Engineering and the Social Process

In terms of the history of mankind, industrialization is very recent, starting to be effective only in the eighteenth century AD. The earliest human societies relied primarily on the gathering of food and the hunting of animals. This indeed was the predominant type of social organization until about 12,000 years ago. Tools and weapons were 

Along with technical development went social development, and the increasing complexity of social systems is what the division of labour describes. The notion of the division of labour articulates the fact that human life is and human development has been characterized by increasing specialization of tasks, roles and functions, a specialization made possible by the wealth produced by the technical developments of homo faber. 

There are a number of key figures in the development of sociology. Here we consider some who addressed engineering-related issues Saint-Simon, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Veblen, Comte, Spencer and Pareto. 

Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was a liberal French aristocrat who fought with the French Army against the British in the American War of Independence, who became a radical republican and an architect of socialist thinking in the French Revolution, who was an influential champion of industrialism, of engineers and bankers, and who saw 

In the work of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the importance of the organization of work is also evident. Durkheim was a major intellectual figure in France for about twenty years he was Leftist -meaning anti-clerical, republican and progressive rather than socialist. He was consulted by governments about moral education, and he succeeded in getting sociology established as a school subject. His concern with social order and harmony reflected the relative lack of it in France. 

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