Social Engineering

Social engineering aims at specific and piecemeal change in the social system. Social engineers identify a problem, collect data on different aspects of the problem, analyze them, develop a specific plan, and implement it or suggest it for implementation to some other implementing agency. They include government departments, and the national and international NGOs. Since all parts of society, all institutions of society and all processes of society are interconnected, change in any one may also produce a corresponding change in others. Thus social engineering may eventually lead to changes which go beyond the intended change though change in many aspects of society simultaneously is not the goal. This meaning of social engineering has to be distinguished from another meaning of the term, coined by computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, currently more popular in the field of computer sciences – simple or complex manipulation of people to divulge some confidential information or perform some action, to steal, get access to systems, money or phones. From our perspective social engineering is a deliberate move on the part of government or a non-government organization to produce a desired state of change in the interest of all or some specific target group.

To follow Popper (Popper, 1961), “Just as the main task of the physical engineer is to design machines and to remodel and service them, the task of the piecemeal social engineer is to design social institutions and to reconstruct and run those already in existence.” Popper (1971) distinguished “piecemeal social engineering” from “utopian social engineering”. For him the difference between the two is that the piecemeal engineer will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.

Social engineering approach requires a good understanding of social processes. For example, the movement for workplace spirituality is based on the understanding that actions and social representations belong to a particular age and are conditioned by state of development. In the process of modernization society changes from collectivistic orientation to individualistic orientation. Thus family, kinship and neighborhood ties get weakened and people start looking for meaningful life, participation and identity at work place. In this situation workplace spirituality may give them new meaningful associations and motivate them to do more and better.