Technical Workers in an Advanced Society: The Work, Careers and Politics of French Engineers.

Technical Workers in an Advanced Society: The work, careers and politics of French engineers. By Stephen Crawford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. viii plus 284 pp.).

France has followed a different route from other European countries in higher education since the 18th century. Faced with the decadence of their universities, most European countries reformed them. France created instead a series of special higher schools such as the Ecole des Mines, the Ecoles des Ponts-et-Chaussees, and the Ecole Polytechnique, which were mainly elite technical and engineering schools designed to train high-level civil servants, state engineers and military officers.

Over the past twenty years we have learned a great deal about the history of the grandes ecoles and the recruitment and formation of technical personnel in France, but we know much less about the professional lives of the graduates of French engineering schools. Crawford's book is one of the most useful to appear so far. He studies two French companies, Pont-a-Mousson, a traditional metallurgical firm located in Lorraine, and France Telecom, a high-tech telecommunications company. His work is based on 129 semi-structured interviews in 1977 and 1978, classified into four career-based categories: department heads, graduate engineers, engineers who acquired their title through promotion on the job, and high-level technicians, who would be considered engineers in North America.

Crawford, a sociologist, compares his findings to those of similar studies in Britain and the United States (1) and then examines the attitudes, work, and careers of engineers in the light of debates about theories of social change, notably the theories of professionalization, (2) proletarianization, (3) and the new middle class. (4) These theories argue that science-based industries gave rise to important changes in both the organization of technical work and the ideologies of technical workers. In an age of high-technology industry, characterized by the demand for ever more skills and credentials, engineers are likely to become middle-level employees and technicians the new workers. They will face a tightening of control over their work and the prospect of a subordination of research and production to the logic of capitalist profit-seeking, to which they may respond by demands for greater autonomy and even by anti-capitalist attitudes.

Generally Crawford is skeptical of these theories. Though he finds differences between French and Anglo-Saxon engineers, he confirms Whalley and Zussman's rejection of the argument for growing tension between engineers and managers in Great Britain and the United States. For a variety of reasons, engineers experience considerable freedom from direct supervision, particularly in the science-based companies where traditional paternalism is less strong. He also found little evidence to support the deskilling thesis because of the job autonomy and variety, the continuing flow of long term projects, and the emphasis on product development in high technology industries. Boring work is normally reassigned to technicians, freeing engineers to use their special skills where needed.

Crawford stresses the importance of non-work factors such as education and the labor market in shaping the organization of technical careers and in forming industrial and social attitudes. France is unique in having three distinct types of engineer (four if one counts the technicians superieurs), trained in different ways: 1) the graduates of the elite grandes ecoles, who get the top positions; 2) the graduates of the less prestigious petites grandes ecoles who account for much of the growth in technical personnel since World War II; 3) the ingenieurs autodidactes and ingenieurs maison, technicians and skilled workers promoted on the job to engineering posts, who constitute over a third of all practicing engineers.

The variety of formations and credentials in France prevents the forging of professional solidarity among engineers. They see themselves as cadres, executive managers and professionals, more than as engineers, because the cadre barrier distinguishes them legally from technicians and guarantees their professional status. The graduates of the petites grandes ecoles, though more specialized, do not become discontented with their work because of their status as cadres, their hope for promotion, and their fear of competition from the autodidactes and higher technicians. Employers thus enjoy ample sources of technical personnel from the petites grandes ecoles, while benefitting from two traditional sources of "trusted" employees: the graduates of the grandes ecoles, who as future executives are hired for their leadership qualities more than for their technical or research expertise, and the autodidactes, who are dependent upon the bosses for their position. This prevents the development of a high level of solidarity among technical workers.

Thus the formation of technical elites has changed little in France over the years; what has changed is the rapid expansion since the 1950s of middle-level technical personnel, which has been met by the creation of an additional layer of special schools, the petites grandes ecoles. Crawford concludes: "The key recent developments may have been those in the labor market. The rise of the high technology industries has been significant, but mainly in the demand it has created for technical workers, not the effects on the organization of technical work."

Crawford does not argue that the French institutions under discussion are global characteristics of French culture; rather "they express the social definition, production, and organization of technical workers in French society." Future research, he suggests, might well focus on this intermediate level of analysis, a level between that of the job and that of capitalism or industrialism. The approach, he admits, is particularly applicable to middle-class "knowledge" occupations, in which career structures are the most significant and in which formal education is required. In these fields national differences are most marked, hence the logic of industrialism may not be leading to increasing convergence among advanced societies but rather "to a certain amount of divergence in institutional arrangements and political consequences among the nations which comprise the world of advanced industrial society."

Crawford's book is densely written and the historical background sometimes lacking. The French way of training executives and technical personnel mainly through special higher schools has departed from the European university model since the eighteenth century. The French are, as always, different, and Crawford's conclusion that modern industries are becoming increasingly dependent on institutions that are nationally distinctive may reflect French reality rather than that of the west generally. Nevertheless, this is an excellent book which provides valuable information on the nature of the engineering profession in France and other countries and represents an original analysis of the interplay between occupation, class, and nation.

C.R. Day Simon Fraser University 

ENDNOTES

(1.) Peter Whalley, The Social Production of Technical Work: The Case of British Engineers (Albany, New York, 1986); Robert Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class: Work and Politics among American Engineers (Berkeley, California, 1985).

(2.) Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York, 1972); Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago, Illinois, 1986).

(3.) Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974).

(4.) Serge Mallet La nouvelle classe ouvriere (Paris, 1963); Alain Tourraine, The Post-Industrial Society (New York, 1971); Andre Gorz, Strategie ourvriere et neo-capitalisme (Paris, 1964).