ABSTRACT
Does Japan produce many more engineers than Britain? Has a large output of engineers been a significant factor in Japan’s post-war economic success? Very emphatic answers of ‘yes’ to both of these questions united captains of industry and labour unions in Britain in the mid-1980s and put pressure on the government to take policy initiatives to boost the number of engineers in Britain. League tables of the numbers of engineers produced have been used like totems of national prowess, both as indicators of national effort and manifestations of success. In the early post-war years, as the ‘Cold War’ began to take shape, many of the comparisons were between Soviet efforts and those of the Western capitalist countries. Numbers of engineers could be counted like missiles, tanks or troops as ‘divisions in the factory’ to make the big push in extending national industrial capacity. As ‘peaceful coexistence’ took shape and note was taken of the economic growth in neighbouring European economies, more attention was paid to comparisons of the numbers of engineers and other technical workers in Germany and other countries of the EC. Comparisons with Japan marked a new phase of concern about British manufacturing industry from the late 1970s and a new awareness of Japan as a major economic power. This chapter provides a critique of how that awareness came to be expressed in the construction of league tables of numbers of engineers, the ready exaggeration of the numbers of Japanese engineers, the relative neglect of qualitative dimensions of comparison, and an account of the way in which the institutional framework for the education and training of engineers is changing in both countries, with some elements of convergence and divergence.
