Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession (review)

For those interested in the problematical ethics of engineers and engineering managers, this is a book worthy of contemplation. Michael Davis, a philosopher and senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology, ends it with a challenge: “I hope this book, whatever else it does, serves as an invitation to social scientists, especially those in science and technology studies, to consider studying the technological professions as professions, especially engineering, the most important technology profession of them all” (p. 180). Davis thinks technology studies remain too focused on things, processes, and knowledge, that is, on technology rather than specific technological professions.

Thinking Like an Engineer is, except for one chapter and the epilogue, a compilation of previously published essays. Davis attempts to draw together threads from each that would help give content to the notion of “thinking like an engineer.” His efforts are only partially successful, despite the insights embodied in each essay.

When Davis refers to how engineers think, he is not talking about how engineers approach a technical design problem. Others, like Walter Vincente, flirt with that when they examine how engineers acquire the knowledge needed to design innovative systems. Davis focuses rather on how factors outside the engineer’s personal knowledge and experience can alter an engineering decision—factors like peer influence and pressure from superiors or customers, for example.

The book has four parts. The first includes a brief historical perspective of engineering as a profession; the second is “an extended meditation on the Challenger disaster”; the third discusses the importance of protecting the autonomy of engineering judgment; and the final section includes the results of interviews with engineers and managers in several companies.

Davis discusses engineering autonomy at length, differing with others, such as Edwin Layton, who believe that the essence of professionalism is not taking orders from an employer. He instead builds a case that “the essence of professionalism consists in part of taking orders, those consistent with acting as a professional, and in part of not taking orders, those inconsistent with acting as a professional” (p. 170). He takes issue with the notion of engineering as a “captive profession” (since most engineers work in large organizations). “[E]ngineering is no more a captive of those organizations than the heart is a captive of the body. . . . Work in large organizations is not a nightmare from which engineers will someday wake; it is their natural habitat” (p. 22). In the concluding chapter of part 4, he calls for studies that would define, for the engineering profession, which factors (e.g., quality) are the professional’s responsibility, and for which the engineer’s judgment should therefore prevail.

Davis also delves into the history of engineering codes of ethics, noting that they were developed with no input from or interest on the part of the public, and suggesting therefore that they are a “contract between professionals” (p. 50). He argues that a code provides a guide to what engineers may reasonably expect of one another (what “the rules of the game” are) and how the professional should behave in adversarial situations. As an example, he postulates that one rule derived from a code of ethics might be that an engineering supervisor should not succumb to management pressure to overrule the consensus of his engineering group on an issue for which engineering autonomy should prevail. If such an ethical rule existed, says Davis, then in the Challenger case, when Morton Thiokol’s vice president of engineering was asked by his boss to think like a manager rather than an engineer, he would not have reversed his vote on the launch decision. Instead “he should, as an engineer, have responded, ‘Sorry, if you wanted a vice president who would think like a manager rather than an engineer, you should not have hired an engineer’” (p. 51).

Davis discusses but leaves...