Engineering, Development and Philosophy

Since the 1970s, the relations between engineering and development have changed significantly. On the one hand, at a discursive or macro level, there has been a shift in regard to the kind of development to which engineering is meant to contribute, from furthering economic growth to an approach to development that is “sustainable” in one way or another. On the other hand, on a practitioner, or micro level, there has been a change in the kinds of competence that engineers are expected to have in order to be able to contribute to development, due to the emergence of new fields of “technoscience” blurring the boundaries between what was previously considered science and what was previously considered technology. Finally, in between, at an institutional or meso level, there have been significant changes in how engineering work and engineering education are organized. This chapter attempts to provide an overview of these changing relations between engineering and development and distinguishes between three ideal-typical educational responses: a technical, market-oriented approach; a scientific, academic-oriented approach; and a hybrid, socially oriented approach.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the philosophy of engineering is becoming its own distinct branch of philosophy. The growing importance of philosophy of engineering cannot be overemphasized, since it has raised or will raise considerable and fundamental issues that challenge traditional ontology, methodology, and epistemology. Engineering is extremely complicated. Without initiating and advocating a new conceptual framework or paradigm, including a number of new categories, neither philosophers nor engineers could comprehend or demonstrate the essential characteristics of engineering. In particular, some social scientists pay significant attention to the relationship between micro (at the level of individuals) and macro (at the level of institutions or the social whole) issues, and as a result, a variety of micro–macro frameworks have advanced. There are four approaches for scientists to investigate social phenomena: micro-theory-based approach, macro-theory-based approach, micro–macro approach, and micro–meso–macro approach. As for engineering phenomena, scholars should focus on engineering facts, engineering acts, and engineering results, which comprise the three layers. A great number of perspectives contribute to a more complete and deeper understanding of engineering practice as a kind of multiple social construction assemblage. Engineering as a tangible architecture of social reality should be explained as a kind of multiple construction undertaken at micro, meso, and macro levels. The traditional micro–macro framework is obsolete. As such, it is time to establish a new kind of micro–meso–macro framework.

Over the past several thousand years, China has made extensive and unique contributions to engineering and technological fields such as agriculture, food, textiles, architecture, metallurgy, ceramics, and medicine. In doing so, it has added significantly to the development of Chinese culture and all of human civilization. The Four Great Inventions of ancient Chinese people—papermaking, typography, gunpowder, and compass—are applied throughout the world. It is estimated that in 1820, China accounted for up to 30% of the world’s GDP. However, for various reasons, Chinese engineering and technology stalled as China entered modern times and fell far behind developing Western countries. After being defeated by Western powers with their warships and cannons in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the secluded feudal Qing Dynasty began using some science and technology transferred from the West. These methods and machines provided a foundation for modern Chinese industry. But due to political corruption and recurring invasions by imperialist countries, China remained very weak in engineering, technology, and industry, falling behind developed countries in Europe and North America. This chapter analyzes the relationships between engineering and the development of modern Chinese society from the perspective of historical development. Based on a “challenge-response” model approach to theorizing the codeveloping processes of engineering and modern Chinese society, key engineering projects and representative engineers are selected for detailed analysis.

In China, the ecocity has become the model for sustainable urban ­development. When considering that upward of 45% of the population of China may still urbanize within the next 50 years, the issue of developing China’s cities in a sustainable way concerns not only China, it also concerns the world. This chapter first looks at the concept of the ecocity and how it has taken on its own brand identity within China, labeled here as “Ecocity China.” Drawing from various examples, an analysis of “Ecocity China” follows as to how differences in constructing ecocity indicators and urban master plans reflect distinctly different ontological and epistemological approaches to sustainable development. Different than most top-down approaches to ecocity design in China, this chapter looks at a promising example of an incremental ongoing “policy by design” approach to ecocity planning and development. Also emerging from this analysis is the realization that to fully embrace ecocity development requires the adoption of eco-cosmopolitanism ethics by governing institutions. Conclusions from this analysis suggest that moving to a robust ecocity approach will be challenging for status quo Chinese politics and that such planning will necessitate a more experimental approach to urban development and establishment of an information infrastructure and a culture of collaborative communication.

This chapter explores an approach to international development ­programming as a negotiated process, rather than one which is either imposed or contested. The authors posit this ‘negotiated’ development paradigm as one which aligns well with key features of good development practice as currently understood (such as responsiveness to needs, local ownership of projects, participatory planning and a focus on sustainability), as well as with the recent and growing emphasis among international donors on aid effectiveness and focus on results. Side by side with this, the contribution of higher education to international development is also discussed in some detail, and attention drawn to its potential to underpin the negotiated development approach with a firm evidence base.

This chapter summarizes the early institutional history of one of China’s most important and well-regarded engineering schools, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). It shows how the university and its engineering programs evolved in tandem with national development and defense priorities from the school’s founding in 1896 through the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. More specifically, we look at key changes in the school’s admission policies, pedagogy, curricula, and organizational structure, as well as typical career pathways for its graduates. To further contextualize this account, this chapter begins with a general history of engineering education in China from the late Qing Dynasty through the Nationalist period. This chapter should be of interest to those wanting to know more about the historical foundations of the engineering profession in China, including the role of leading educational institutions in China’s national development.

In this chapter, it is argued that insights from comparative studies of higher education are essential to develop an understanding of educational systems dynamics impacting on professional engineering education. Usually such structural dynamics tend to go unnoticed among engineering educators. This chapter is organised in the following way: After a theoretical framing of the argument, three examples of institutional transformations and cognitive shifts that have taken place in similar types of professional nonuniversity engineering education institutions in Great Britain, France and Germany from the massive expansion of higher education in the 1960s to the present are discussed. More precisely, academic drift processes in British polytechnics, French Instituts Universitaires de Technologie (IUTs) and German Fachhochschulen will be examined and compared. In reviewing the relevant literature, the following questions will be considered: (1) What do we know about the processes that have constituted the engineering curriculum? (2) Are such processes inevitable and irreversible? (3) What kind of tensions and dilemmas do they create? It is argued that a particularly powerful and coherent set of values and attitudes characteristic of universities may also be seen as lying at the heart of vocational nonuniversity higher education institutions, causing them to drift towards the university or imitate them as implied in the subtitle.

Ever since institutions for educating engineers first began to be ­established in Europe, there have been a number of fundamental tensions as to how that ­educating should best be conducted, what it should consist of, and who should do the educating. These tensions are based on different styles or approaches to ­engineering education that have developed historically in different parts of Europe and which have led to what we characterize as “theory-driven,” “practice-driven,” and “technology-driven” approaches. This chapter explores some of the historical roots of these tensions in medieval Europe and briefly traces their developmental trajectories through the subsequent formation of institutions of engineering ­education. It has been written as part of PROCEED (Program of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark).

The introduction of theory of science in Danish engineering education may be seen as an exemplary attempt to integrate socio-technical and contextual competencies into bachelor’s engineering degree programmes. In this chapter, we set out to investigate in what way boundary definition and demarcation between technical text and social context have influenced the process of ­introducing and implementing theory of science into professional engineering ­bachelor’s degree programmes. To set the stage, we first discuss how contextual issues and ­socio-technical competencies have been incorporated in accreditation criteria for first-cycle engineering degree programmes in the United States and Europe and some of the impediments for responding in engineering education. Second, we give a brief account of the rationale for implementing theory of ­science into Danish ­professional engineering bachelor’s degree programmes. Third, we d­iscuss our findings from an institutional example: a longitudinal case study carried out at Aarhus University, Institute of Business and Technology from spring 2007 to fall 2010.

Engineering design competencies and the role of scientific disciplines in engineering curricula form the background for this chapter. Engineering ­knowledge as produced in the context of engineering education at large is seen as the key to understanding the dominant strategies of machination in engineering practice. At the same time, there is a need to bring new perspectives to engineering design and to the understanding of engineering knowledge. The crowding of engineering ­education with an exploding number of new specialities and disciplines has ­rendered problematic the broad ‘polytechnics’ education prominent in the ­traditions of engineering education. While the idea that engineering is building on a natural science base is still dominant as the common model for the education and identity building of engineering, the growth in specialties and required competencies are blurring the claims by engineering schools and institutions of a common ­engineering identity. Social sciences and humanities primarily have functioned as an add-on to the rather diverse engineering curricula at the same time as new ways of ­understanding technologies as hybrids constructed through historical and situated actors associations have created a new ground for interdisciplinary integration. In design engineering education, these new types of knowledge have become f­oundational for their approach to technology.

Engineering leaders have long tended to equate the technical contents of engineering practices with material advancements across the planet for human benefit. I call this normative holism. Taking normative holism for granted grounds images of engineering practice as knowledge in service. It also frees engineers from assigning themselves responsibility for the actual consequences of their work. Drawing on short vignettes from the territories of France, Germany, and Japan during the late nineteenth century, the approach taken here – the ethnography of dominant images – shows normative holism to be a localized phenomenon. While claiming to produce engineers to work for humanity as a whole, for example, through development, the makers of engineers have actually been following localized pathways that respond to distinct dominant images of material progress. Normative holism is a foundational normativity in engineering formation for two reasons. One is that engineering formation emerges whenever countries first form. The other is that engineers’ ready embrace of normative holism makes it a key site for effectively translating critical analysis into critical participation. If students and working engineers can begin to see and analyze dominant normativities as such, might they be more able and willing to explore additional and alternative normativities?

The relationship between technology and society may be conceptualized as a seamless web in a form of coevolution. In modern societies, this coevolution, which includes engineering design and related ethical issues, is largely a kind of social experiment. To prevent unnecessary problems, Martin and Schinzinger suggest that engineers should seek to act ethically. This chapter examines how engineering students develop, or not, ethical concerns and practices in their everyday work. It is based on a case study using mixed methods and focusing on students in mentor companies during their Master’s degree program. The educational context is understood as a Mode 2 knowledge production representing a triangular relationship between the student, the university supervisor and the mentor company where power and authority are distributed and shaped over time. Moreover, the student’s role is conceptualized as being a legitimate peripheral participant in engineering practices and consequently in the enactment of practical morality. The students work on problem-oriented projects and deal with complex decision-making processes. Having to face the constraints and limits of real-life project development in an organization, they struggle within a web of technical knowledge, loyalty relationships to various actors, norms, and regulations, as well as market demands. These tensions, and their related trade-offs inherent to quick decision-making, leave little space and time to reflect on ethical questions. Nevertheless, one can trace moral concerns in the students’ processes during their studies.

The engineers’ ethos can be explained by the composition of the population (mainly male, highly educated, at ease with science and coming from upper middle class families). But this ethos is also influenced by the graduates’ secondary socialization in the engineering education and whilst at work. In this chapter, the author sets out to investigate the influence of the involvement of engineering students in a development-oriented association on their career path. The research is based on a large number of ex-members of the association “Engineers without Borders” in France. In this chapter, the author analyses by means of online CVs and interviews with ISF present-time staff current the professional path of a few main figures of the 30-year-old association.

Research policies in the United States and the European Union have shown increasing eagerness in the last two decades to incorporate insights from publics and the human and social sciences into natural science and engineering research, while Chinese research policies devote relatively little attention to socio-technical integration. The ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications) program of the US Human Genome Project functioned primarily as a parallel exercise with little real influence on genomic research practices, but more recent research policies for nanotechnology go as far as to redefine research and development in this field as a confluence of technological and societal research. In the EU, the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development show a progressive radicalization of integration discourses and practices. ELSA (Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) research, for example, which has been conducted since the 2nd Framework Programme (FP2, 1987–1991) in parallel to the natural science and ­engineering research it studies, has been conceived as a constitutive part of ­science and engineering research projects since FP6 (2002–2006). Although there are few formal Chinese science and technology policies that encourage socio-technical integration, more and more Chinese scholars from both natural and social science and humanities have embraced the idea of integrating social and ethical concerns at an early stage of science and technology development.

This chapter develops an ethical approach to thinking about obligations toward the preservation of industrial heritage. Industrial heritage is an aspect of cultural heritage dealing specifically with the buildings and artifacts of industry which are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present, and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. We also refer to these broadly as “inheritance ethics.” As a central case study, we compare the approaches to the preservation of industrial heritage between the Ruhr district of western Germany and the Shenyang urban region of northeast China. We discuss how different engineering decision-making mechanisms lead to different ethical choices about heritage and inheritance. The main example of Shenyang city will demonstrate, similar to other cities in China, that architectural and older industrial ruins were considered unsightly and polluted. As such, these sites have often been destroyed, thus erasing the material, architectural, and industrial heritage of previous generations. While many sites of ancient cultural heritage are protected in China, the question goes unanswered as to whether we have the right to destroy the historical imprint left by our more recent industrial lineage. Further, we inquire as to whether China can realize a development ethics that considers both the needs of future generations as well as the heritage left by previous generations.

Dam Construction in China has produced significant societal benefits. But in recent years, large dam construction has been strongly criticized both nationally and abroad. This chapter argues that the criteria for evaluating the construction of dams should include expanded perspectives from engineering ethics. It also briefly analyzes the ethical problems associated with large dam construction in China and points out divergent ethical assessments within the Chinese experience. Finally, the chapter argues that while there are certain ethical standards that universally apply in engineering, American as well as other foreign standards are not always appropriate in the Chinese context. When it comes to dam construction, China needs to establish its own ethical standards and engineering practices.

The railroad, as the first form of transport to utilize nonhuman or animal energy resources, is one of the most revolutionary inventions of all time. While many books and articles have been written about railroads from historical, economic, and societal perspectives, the present analysis offers a more comparative evaluation of their development in the United States and China. Five aspects that are examined include planning, finance, standardization, management, and pricing. This comparison indicates that many factors – from economic and political, to technological, managerial, institutional, military, cultural, environmental, and more – can influence railroad development. It also offers a window on how engineering can function differently in two quite different societies.

By 1921 the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his book The Engineers and the Price System argued for a technocracy in which the welfare of humanity would be entrusted to the control of the engineers because they alone were competent to understand the complexities of the industrial system and processes and thereby optimise and maximise its output. This chapter sets out to explore the extent to which Veblen’s technocratic leadership thesis has come to pass. We first review the role of the engineer in society and in the context of Europe, the USA and China and examine the influence of the engineering profession on the management and economic welfare of nations. Second, we review trends in engineering education and formation in Europe, China and the USA and the substantive developmental role of the Grand Écoles in eighteenth-century France. A comparison is made between the economies of Ireland and China, in the context of their recent economic performance. Third, a review of commentary on the interconnectedness of world economies and shift in economic power from nineteenth-century United Kingdom market dominance to twentieth-century United States supremacy and to present day emergence of China as the world’s second largest and fastest growing economy is made in the context of the role of engineering leadership. We finally ponder whether a hybrid political environment, with a blending of meritocracy with technocratic leadership and moderated by nonengineering influences, might be a recipe for sustained economic success of nations.

Contrary to the emphasis on the control of nature in the Western view of technological development, the Chinese view of technological development aims at abiding by the laws of nature and maintaining harmony with nature. Harmony is hereby the direction of development, the moral principles and methodological norms of development, as well as the assurance of development.

Since the beginning of the awareness of the environmental crisis, studies have tried to trace back the historical and ideological roots of industrial evolution. Many of these studies indicated elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition as at least co-responsible. Some 40 years later, this chapter overviews some strands of the discussions these studies have provoked, especially concerning the alleged anthropocentrism of Judaism and Christianity and their disenchanting attitude toward nature. These traditional ideas are confronted with insights from Marcel Gauchet’s philosophy of religion, with inputs from other religions, and with empirical data from recent surveys.