Management and Engineering Innovation

Carolina Machado, J. Paulo Davim, Carolina Machado, J. Paulo Davim

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118733325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Ressources d'alimentation

This book discusses management and engineering innovation with a particular emphasis on human resource management (HRM) and production engineering.
In an innovation context, the disciplines of management and engineering are linked to promote sustainable development, seeking cultural and geographical diversity in the studies of HRM and engineering, applications that can have a particular impact on organizational communications, change processes and work practices. This connection reflects the diversity of societal and infrastructural conditions.
The authors mainly analyze research on important issues that transcend the boundaries of individual academic subjects and managerial functions. They take into account interdisciplinary scholarship and commentaries that challenge the paradigms and assumptions of individual disciplines or functions, which are based on conceptual and/or empirical literature. The book is designed to increase the knowledge and effectiveness of all those involved in management and engineering innovation whether in the profit or not-for-profit sectors, or in the public or private sectors.

Contents

1. We the Engineers and Them the Managers, Teresa Carla Oliveira and Joao Fontes Da Costa.
2. Strategic Capabilities for Successful Engagement in Proactive CSR in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Resource-Based View Approach, Nuttaneeya (Ann) Torugsa and Wayne O'Donohue.
3. Innovative Management Development in the Automotive Supply Industry – A Preliminary Case Study for the Development of an Innovative Approach to Innovation Management, Frank E.P. Dievernich and Kim Oliver Tokarski.
4. Innovative Product Design and Development through Online Customization, M. Reza Abdi and Vipin Khanna.
5. Struggling for Survival and Success: Can Brazil's Defense Industry Help Foster Innovation?, Alex Lôbo Carlos and Regina Maria de Oliveira Leite.
6. Knowledge Management Fostering Innovation: Balancing Practices and Enabling Contexts, Maria Joao Santos and Raky Wane.
7. Institutional Logics Promoting and Inhibiting Innovation, Teresa Carla Trigo Oliveira and Stuart Holland.
8. HRM in SMEs in Portugal: An Innovative Proposal of Characterization, Pedro Ribeiro Novo Melo and Carolina Machado.

About the Authors

Carolina Machado has been teaching Human Resource Management since 1989 at the School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, Portugal, becoming Associate Professor in 2004. Her research interests include the fields of Human Resource Management, International Human Resource Management, Training and Development, Management Change and Knowledge Management.
J. Paulo Davim is Aggregate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. He has more than 25 years of teaching and research experience in production and mechanical engineering.

Chapter 1

We the Engineers and Them the Managers

Chapter written by Teresa Carla TRIGO OLIVEIRA and João FONTES DA COSTA.

1.1. Introduction

People have managed since the beginning of time. When men were hunter gatherers, women managed families. The development of agriculture involved developing new management skills and techniques [MIT 99]. The Mandarins who administered imperial China were professional managers, and had training in mathematics, sciences and engineering [NEE 86]. Engineer-managers were crucial to the success of the Roman Empire, building roads that connected it and aqueducts that enabled urbanization [CHA 08, HOD 01]. In the Middle Ages, masons were both engineers and managers with their own highly effective and multinational professional association [BLO 68], and guilds that insisted on training and professional recognition for membership [DUR 57] were also central to the emergence of civic institutions [BRA 82]. Brunelleschi was an engineer-manager, inventing new engineering techniques and directly supervising the construction of the dome for the Duomo in Florence [COO 90]. Napoleon established the Grandes Écoles for engineer-managers that still flourish in modern France. From the early to mid 19th Century, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who built the first iron ship, bridges, docks and railways, was a mechanical and civil engineer who directly managed their construction [VAU 91].

With a transition from entrepreneurial to modern capitalism [BER 32, BUR 62], this changed. At a technical level, engineers became increasingly important. Yet when engineering breakthroughs such as in electricity and telephony emerged, and were applied by those such as Edison and Bell, there was a change. With economies of scale such as Ford achieved with serial mass production, and as giant corporations rapidly came to dominate markets, professional management was needed [LAC 87]. When Will Durant took over what remained of the US auto mobile industry in General Motors, banks and shareholders insisted on bringing in Sloan, an accountant rather than an engineer to manage, which developed into 3M (Minnesota, Mining, and Manufacturing Company Limited) multidivisional management structure, which then became paradigmatic for big business [SLO 64, WOM 05, WOM 96].

But in the process a divorce emerged. Veblen [VEB 21] in his The Engineers and the Price System wrote that “businessmen are increasingly out of touch with that manner of thinking and those elements of knowledge that go to make up the logic and the relevant facts of mechanical technology…”. He allowed that industrial experts, engineers, chemists, mineralogists and technicians of all kinds have been drifting into more responsible positions in the industrial system and have been growing up and multiplying within the system, because it will no longer work at all without them [VEB 21, p. 26], but they rarely became professional managers. Veblen also castigated emerging neoclassical theories of the firm for their presumption that managers simply combined capital and labor and that anything else, such as technical progress was simply a residual. In contrast, like Schumpeter [SCH 49], he claimed that it was engineers who created new products, processes and, with them, enabled new markets, while Schumpeter himself contrasted creative innovators from managers, as administrators. Corporate strategy became important [CHA 62], yet led to inflexible mind sets [SEN 90] and then declined in effectiveness [MIN 94] such as that there was nothing to be learned from post-Fordist models of flexible production and “lean” engineering developed in Japan [WOM 05, WOM 96] which is now common in Asia.

This relates to innovation trajectories and product cycles. For decades, in western management theory, it was assumed that a product is first innovated, then grows and then matures [VER 66]. Yet, according to Schumpeter [SCH 49] this may spawn other products that may transform the initial innovation, such as mobile phones initially displacing fixed line telephones, then incorporating cameras and keyboards and enabling access to texts without the need to go to a library. Such transformations were achieved by engineers and it is engineers who can advance this unless they are blocked by managers who may have no training or experience in engineering [OLI 13].

Perceptions of roles and identities also are influenced by either explicit or implicit logics [OLI 07a, OLI 06, OLI 00, OLI 12]. A profession such as engineering has distinctive features similar to medieval guilds [DUR 57] including a formal code of ethics, criteria for certification as member of a recognized professional association and the monopoly of a specific labor market by regulating the entry of members. By contrast, management does not have these features. Even if there are explicit commitments to ethical and other codes in corporate mission statements, these may prove to be rhetorical [LOK 10]. Tacit rules and implicit norms in organizations [OLI 07a], whether as in Enron, World.com or the more recently revealed Libor interest rate manipulation, may override the explicit commitment to ethical codes in mission statements. Engineering and management also have different criteria and sanctions for performance. If an engineer designs a bridge that collapses, then his or her professional reputation is destroyed. If bankers design financial derivatives that collapse the western world, they can continue to pay themselves bonuses unrelated to performance, which may change public perceptions of banks, and incur public protest, but without necessarily affecting their careers.

Barley [BAR 06] has cited a range of studies distinguishing between basic and applied researchers. These indicate that the latter are usually engineers who are more concerned with recognition within organisations and a managerial career, unlike scientists and management theorists for whom recognition depends on publishing research findings. Yet these, and perceptions of them, may be asymmetric. An engineer working as manager is likely to be accepted with or without a professional qualification in management whereas this is not the case with a manager presuming to be an engineer.

This chapter indicates that engineers nonetheless may be reclaiming the roles and professional identities of earlier engineer-managers. It analyzes this in terms of theories of personal and professional identity, subject–object relations in terms of theories of “the self and the other” [SCH 18, SAR 57, HOL 13], the role of self-direction and other direction [RIE 54] and factors influencing both initial career choice and later career moves in relation to concepts of boundaryless or Protean careers. In doing so, the chapter extends Schneider’s [SCH 83, SCH 87, SCH 90] attraction–selection–attrition (ASA) theory or ASA model from personnel selection and candidate choice to career choice and draws on but qualifies Foucault’s [FOU, 72, FOU 77] concept of power-knowledge. Using case study evidence, it illustrates the mediating effect of the perceived comparative status (PCS) of engineers toward managers in the relationship between professional identification and professional commitment.

In asking whether managers are a professional reference group for engineers and, if so, whether that influences career choices, the chapter addresses the following exploratory propositions (EP):

EP1: engineers perceive cultural differences along with an unbalanced status between engineers and managers;

EP2: Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge can be qualified in terms of managers having power but engineers having knowledge;

EP3: Schneider’s ASA theory is relevant to engineers initially being attracted to engineering as a profession but then wishing to avoid narrow job-fit by qualifying as managers;

EP4: it has implications for differing perspectives on boundaryless or Protean careers.

1.2. Identities and values: the self and the other

The relationship between engineers and management has been studied in terms of different roles and identities, as well as different organizational cultures ranging in Human Resources Management (HRM) terms from “soft” in terms of cooperation and group working in Japan and other Asian cultures to “hard” in some more individualistic market cultures such as those of the United States [BOW 10, LEE 92, LEE 06, LEE 10, SHA 98, SHA 03]. This varies in whether or not there is a high degree of trades unionism, including professional associations [STU 08], even if some professions prefer not to conceptualize their associations in such terms, as well as with different degrees of commitment of higher level management to human resource management policies such as retraining and requalification [CAB 04].

Identities also involve different perceptions and cognitions that are influenced not only in terms of a Cartesian cogito ergo sum [DES 37] but also in terms of who we have become through the acquisition at varying levels of consciousness of values, beliefs and dispositions derived from both life and professional experience [HOL 13]. Such cognitive and social processes are not only functional but also existential in terms of relations between “the self and the other” in the sense of existentialist philosophy and literature from Schopenhauer to Sartre [SCH 18, SAR 57, HOL 13], where the self and individual perceptions are subjective and include choice and scope for self-direction whereas the other is objective, as in an organization or a profession.

This self–other distinction is paralleled in the cognitive-experiential self-theory of Epstein [EPS 90, EPS 91, EPS 92, EPS 93, EPS 94] that premises that “…everyone develops an implicit theory of reality that contains subdivisions of a self-theory, a world theory, and propositions connecting the two” [EPS 90, p. 165]. This relates also to whether people are disposed to be self-directed or other-directed that Riesman [RIE 50, RIE 54] developed in relation to whether they are disposed to be “one of a crowd” or to stand out, or strike out on their own.

Cognitive psychologists have wavered between the view of the individual as a competent and rational being and a view with limitations for rationality and its biases [SCO 01]. Identity is influenced by mental pattern and schemata in a c...