Social engineer

[http://www.ideasinhistory.org/cms/index.php?page=a-knower-and-friend-of-human-beings~~oldaos~~] The term "sociale ingenieurs" was introduced in an essay by the Dutch industrialist J.C. Van Marken in 1894. The idea was that modern employers needed the assistance of specialists - social engineers - in handling the "human" problems of the plant, just as they needed technical expertise (ordinary engineers) to deal with the problems of dead matter (materials, machines, processes). The term was brought to America in 1899, when the notion of "social engineering" was also launched as the name of the task of the social engineer in this sense. "Social engineering" was the title of a small journal in 1899 (from 1900 named "Social Service"), and in 1909 the title of a book by its former editor, William H. Tolman (translated in French in 1910), marking the end of the usage of the terminology in the sense of Van Marken. With the Social Gospel sociologist Edwin L. Earp's "The Social Engineer", published during the "efficiency craze" of 1911 in the U.S., the usage of the term was launched that has since then been standard: the one building on a metaphor of social relations as "machineries", to be dealt with in the manner of the technical engineer.

See also: Social engineering

ReferenceDavid Östlund, “A knower and friend of human beings, not machines: The business career of the terminology of social engineering, 1894-1910”, [Ideas in History, 2007:2] [http://www.ideasinhistory.org/cms/index.php?page=a-knower-and-friend-of-human-beings] .]