Engineers and Management

International Comparisons

Gloria L. Lee, Chris Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351261104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Originally published in 1992. In an increasingly competitive climate, well-trained, experienced management is vital for establishing the long term future of industry. In response to this need, the number of management training courses have been growing in recent years. However, there is a group of highly skilled professionals who are not always recognized for their management potential. Engineers, often viewed as nothing more than technicians, are a valuable but neglected human resource. Their expertise has helped to generate the recent organizational restructuring throughout the manufacturing industry. This study compares the situation of engineers in Britain with those in other countries. It analyzes the industrial cultures of countries that have developed along very different traditions such as Japan, Germany and Hungary as well as countries like Canada and the US where British traditions have prevailed but where the outcomes are different. Bringing together leading writers on management who have specialist knowledge of the engineering profession, it covers such issues as education, employment and labour relations to show how far engineers are undervalued in British culture. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, MBA students, academics and researchers in management, engineering, new technology, industrial sociology and organizational behaviour.

Chapter 1

Engineers and management in comparative perspectives

Gloria L. Lee and Chris Smith

INTRODUCTION

Growth within capitalist society is dependent upon continual technological renewal and change. Engineers are at the centre of this dynamic process. The organizational form that has come to represent growth is the large corporation. Management, and not owner entrepreneurs, is at the centre of such forms. Engineers and management are therefore central features of contemporary society. Yet how these two groups relate and interact is not straightforward. Assumptions of a simple integration and affinity are not confirmed by experience. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Britain, where management has become synonymous with decision-making, finance and marketing, and somehow disconnected from making and providing goods and services.

This book examines the relationship between management and engineers through an international perspective. The reason for this is simple. Management as a subject of academic inquiry and a practical set of disciplines and tasks can no longer be understood as simply containing universal principles – one best way of organizing and doing things. Ideas of what constituted management conformed to this pattern when American social science and business dominated the world – although there was always considerable discrepancy between this and the actual practices of management. But today, America is no longer the centre of organizational capitalism. Japan, the Pacific Basin and Europe are rival centres of business success. Therefore the possibility of rival models of management has assumed a practical significance. Cross-national organizational research has revealed major differences between societies in their style, structure and practice of management.¹ International management courses are proliferating in business schools, exposing hitherto core principles of management to the microscope of national scrutiny. What was previously considered universal is increasingly seen as only one way of managing. We need, then, to see management in a comparative, not a general, light.

The literature on engineers as organizational professionals has also been prone to this comparative myopia. Engineers have been assumed to be technical experts, the translators of industrial design practice, the masters of production control and surveillance, performing similar functions across all advanced societies. And yet, the status of being an engineer varies significantly between countries. Moreover, the association between engineers, managers and other workers demonstrates marked divergences across similar societies. Given the centrality of engineers to modern society, it is important to explain the consequences different patterns of integration into management have for their work and action. This book is an attempt to reach a wider understanding of this relationship between engineers and management. As such it not only sheds a broader view on the British situation, in all its particularities, but also argues that all approaches to engineers and managers as historical groups require an appreciation of national differences and diversity. Without seeing differences, it is not really possible to begin to see similarities or the emergence of common or ‘best’ practices across societies.

This chapter will examine some of the differences in the relationship between engineers and managers across divergent economies. It will suggest some models for explaining these differences, relate these to the situation of British engineers and conclude by discussing the possibility and mechanisms for diffusing different ways of integrating these two groups from one society to another.

ENGINEERS AND MANAGEMENT

Management comprises people who bring with them different specialist occupational perspectives, which to a greater or lesser extent continue to shape their thinking about the strategic direction of the organization. Access into management is broadly divided into those who enter as graduate trainees with general and/or professional or specialist knowledge, and those who have worked their way up from the shop-floor or office, acquiring firm-specific competences and experience, and possibly part-time qualifications. There are obvious differences in the level of management supplied by these two routes, the graduate route generally facilitating the prospects for higher-level positions, although there are marked national variations in this pattern. In the British context managers are typically people with practical experience of the business, rather than high-level academic qualifications (Handy et al. 1987). Many, particularly among the older managers who survived the two recessions of the past decade, will have spent much of their careers within the same organization, working their way through a particular functional specialism or through general management.

For those who have specialist occupational skills, like engineers, there are two broad alternative career strategies within organizations: to remain in technical work or to move over into more general management. For most engineers their early career is likely to centre around their technical expertise in a particular sphere of work, but their satisfaction from this may diminish, especially if there are limited opportunities for career advancement – in the absence, for instance, of dual career ladders which provide extended career progression through a technical specialism. Also, again particularly in the British and American contexts, they may become increasingly aware of the limitations their role as technical specialist has with regard to events within their organization and therefore wish to take on more responsibility through mainstream management. While some may take this direction through choice, others may feel that it is thrust upon them. Dobson and Stewart (1990), for example, found people in middle management resentful at having to abandon their technical work for which they were highly qualified, in order to take on administration. A more challenging alternative would be to give technical functions more strategic responsibilities without requiring them to abandon engineering.

This latter course has, however, proved problematic, particularly for British engineers. Organizations, especially in the sphere of manufacturing, have traditionally made a distinction between what Dalton (1959) referred to as staff and line positions. Staff positions, where engineers are usually located, provide specialist support for line functions, but their overall contribution to decision-making is largely unrecognized. Line positions have responsibility for managing the throughput of the organization, which connects them much more closely with the arenas of power and influence.

Functional differentiation has long persisted as the central organizational structure within British companies, and this has reinforced engineers as staff, providing technical expertise in research and development (R&D), design and manufacture. They are concerned with productive activity, which in Britain has less strategic value than marketing, finance or general management. However, as we describe below, this is not the case in other countries. Moreover, over the last decade there has been a major attack on the benefits of functional management, because it reinforces divisions, slows down decision-making and increases bureaucracy. Project management, with integrated teams of specialists united around tasks not functions, has expanded across all developed countries. In many companies, specialist functional structures have been abolished, and ‘integrated professional groups’ created to facilitate closer integration between design, production, distribution and sales (Smith, Child and Rowlinson 1990). There has also been a tendency to externalize many technical functions to specialist subcontractors, themselves composed of integrated not functional specialist teams (Smith 1989; Whittington 1991). As we discuss in Chapter 10, new information technologies have facilitated organizational reforms of the specialist hierarchy, many of which have implications for the relationship between engineers and managers. The growing technological sophistication of the production environment increasingly necessitates a more technically trained line management, and engineers provide an important source of supply for this area. Old divisions between line and staff appear no longer appropriate to this new situation (Long 1987).

If we look outside the British context, in other management structures, rotation of specialists is more strategic, and the creation of functional occupational identities deliberately minimized. This is the case in Japan. In other words, while the choices available to engineers in managerial hierachies are not limitless, neither are they confined to what has largely been a British or American practice. In order to explore these comparative differences more fully, we need to examine some of the reasons advanced for variety rather than single forms of organizing and integrating engineers into management.

EXPLAINING NATIONAL DIFFERENCES

Before we illustrate the pattern of divergence in the relationship between engineers and managers across the countries covered by this book, it is necessary to discuss some of the various models advanced to explain these differences. First, there is the assumption that each society is unique, and therefore universal or general models of management are not possible. Such a pure culturalist view is unsustainable because it cannot explain why societies go through such dramatic changes in their organizational life, why societies look alike or, more importantly, learn and borrow from each other’s practices (Child 1981). Modified versions of the culturalist approach have studied the character of a country’s institutions and how these transmit differences. Institutionalism has become the dominant method of explaining differences across societies (Lane 1989). It has proved the most fruitful in terms of research, because, instead of trying to locate and define rather vacuous concepts like ‘culture’ or ‘national identity’, it focuses on more concrete and observable entities, like the way management is developed, or how education, skill, training and qualifications transmit different messages and build divergent structures across societies.² Within this approach it is possible to suggest that the route a society took to industrialization, or the legacies it brought with it, contributes to explaining national differences (Smith and Meiksins 1991). We are also able to say that the historical structuring of the meanings and boundaries between groups – like management and engineers – is arranged differently between societies because of such issues as the timing and route into industrial capitalism. We can illustrate these points by briefly describing some recent approaches that have borrowed from or used a modified institutionalist explanation of societal difference.

Lane (1989), comparing labour and management in Britain, Germany and France, implicitly divided employment relations into two dichotomous models, and then investigated the manner in which state and civil institutions reproduce these models. Her approach is not truly comparative, but an evaluation of societies against relatively fixed criteria. She borrows extensively from institutionalist approaches to achieve this end. The positive model is where a society has co-operative industrial relations, secure and unsegmented employment relations, broad-based, bilateral national training systems, skilled/qualified labour, and technically centred, long-term oriented management practices. The negative model is pretty much the opposite of these qualities – adversarial industrial relations, insecure and fragmented employment relations, market-based or ad hoc training standards, etc. Her book, therefore, although ostensibly a comparative study of the three countries, is in practice an evaluation of each society against these universal dualities. Given that the positive model is largely based on one reading of German practices, and the negative model on one reading of British practices, not surprisingly, with some qualifications to the more adulatory attribution to the German model, her book nevertheless concludes by praising the former and bemoaning the latter. Her model has largely defined her narrative, and comparative analysis is relatively weak.

More explicitly on the issue of engineers Meiksins and Smith (1991) have identified four abstract models available for organizing the production of engineers in advanced capitalist societies. However, they have not attempted to evaluate societies against fixed efficiency principles to create a ‘pecking order’, but rather see the models as abstractions which represent the historical experience of different entry points into industrial capitalism. They suggest that the character of national institutions and work organization can be strongly shaped by the past and timing. Legacies from previous economic systems or state traditions can be reinforced by the new mode of production, rather than, as was assumed by Marx and industrial society theory, ’swept away’ by the development of the technological forces of the economy.

They distinguish four models for producing and organizing engineers: craft, managerial, estate and corporatist forms of organization (Meiksins and Smith 1991). Craft forms are the traditional apprenticeship structure, whereby training and knowledge are acquired under the pupillage of older craftsmen, within the workplace, with little or no formal education away from the workplace. Managerial forms, in contra-distinction, are university-based and market-oriented methods of acquiring expertise, qualifications and credentials which are institutionalized through specialist associations. These need not secure closure or licensing for engineers, as in the American case, but they emphasize the integration of engineers into management and away from other workers. Such a form creates occupational associations with an organizational or autonomous character. Estate forms are education and training principles sanctioned from above, with state authority, so that statutory controls, a clear hierarchy and fixed correspondence between training and a division of labour occur. Corporatist forms are where there is an interaction between state systems and large employers, with the latter creating dependency structures, firm-specific training and reducing market-based occupational identity. Professional associations are weak, and forms of representation are through the firm.

Societies broadly correspond to these different forms, although it is possible, especially for the early industrializers, to develop overlapping forms and therefore display more heterogeneity. Britain, the first industrial nation, alone among capitalist societies developed engineers through craft routes and professionalized them before the development of state education. In Britain, engineers have been unable to differentiate themselves from skilled manual and technical workers, are unionized along occupational lines and are poorly placed within managerial hierarchies. The craft legacy has continued to structure engineers’ identities (Smith 1987). In the USA, engineers professionalizing through higher education credentials were at the forefront of organizational capitalism and scientific management, were relatively secure in their managerial status and were unable to form sustainable trade unions. In Germany, Sweden and France, state-led modernization placed the engineer in a well-structured and economically safe position as an estate elite. In Japan, with its giant organizations and weak occupational labour markets, engineers are a stable part of the corporate hierarchy, tied to the firm, with weak professional or external forms of representation.

Another line of cross-national research has focused upon the construction of ’social actors’, which involves uncovering the basis of differentiation or boundary formation between classes, groups and occupations. In societies where being an engineer is not clearly constituted, where ambiguity exists with other occupations, social groups or classes, then relations between engineers, management and other employees may be conflictual and unco-operative. Heidenreich (1991), building on the work of Boltanski (1987), has compared the constitution of the white-collar/blue-collar divide in Germany, Italy and France and how this structured the way technical and manual labour utilized information technologies. He concluded that

The institutional and professional identity of the white-collar worker in Germany shows the greatest stability, as the process of differentiation began very early and can be legitimized as well by reference to specific professional competences – ones necessary for the existence of administrative functions. In Italy the formation of the socially active agent quadri has only just begun; the corresponding professional, institutional and cognitive identity is still quite uncertain. In France the identity and extent of the socially active agent cadre is continually being called into question by definitional struggles (at least outside the central group of university-educated engineers).

(Heidenreich 1991: 20-1)

The consequence of these differences for the introduction of computer technology were that in Germany there was consensus over the division of tasks, responsibilities and labour due to the shared technical culture between engineers and manual workers; whereas in France, a rigid divide between mental and manual labour, and ambiguity over the the position of cadres encouraged more hierarchy and control. Both societies made ‘efficient’ use of the technology, but in markedly different ways. In Italy, there was an ill-defined and uncertain relationship between technical and manual groups involved in information technology.

If we apply the same perspective to the British situation, we could argue that British engineers have been experiencing ‘definitional’ struggles over the boundary relations with technical and manual groups, and attempts by engineering associations to introduce new elite categories on a market not a statutory basis have not assisted in clearly delimiting the relationship between white-collar and blue-collar workers. Competition between manual and technical unions over the control of Computer Numerical Control machines, for example, highlights this conflict. The demise of the common craft culture has also undermined the consensual work culture between engineers, technicians and manual workers, and increased hierarchical animosity along the lines experienced in France (Smith 1987, 1989; Crawford 1989).

National diversity is, then, the summation of historical differences in the timing and entry into industrial capitalism, and is reproduced through a society’s institutions; but it is not a fixed process, but rather one subject to continual change and renewal. Borrowing between societies is normal, and the global nature of the economic systems means there are pressures and contradictions between international and national institutions (Smith and Meiksins 1991). What, then, are some of the differences in the relationship between engineers and management in our country studies?

ENGINEER...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Engineers and management in comparative perspectives
• 2 Wheels within wheels: predicting and accounting for fashionable alternatives to engineering
• 3 The engineering dimension and the management education movement
• 4 Japanese engineers and management cultures
• 5 Engineering and management in West Germany: a study in consistency?
• 6 The work of engineers in Hungary and their place within management cultures and hierarchies
• 7 Symbolizing professional pride: the case of Canadian engineers
• 8 Engineers and trade unions: the American and British cases compared
• 9 Irish engineers: education for emigration?
• 10 British engineers in context
• References
• Index