Social engineering is a term which has been used to refer to efforts in influencing particular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale. This is often undertaken by governments, but may be also carried out by mass media, academia or private groups in order to produce desired characteristics in a target population.

Origin of concept

The Dutch industrialist J.C. Van Marken (nl) used the term sociale ingenieurs ("social engineers") in an essay in 1894. The idea was that modern employers needed the assistance of specialists in handling the human challenges, just as they needed technical expertise (traditional engineers) to deal with non-human challenges (materials, machines, processes). "Social engineering" was the title of a small journal in 1899 (renamed "Social Service" from 1900), and in 1909 it was the title of a book by the journal's former editor, William H. Tolman (translated into French in 1910). With the Social Gospel sociologist Edwin L. Earp's The Social Engineer, published during the "efficiency craze" of 1911 in the U.S., a new usage of the term was launched that has since then become standard: "Social engineering" came to refer to an approach of treating social relations as "machineries", to be dealt with in the manner of the technical engineer.

In India, social engineering was said to have been done by the state of Bihar, on a grand scale, to unify different castes after 2005.

In his political science book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume I, The Spell of Plato (1945), Karl Popper made a distinction between the principles of what he called "piecemeal social engineering" and Utopian social engineering.

See also

  • Media manipulation
  • Nudge theory
  • Political engineering
  • Psychological operations
  • Social control
  • Social policy

References

Further reading

  • "The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, and War", Jacque Fresco, 2002.
  • Peter Swirski. American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York, Routledge, 2011.
  • Charles Arthur Willard. Liberalism and the Social Grounds of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
  • Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Noam Chomsky. 1998.
  • Seeing Like a State. James C. Scott. 1999.
  • Social Engineering. Adam Podgórecki. 1996.