Social Sciences and Manufacturing Engineering

Since my major was Social Sciences and I’ve said that it is a good major to have for Manufacturing Engineering, I’m going to try to prove it here.

My first task is to find any references I can find to sociology or anthropology that relate to manufacturing engineering.  Maybe I’ll make up my own.  The ultimate goal is to create a new definition that combines Social Sciences and Manufacturing Engineering.

The second task is to make observations at work on how those disciplines relate.  The obvious career path is through engineering but like I just read in the book by Alan Greenspan The Age of Turbulence – Adventures in a New World about how there aren’t any good mathematicians teaching math to high school students because they can get high paying jobs in industry, the same holds true for manufacturing engineering.

Very technical engineers can get higher paychecks going into design.  Manufacturing engineering has the element of engineering but it is a smaller part.  In this series, I’ll attempt to figure out what percentage of engineering is required.  Anyway, our society promotes careers in engineering.  After school, the people who have more of a leaning towards people and systems, gravitate to manufacturing engineering or project management.  Pure engineers look down their noses at those fields, thinking they are soft and NOT technical.

I’m also going to explore what it means to be technical.

Observations:

Two directives for my new job are to have a consistent interface with the teams both internal (direct reports) and external (other departments) and to juggle assignment of resources.

These sound vaguely like sociology…

More later.