Engineers in Advanced Industrial Society

Abstract

This is a book about the work lives of engineers in two British factories, but in another, perhaps more important, sense it is a book about how technical work is socially produced in advanced capitalist societies. Despite widespread speculation about high-tech industry’s impact on the social structure of such societies, we know comparatively little about how technical work gets organised, how the technical job market is structured, and still less about technical employees’ perception of themselves and their positions in society. If the systematic application of knowledge to production is indeed the characteristic project of advanced society, then we need to improve our present understanding of how that project gets carried out.