An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped
shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as
the driver of history.
In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and
civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The
engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their
fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In
Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this
conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about
technology and American life.
The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's
beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society--influenced by
the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis
Mumford--began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers
themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the
military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered
critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from
technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by
conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as
Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to
promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating
force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative
consequences of technology spring from its very nature--and not from
engineering's failures. "Sociotechnologists" were recruited to help
society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to
the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in
the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of
technological change as the driver of history.
