Standing on the Edge: Engineering Students Grapple with Skill-based Automation

Abstract

A shift to production systems that are skill-based rather than Taylorist (removing skill and intellectual effort) in their design has been widely endorsed. We focus on one major barrier to the transition to skill-based systems: the conceptual barrier inherent in engineering as it is currently taught. Engineering students who are later exposed to a worker-centered view of production and to the ideas of skill-based automation describe in extended interviews a pervasive, and sometimes acute, sense of conceptual and emotional conflict caused by the perceived clash between an engineering approach and a skill-based approach to production. Because it is impossible for students by themselves to reconcile these apparently conflicting views, and because there are few institutional roles available to people who can “see both sides,” students must remain painfully “on the edge” or choose one “side” over the other. To relieve the sense of conflict and to remove a barrier to skill-based automation, we suggest several possible avenues for research and action.