Engineers have generally been viewed either as members of a ‘middle class’ attracted to a distinctive technocratic politics that rejects the leadership of both labour and capital or as passive servants of capital. Using published and archival data, this article shows that American mechanical engineers during the 1930s were not attracted to technocratic ideas. Instead some supported pro-business ideas, while many others showed an interest in organizing themselves as employees with interests different from business. This example suggests that engineers do (...) not constitute a distinctive, homogeneous middle class, but are, in fact, internally divided by class. (shrink)

This article reexamines the classical distinction between professional and organizational work orientations for the case of engineers. Based on data from a survey questionnaire mailed to a sample of 800 engineers in the Rochester, New York, area in 1986, it argues that the two orientations are not opposites. Instead, it is possible to score high on measures of both orientations, or to score low on both. The result is a more complex, fourfold typology of engineers' work orientations. This fourfold typology (...) is then applied to the analysis of engineers' job satisfaction. The most important finding is that the content of engineers' work—that is, the level of challenge and the intrinsic interest of the work—is the central predictor of their satisfaction. The results thus support the conjecture that contemporary engineers have become highly focused—perhaps overly focused—on the gratifications derived from technical work as a process. (shrink)