Organizational and Institutional Knowledge in Civil Engineering

Abstract

Civil engineering departments in American universities show considerable uncertainty about the role of planning in an engineering context. Fiscal pressures and changes in practice have eroded support for planning as an integral part of the civil engineering curriculum. Yet, current problems in the field, such as groundwater contamination and infrastructure decay, have institutional and organizational components that could be brought into civil engineering by planning faculty. This paper argues that civil engineering should integrate organizational and institutional knowledge into its academic core, rather than assume that on‐the‐job experience and other disciplines can be relied upon to illuminate the nontechnical aspects of infrastructure problems.