An important issue for both engineering and business ethics is the relationship between engineers and managers.

Both business and government have traditionally treated engineering as a "staff function" and management as a "line function." In its extreme form, the division between staff and line functions works like this:

Engineers are those with special knowledge of how to do certain kinds of work (drafting, designing, checking, evaluating, and so on). They answer to a certain manager, but no matter how high they stand in the organization, no one (except perhaps a few assistants) answers directly to them. They are not in "the chain of command."

Managers, on the other hand, are those who, whether having technical knowledge or not, have special responsibilities for deciding what to do and how to do it. Managers answer to those "above" and command those "below." Engineers on the staff of a particular manager provide him or her with advice, information, and technical assistance.

This division of labor has usually left a gap between engineering and management. Traditionally, engineers have deferred to management rather than tried to bridge the gap in a way combining the expertise of both functions. Even when (as often happens) engineers became managers, that deference generally meant that the engineer-manager simply became another manager. Management often encouraged that transformation.

The gap between engineering and management seems to involve a clash of differing standards of evaluation making the perspective of each at least partially opaque to the other. The gap seems to exist even when the managers are themselves engineers. The first stage of the investigation of the Challenger disaster has provided a story that will serve both as an example of this clash of perspective and as evidence of the need to understand it.

The space shuttle program has been considered a model of how to integrate management and engineering functions. The central feature of that model was an extremely complex system of consultation between staff engineers and managers (many of whom were themselves engineers), assuring engineering "input" at every step in the making of any significant decision.

Yet, this system of consultation did not close the gap. The night before the shuttle blew up, killing all seven astronauts aboard, managers were telling one another to "put on their management hats," to "think like managers, not like engineers." This advice apparently led several managers, vice presidents at Morton Thiokol, to change their evaluation of the risk of O-ring failure and approve the launch (knowing that the launch would not occur without their written approval). The managers at Thiokol were themselves engineers who, earlier that day, had decided against launch after receiving a unanimous recommendation from their engineering staff. The night-time reversal seems to have occurred without any new information about the risks involved. "Putting on their management hats" changed the way they evaluated staff recommendations.

It would be easy to be cynical about what happened, to explain the reversal as the triumph of "politics" over "professional standards." Many engineers would, perhaps, describe it in exactly that way. Yet, there is reason to think that what happened was much more complicated.

Recent historical work indicates that the line-staff separation of management and engineering goes back through American corporate history to the first great businesses, the railroads, and then back to the first great organization of modern times, the French army of the eighteenth century. The gap between management and engineering seems to have much the same history. The engineer would want to "do things right," even if the expense was enormous or the time unreasonably long. The managers would want to "get things done"-in time and within budget-even if that-meant cutting corners or taking chances.

Still, though the gap between "politics" and "professional standards" seems to be as old as the line-staff distinction itself, its importance may have increased recently. Technical questions seem to be more central to the decisions made than they used to be.

So, for example, allowing Thiokol's engineers veto over launch of the space shuttle seems more reasonable than allowing military engineers veto over undertaking a siege. The question whether to lay siege seems to be primarily one of strategy, not engineering. Line officers generally know enough about sieges to make the decision intelligently without first calling in an engineer. That being true, the job of the siege engineer is to advise on details while carrying out predetermined policy. The question of launching the space shuttle seems, in contrast, to be as much a question of engineering as of commercial policy. The concerns of Thiokol's engineering staff (for example, safety) seem to correspond to external constraints on what government (and business) should do in a way that the narrow concerns of a siege engineer do not.