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Engineering

Professionalized, university-trained engineers were rare before the 1870s, but engineers quickly came to be a critical element in the development of planned organizations and societies in the twentieth century. University-trained engineers worked across the globe for local and multinational firms, for imperial and national governments, and in independent consulting arrangements. Both corporations and state bureaucracies sought new knowledge—and the experts who could apply “useful knowledge”—in order to manage the increasing geographic scale and scope of their ambitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The expanding production and global mobility of engineering talent during this period, the roles engineers played within firms and states, and the resulting global networks of knowledge, expertise, and innovation, constituted a new infrastructure on which the strategic planning and governing capacity of both multinational corporations and state bureaucracies were built. These two organizational forms would dominate economic life through the remainder of the twentieth century, they still battle over control of the (now digital) knowledge economy, and we have recently witnessed a reaction against the privileged place of globalized expert knowledge.