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

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...