Industrial engineering was originally founded as a discipline that focused on the study and design of work. Yet, today the field has largely distanced itself from this early concern. This paper ...tracks the decline of work studies in industrial engineering and explores the question of why the discipline lost its concern for work and, ultimately, its ability to speak to the kinds of social and economic changes that it was created to address. Our reading of historical documents and our analysis of data collected from nine industrial engineering departments from their founding to the present day reveal that changes in industrial engineering were tied to trends in society, to shifts in sources of funding, and to the field's concern with its own status. The decline of work studies in industrial engineering is especially problematic because the nature of work has dramatically changed over the past 50 years, as we outline in this paper. The upshot is that industrial engineering now finds itself unable to speak about the organization of work and the design of modern work systems. We explain why the time has come for the field to rekindle its interest in the nature of work and the particulars of the workplace and we suggest several paths for proceeding in this direction.
Handled by Special Editor Wallace Hopp
JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2019. 421 pp. $64.95, hardcover.
Foreword Stephen R. Barley
Putting Work in Its Place,
09/2018
Book Chapter
Temporal pioneers and rebels move among us, living incognito in single-family homes on quiet streets in suburban neighborhoods, in the duplexes and apartments of bustling cities, and even on an ...occasional farm. Bearing little resemblance to the pioneers of America’s past, they are just as surely blazing trails into territories where many of us hope someday to settle. Nor are they the sort of reformers on whom we have traditionally pinned our hopes and fears of social change. They do not demonstrate, form movements, or even speak out publicly. Yet, as surely as the woman suffragists and the unionists of
An edited version of a transcript is presented of a symposium that was organized for the 1995 Academy of Management Meetings in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The symposium was entitled "The Practices and ...Uses of Field Research in the 21st Century Organization". Four experienced and recognized field researchers discuss what it would mean to do field research in 21st century organizations. Three questions are addressed: 1. What role is envisioned for field research in studying transformation of work and organization in the 21st century or, alternately, what would scholarly research on the transformation of work and organizations lack if no one did fieldwork? 2. Describe how a concept or set of concepts in the course of a field research project is generated, refined, revised and tested. 3. How has theory helped to shape the design, analysis, and reporting of field research results and how was theory revised in the course of field research?
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