Academic engineers can be useful, but so can social scientists, if they so choose. The point is that academics have other pressures besides being useful, and this can apply to engineers as well as social scientists. Non-academic engineers and economists must both be useful somehow to someone, but that is a different matter.
Do you think the effect of the ‘other pressures’ academics feel is the same for all disciplines? Or are there other factors that increase or decrease that effect?
It is unlikely to be exactly the same, but it seems hard to measure the differences. Fields in which academics are more often hired not for their prestige but for their directly useful knowledge tend to be less prestigious fields I think, so I’d guess that might be one clue, but a weak one.
Academic engineers can be useful, but so can social scientists, if they so choose. The point is that academics have other pressures besides being useful, and this can apply to engineers as well as social scientists. Non-academic engineers and economists must both be useful somehow to someone, but that is a different matter.
Do you think the effect of the ‘other pressures’ academics feel is the same for all disciplines? Or are there other factors that increase or decrease that effect?
It is unlikely to be exactly the same, but it seems hard to measure the differences. Fields in which academics are more often hired not for their prestige but for their directly useful knowledge tend to be less prestigious fields I think, so I’d guess that might be one clue, but a weak one.