Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
managers noticed “another attitude common to most of
Datamation
's
wise men: the relative uselessness of departments of computer sciences
. . . and the people they are capable of turning out.” For those people
thinking about entering the fi eld, the article recommended, “the consen-
sus advice seems to be: stay out of computer sciences. Take a bachelor's
degree in a technical subject, add a master's in business administra-
tion.”
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Fred Gruenberger, himself a computer science educator, sug-
gested that “most programming managers in large corporations tell the
same story repeatedly (although regrettably few people listen). Please,
they say, give us well-educated MBAs, not Computer Science graduates.”
Why business training and not computer science? “It has been repeatedly
proven in both scientifi c and commercial data processing that program-
ming can be taught to bright, well-motivated and well-educated people,
but that company identifi cation and a general feeling for 'business'
can almost never be taught.”
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Employers also began to look at mecha-
nisms other than education for ensuring the quality of their workforce,
especially professional certifi cation exams. This will be the subject of
chapter 7.
Science as Professional Identity
In his pathbreaking work on the intellectual history of theoretical com-
puter science, Michael Mahoney has described the emergence of that
discipline in terms of the setting of intellectual agendas. An agenda, in
Mahoney's formulation, is “what practitioners of the discipline agree
ought to be done, a consensus concerning the problems of the fi eld, their
order of importance or priority, the means of solving them, and perhaps
most importantly, what constitute solutions.”
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It is the ability to set
agendas and make progress toward achieving them that determines the
intellectual standing of a discipline. In the years between 1955 and 1975,
Mahoney argues, theoretical computer science did manage to converge
on a set of agendas—automata theory, formal languages, computational
complexity, and formal semantics—that provided it with a coherent
disciplinary identity. By the end of this period, computer science had
unquestionably established itself as a mathematically oriented discipline
with real scientifi c credibility.
The desire to set an academic agenda was itself a form of agenda, or
at least a strategy for pursuing a larger agenda. In this case the larger
agenda was the professionalization of the computer industry. As will be
argued more completely in the following chapter, the accomplishment
