It's a term "coined" by one of my batchmates in the 19th FK Prepcourse in Bangkok. He was actually an engineer by profession and he used the term social to indentify himself as a "real" engineer and to differentiate his tasks from the rest of us NGO workers.
Let me clarify. He did not say it to demean us NGO workers. I actually thought he wanted to create a metaphor out of the term engineer for all the different tasks we're going to do in 10 months. Engineering is the field that deals with the scientific application of knowledge in order to build and design structures and processes to improve people's lives. If we put the social component in the scientific concept, the meaning would not change dramatically, the meaning will only be enriched. It would expand in ways that the metaphor captures development work as an attempt towards building and improving people's lives.
It's a great realization for me. The concept if used in political science would actually mean manipulation of people to change their attitude or perspective towards policies or systems that a political entity wants to pursue for their political gain. But putting it in the light of development work, social engineering can mean the other way around. It can mean changing or inlfuencing people's attitudes towards development. It can mean taking away the culture of mendicancy among the poor people; it can mean changing people's attitude towards government systems and the culture of corruption; and it can also mean changing people's attitude towards gender relations and power.
It's a concept that can define the work that we do. I'm proud to be a social engineer. Scoail
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