New Profession, Old Order
Engineers and German Society, 1815–1914

An exploration of the creative tension between modern technology and preindustrial Germany.

Kees Gispen (Author)

9780521526036, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 July 2002

368 pages
23 x 15.4 x 2.3 cm, 0.652 kg

"Studies of professionalization tend to be success-oriented accounts of the rise of expert groups to social dominance. Gispen's analyses of engineering provides a refreshing contrast in tackling what amounted to a failed profession....Gispen shows that engineers remained fragmented with various competing groupings....He does provide a finely crafted and intellectually sophisticated analysis of professionalization in a distinctive political context, and opens challenging new perspectives for historians interested in education and the social repercussions of German industrialization." Paul Weindling, German History

New Profession, Old Order explores the creative tension between modern technology and preindustrial Germany. It offers an explanation of why the engineering profession is so successful in transforming the physical world, did not achieve the professional power, cohesion, and prestige that its technological accomplishments would seem to have warranted. On the one hand, engineers were agents of modern instrumental rationality, specialization, practical knowledge, and entrepreneurial capitalism - forces antiasthetical to the quasi-aristocratic world of Bildung and bureaucracy that was the life blood of the preindustrial social hierarchy. On the other hand, it was this latter universe in which engineers had to survive and by whose standards they were judged for membership in the educated middle class or for access to prestigious careers. The result was an orientation that combined the old and the new in ways that were at once uniquely German and paradigmatic for modern industrial society.

List of tables
List of figures
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Emulation: Bildung and the Bureaucratic Order: 1. technical education and society before 1850
2. Nationalism, industrialization, and technology: the first years of the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure
3. The pursuit of Bildung: Grashof and the VDI, 1856–76
4. The reform of technical education in Prussia, 1876–9
Part II. Reorientation: industrial capitalism and a 'practical' profession: 5. Reorientation in the engineering industry, 1876–84
6. Crisis and renewal in the VDI, 1877–90
7. The rebirth of nonacademic engineering education, 1879–1901
8. Public authority, private power, and the production of engineering personnel, 1901–14
Part III. The crucible: technical careers and managerial power, 1900–14: 9. Career prospects and the Btib's reform efforts
10. The unified employment code and the Patent Law
11. Direct action
12. The reaction of the VDDI
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliographical note
Index.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]