wisnioski

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-10-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0262304260

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An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history. In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society—influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford—began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature—and not from engineering's failures. “Sociotechnologists” were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.


The Introspective Engineer

The Introspective Engineer

Author: Samuel C. Florman

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1996-12-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780312151522

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An exciting look at how engineering and engineers can shape the future of our society--from the author of the classic "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering". In this elegantly reasoned and passionately argued book, Samuel Florman suggests that at this moment in history, a few good technological fixes are just what the world needs.


Engineering Trouble: US–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent, 1905–1945

Engineering Trouble: US–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent, 1905–1945

Author: Thorben Pelzer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9004549552

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In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.


Practically Speaking

Practically Speaking

Author: C.C. Gaither

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9781420050677

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This book brings together over 1,100 quotes pertinent and illuminating to engineering, technology and architecture. It includes extensive author and subject indexes for locating quotations. The book can be read for entertainment or used as a handy reference by students and professional engineers.


An Engineer's Alphabet

An Engineer's Alphabet

Author: Henry Petroski

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-10-10

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1139505300

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Written by America's most famous engineering storyteller and educator, this abecedarium is one engineer's selection of thoughts, quotations, anecdotes, facts, trivia and arcana relating to the practice, history, culture and traditions of his profession. The entries reflect decades of reading, writing, talking and thinking about engineers and engineering, and range from brief essays to lists of great engineering achievements. This work is organized alphabetically and more like a dictionary than an encyclopedia. It is not intended to be read from first page to last, but rather to be dipped into, here and there, as the mood strikes the reader. In time, it is hoped, this book should become the source to which readers go first when they encounter a vague or obscure reference to the softer side of engineering.


The Engineering-Business Nexus

The Engineering-Business Nexus

Author: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-11-14

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 3319996363

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Fascinating and compelling in equal measure this volume presents a critical examination of the multilayered relationships between engineering and business. In so doing the study also stimulates ethical reflection on how these relationships either enhance or inhibit strategies to address vital issues of our time. In the context of geopolitical, economic, and environmental tendencies the authors explore the world that we should want to create and the role of the engineer and the business manager in this endeavor. Throughout this volume the authors identify periods of alignment and periods of tension between engineering and business. They look at focal points of the engineering-business nexus related to the development of capitalism. The book explores past and present movements to reshape, reform, or reject this nexus. The volume is informed by questions of importance for industry as well as for higher education. These are: What kinds of conflict arise for engineers in their attempts to straddle both professional and organizational commitments? How should professionals be managed to avoid a clash of managerial and professional cultures? How do engineers create value in firms and corporations? What kinds of tension exist between higher education and industry? What challenges does the neoliberal entrepreneurial university pose for management, faculty, students, society, and industry? Should engineering graduates be ready for work, and can they possibly be? What kinds of business issues are reflected in engineering education curricula, and for what purpose? Is there a limit to the degree of business hybridization in engineering degree programs, and if so, what would be the criterion for its definition? Is there a place in engineering education curricula for reflective critique of assumptions related to business and economic thinking? One ideal of management and control comes to the fore as the Anthropocene - the world transformed into an engineered artefact which includes human existence. The volume raises the question as to how engineering and business together should be considered, given the fact that the current engineering-business nexus remains embedded within an economic model of continual growth. By addressing macro-level issues such as energy policy, sustainable development, globalization, and social justice this study will both help create awareness and stimulate development of self-knowledge among practitioners, educators, and students thereby ultimately addressing the need for better informed citizens to safeguard planet Earth as a human life supporting system.