The Growth and Structure of Heavy Engineering Industry in New Zealand

Abstract

Engineering can scarcely be regarded as a single industry if this is taken to mean the generally used definition of a group of firms producing similar products for sale in some specified market. A continual process of innovation and development has made the boundaries of 'Engineering Industry' difficult to define: to the old-established fields of the steam engine, ship building, and industrial equipment have been added the more recent fields of agricultural equipment, automobile and electrical goods manufacture and structural Steelwork activity, all of which are loosely classed as engineering. E.A.G. Robinson expresses the problem concisely: 'Industries as such have no identity. They are simply a classification of firms which may for the moment be convenient.' For the purpose of this Thesis then, Engineering Industry is defined as follows:- All Engineering Activity (a) Employing skilled engineering tradesmen; (b) Manufacturing products predominantly of metal and usually of a highly composite nature; (c) Manufacturing products predominantly for use in further production or transport; (a) Concentrating on non-repetitive product manufacture; (e) Using metal-working machinery. This definition is quite narrow, excluding civil engineering involved in altering geographical features generally not manufacturing products of metal; and confines attention to that section of metal working commonly referred to as jobbing engineering, by excluding repetitive production. The jobbing engineering firm undertakes to customer order the capital plant for all industrial groups that cannot be produced in standard repetitive production.