In the current issue

Peter Soppelsa, "Intersection: Technology, Mobility, Geography"

Film Review
Joseph November, "When Women Were Computers: LeAnn Erickson, Top Secret Rosies"

Essay Reviews
Shannon Jackson, "Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr, Sensing Changes"

Eda Kranakis, "'And it is, it is a glorious thing/To be a Pirate King!': Adrian Johns, Piracy"

Peter A. Shulman,"The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction"

Amy E. Slaton, "The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

The Uses of Context:
Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context

Amy E. Slaton
This lengthy collection (Engineering in Context. Aarhus, Denmark: Academica, 2009. Pp. 502. DKr 425), comprising twenty-seven essays by forty authors, brings a welcome focus on engineering in society, just as the work of engineers is gaining new significance as a source of worldwide social and political change. The world’s cities, communications networks, and transport systems expand by the day, as do the labors of the engineers involved. A rapidly globalizing though unstable system of industrial trade and production has lately given technological knowledge and its applications increasing importance in the rhetoric of nations seeking economic security and growth. In the United States, President Obama calls this “our own Sputnik moment,” while European Union members track the role of “innovation” in productivity as they seek to compete with Asian nations—which, in turn, boast rapidly expanding science and engineering institutions and industrial infrastructures. The editors’ aim to enhance readers’ awareness of engineering’s social origins and consequences is thus quite timely.

The collection gathers historians of engineering, philosophers of technology, practicing engineers, and educators from institutions in the Americas and Europe. The project as a whole helps make the case, as author Andrew Jamison puts it, that contextual knowledge for engineers has too often been treated by engineering educators as “supplementary or add-on knowledge” (p. 52), when in reality social processes are integral to all that we call science and technology. The book frequently succeeds in making a constructive project of what could easily become an unwieldy one; what, after all, is not part of the contexts in which engineering attains its authoritative cultural status or in which engineers gain skills and find gainful employment? Corporations, governments, professional organizations, arts and media, and national and international regulators of health, environment, and trade . . . all of these institutions are justifiably discussed by the book’s authors, as are instances of identity (ethnic, national, or gender) and value formation by those who practice and patronize engineering.

The book is most satisfying when its authors explicate the power relations that render some actors influential and cast others as onlookers. For example, the necessity, safety, reliability, and even newness of what engineers make and do are all matters of audience perception and audience members’ relative social position. The editors astutely observe in the book’s introduction (written with Mike Murphy) that accreditation bodies and prominent individual practitioners may formulate sociocultural goals that the employers of engineers fail to embrace, because the needs of companies “may diverge from those of society”—in short, the imperatives of profit may trump those of collectivity (p. 24). In their chapter, Jane Grimson and Caroline Roughneen explain how the attainment of gender diversity in engineering can be approached as either a superficial inclusive effort (which regrettably “takes the male as the norm” (p. 207]), or as a “transformational” one that probes the content of technical practice, not merely its eligibility standards. For these two authors, the context in which engineering is practiced includes persons and concerns marginalized by engineering, a heuristic that vastly enriches what we may take away from such analyses.

Boundary work is also central to a discussion by Steen Hyldgaard Christensen and Erik Erno-Kjolhede of state recommendations for the inclusion of the philosophy of science in Danish undergraduate engineering programs: “The vision behind curriculum reform is concurrently the expression of a political and a technological agenda which is open to criticism. . . . Quite often the strategic goals of stakeholders collide” (p. 145). Even more pointedly, Jon Leydens and Juan Lucena articulate how “rigid knowledge hierarchies” commonly constrain humanitarian engineering projects, however well-intentioned the planners of such projects might be.

In his essay, Matthew Wisnioski offers the summary point that “[e]ngineers make their own context,” by which he means not that engineering is culturally hegemonic, but that the field routinely “collapses is into ought” (p. 403). In other words, among Western engineers, ideological decision-making is customarily evacuated from definitions of rigorous technical practice, despite its inevitable presence in that practice. This is a helpful critical insight, but other authors in the book deploy schematics that undermine such critiques. In rather positivist ways, some of the essays cast engineering design, production, and use as distinct phases of technical activity, rather than as permeable and interconnected efforts whose rhetorical disaggregation often serves the interests of employers or investors.

Even historical framing sometimes leads to reductive logic in the essays. For the purposes of crafting a trans-historical model of discipline formation, Matthias Heymann describes “science” and “technology” as having been overwhelmingly associated with “art” and “practicality,” respectively, until the “scientification of technology” that the author says occurred in the industrializing nineteenth century. However, such distinctions between science and technology, which largely deny the theoretical features of fabrication and design work, as well as the material conditions of scientific activity, have been challenged by scholars who see the rubric itself as an artifact of the early-twentieth-century historiography of science. In fact, what actually counts as engineering is an immense question for historians of technology, one that is left aside entirely in a number of essays: why do we say that a bridge has been “engineered,” but not the contours of a plowed field? Why is a fiber-optic system easily labeled as a case of engineering design, but not a home-knitted sweater? Institutional affinities that produce such assignments need to be addressed if these taxonomies are to be understood as the cultural and historical contingencies they are.

The book in no sense suggests that simple, progressivist narratives of technological change are to be supported, but a critical perspective is sometimes surprisingly elusive in the volume. For example, in the book’s closing chapter on the “Social Risks of Engineering,” Wayne Ambler writes that “the regulation of increasingly numerous new technologies will require increased participation by those who understand the technologies to be regulated” (p. 478). However provocative this essay is at points, that implied unidirectional narrative offers little space for nonengineered solutions to engineered problems (such as the creation of walkable cities as an answer to roadway congestion or the elimination of processed ingredients in food). Consider, by contrast, Christopher Papadopoulos and Andrew Hable’s essay on engineers’ involvement with “sustainability, peace and social justice,” in which the self-sustaining interests of those who historically dominate engineering patronage structures (for example, wealthier nations, or military and industrial entities) are made explicit.

The most nuanced passages in this collection ask questions about where context begins and ends. According to Peter Kroes and Ibo van de Poel, the line between the “inside” and “outside” of engineering is neither static nor agreed upon by all observers. The book’s general introduction develops this nicely destabilizing outlook as well. Putting historians and philosophers together in a single volume might be a way of highlighting that exact uncertainty and setting the stage for reflexivity in both fields. But for this reader (a historian), it was difficult to accept the validity of philosophical arguments about human engagements with technology, recounted with few or no historical referents, when adjacent historical essays rooted their analyses in solidly described institutions and political systems. For some readers with backgrounds in philosophy or ethics the opposite may be true: the book’s empirically grounded narratives about particular historical or political settings may strike them as narrow or selective. Unfortunately, Engineering in Context includes few efforts to reconcile or compare its authors’ divergent intellectual approaches. Perhaps, with this substantial collection in hand, the book’s editors and authors, and its readers, might now take on that project, and in so doing put their own scholarly aims in context.

Amy E. Slaton teaches at Drexel University. She has written on the role of racial identity in American engineering, and is currently writing on labor and instrumentation in high-tech manufacturing.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.