Engineering-Managerial Discourse

Conceptual Overview

In the 1850s, the first practicing managers in the United States were civil engineers, but it was mechanical engineering that spawned and nurtured the management [Page 443]movement until it reformed and reorganized American industry. At first, mechanical engineers were professionally concerned with the formulation of uniform codes and standards, and with achieving predictability and regularity in production. With the rapid growth of the large corporate firm, mechanical engineers expanded their professional engagement to include administrative and organizational systems. They brought in professional road maps, tools, and the (predominant) metaphor that the organization is analogous to a machine composed of interchangeable parts. John Dunlap, editor of Engineering Magazine, has argued that the cold logic of the machine may be more effective in industrial reform than in any humanitarian reform. Dexter Kimball, Dean of Engineering at Cornell University and later a president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), suggested extending the principles of standardization to the human element in production, assuming that human and nonhuman entities are interchangeable and can equally be subjected to engineering manipulation, as noted by Yehouda Shenhav in 1999. Individuals such as Alexander Church and Dunlap, among others—who were labeled by historians as “systematizers”—applied mechanical engineering methods to the administrative restructuring of firms, to design systems of accountancy, determine wages, and determine selection criteria in employment.

The extension of engineering practices and systems ideology to human organizations was an act of translation, affirming an underlying unity between elements distinct from one another and creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously unrelated. Despite objections to the systems ideology, the so-called Progressive Era (circa 1900–1917) in the United States was instrumental to the diffusion of this discourse. It provided legitimacy to the roles of professionals, including engineers, as experts. The (Theodore) Roosevelt administration, for example, maintained close relationships with all engineering societies, and these societies supported Roosevelt's attempts to bring efficiency and rational management into industry and government. At the end of the Progressive period, business philosophy was solidified around secular engineering ideals rather than around religious, philanthropic, or social Darwinist ones. With the engineering discourse, resorting to politics could be redefined in technical terms. Engineering expertise seemed most appropriate for the management of large systems and for the resolution of labor unrest. The efforts to view organizations as systems received public visibility with the work of Frederick Taylor and his followers. Taylor's conceptualization of industrial bureaucracy—the extension and codification of mechanical engineering—involved an explicit attempt to systematize the firm. His suggestions were made under the banner of social physics, a science of production that was supposed to be objective, systematic, and rational.

...