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{{Short description|Discipline in social science}}{{For|social engineering in the context of information security|social engineering (security)}}{{More citations needed|date=June 2011}}{{Nudge Theory}}Social engineering is a term which has been used to mean top-down efforts to influence particular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale—most often undertaken by governments, but also carried out by media, academia or private groups—in order to produce desired characteristics in a target population.

History

{{singlesource|section|date=August 2023}} The Dutch industrialist J.C. Van Marken ((:nl:Jacques 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”,JOURNAL, A knower and friend of human beings, not machines: The business career of the terminology of social engineering, 1894–1910, Ideas in History, 2007, Östlund, David, 2, 2, 43–82, 1890-1832,su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A182548&dswid=5876, 2016-09-05, to be dealt with in the manner of the technical engineer.

Examples of use

In the 1920s the government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of the Russian Empire with a new Soviet culture, and to develop the New Soviet man. Commissars became agents of social engineering.BOOK , In India, social engineering was effectively done{{by whom|date= June 2016}} in the state of Bihar, on a grand scale, to unify different castes after 2005.WEB,economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/bihar-polls-2015-bjp-banks-on-pm-narendra-modis-popularity-and-its-social-engineering-experiment/articleshow/49315429.cms, Bihar polls 2015: BJP banks on PM Narendra Modi’s popularity and its social engineering experiment, The Economic Times, Economictimes.indiatimes.com, 2015-10-12, 2016-04-01, NEWS,indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/bihar-after-delhi/, Bihar, after Delhi, The Indian Express, 2016-04-01, WEB,indiatoday.intoday.in/story/nitish-kumar-bihar-lok-sabha-poll-results-jdu/1/362138.html, Nitish’s dismal show a case of monumental miscalculation, Bihar, News – India Today, Indiatoday.intoday.in, 2014-05-16, 2016-04-01, NEWS , 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. Popper, K. 1971 The Open Society and Its Enemies Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press

See also

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• Demographic engineering
• Engineers of the human soul
• Eugenics
• Media manipulation
• Nudge theory
• Paternalism
• Political engineering
• Social control
• Social technology
• Total institution

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References

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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.

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